n8 Singing Valleys 



their own territorial boundaries. They preferred to go home 

 and till their fields. "Summer soldiers/' Tom Paine called 

 them bitterly, as he poulticed his frostbitten feet with snow 

 at Valley Forge. One reason for this was that the colonists 

 enlisted men for short periods of service, with land bounties 

 for those terms. After Trenton, Washington offered his men 

 ten dollars apiece if they would stay with him a month longer. 

 The Congress advertised a bounty of fifty acres to every 

 deserter from the British Army. Privates in the continental 

 ranks who stayed under arms till the peace were to receive a 

 bonus of one hundred acres. Colonels were offered one thou- 

 sand acres. Fully one-seventh of the public land was so settled. 

 At the close of the Revolution New England was feeling 

 acutely the need for more, and more fertile, soil. A newspaper 

 article published in 1787 describes the plight of the New Eng- 

 land farmer who had 



one miserable team, a paltry plow, three acres of Indian corn, 

 as many acres of half-starved English grain from a half-cultivated 

 soil. With a spot of potatoes, and a yard or two of turnips these 

 complete the round of his tillage. 



In 1790 New York State had no settlements west of the 

 Hudson Valley. But the men of Massachusetts and New 

 Hampshire who had followed Sullivan on his raid on the Six 

 Nations brought home tales of miles of cornfields standing 

 eighteen feet high, and of tons of garnered grain to which 

 they had set the torch. One soldier returned to Plymouth with 

 a pocketful of corn of a variety strange to the white farmers. 

 The seed yielded roasting ears with larger, fuller and sweeter 

 grains than those of the immature cobs which heretofore had 

 satisfied Americans as a summer vegetable. This was the first 

 sweet corn. Not inappropriately, it entered our gardens by way 

 of the very fields which Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to 

 sow and dress. 



New Englanders cut the first road over the Berkshires into 

 York State by which to move from their depleted farms onto 



