When the soil of the county was virgin its staple products were corn 

 and tobacco and the yield was abundant. After the fashion of pioneer 

 farming, the land was repeatedly sown to these profitable crops until the 

 strength of what was naturally rather rich soil was exhausted. Nothing 

 was ever given back to the land and farming suffered. Toward the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, emigration to the newer lands of 

 the West and South set in, as the direct result of an agricultural system 

 which could no longer get enough from the soil to support its population. 

 This increasing economic pressure marked the passing of the day of " the 

 old tobacco planters, with their baronial estates and armies of slaves. 

 They (what time they flourished), felled the native forests and planted 

 the virgin soil in tobacco and Indian corn. They did very well so long 

 as there was timber for the ax and new land for the hoe; and these old 

 lords of the manor were happy. They feasted and frolicked and fox- 

 hunted and made the most of life. Those days were known as 'the 

 good old times.' 



In less than a century after this system of denuding and exhaustion 

 began there were no more forests to clear and no more new land to till. 

 Then succeeded the period of old fields, decaying worm fences and 

 mouldering homesteads. This sad condition of the county had reached 

 its climax about the year 1840. . . . The land would no longer yield an 

 increase, and they made no attempt at renovating and improving the 

 soil, and Montgomery lands became a synonym for poverty."* 



The population, over the first four decades of the last century, showed 

 a net decrease of more than 14%. Land values decreased, in some 

 cases almost to the vanishing point, and the fortunes of the county were 

 at low ebb. As one instance of this condition, in the early forties a 

 large tract of land in the Sandy Spring neighborhood (a tract now 

 occupied by fine farms) was sold at ^2.05 an acre, and the opinion was 

 expressed that this was ^2.04 too high. In the first experiment with 

 wheat on this land, its new owner sowed 8 bushels in a certain field 

 and reaped but 5. It was in this neighborhood, among the society of 

 Friends, that this characteristically pioneer method of farming was first 

 abandoned. In 1845, the man above referred to, sowed Peruvian Guano 

 with his wheat, and marked improvements were at once seen to follow 

 its use, which soon became general. With the continued employment of 

 this and other commercial fertilizers and with a change to rotative crop- 

 ping the fertility of the soil returned, and with it came population and 

 prosperity. During the second four decades of the nineteenth century, 

 the population made a net increase of about 55%. The progress of 

 the county has thus depended upon its success in making its farms 

 productive. 



♦Boyd's History, 107, 108. 



