Development of agriculture. 41 



County furnished the highest number of militia men by 47, Suffolk County 

 the next highest number by fifty-six over the number assigned to New York, 

 which latter county came then third on the list of Quotas. 



In the Journal of the Legislative Council of New York, under date of 

 September 28, 1691, I find a memoradum of the Address of the House of 

 Representatives, setting forth their sense of the displeasure of Almighty 

 (}od for their manifold sins "by the blasting of their corn," etc. , and an 

 order that the first Wednesdav of every month, until the month of June 

 following, be observed and kept a fast day, and that proclamation be is- 

 sued through the government to enjoin the strict observation thereof, and 

 that all persons be inhibited any servile labor on the said days. Thus 

 the uncertainties of unfavorable seasons, sometimes occurring now, clearly 

 prevailed widely at that early day. 



In the Journals of the same Council, under date of October 16, 1738, 

 among the bills read before the Council is one entitled " An act to en- 

 courage the destroying of wild cats in Kings County, Queens County and 

 Suff"olk County." By an act of February 16, 1771, a like provision ap- 

 plied to Suff"olk County, and later, up to the first constitution of the State, 

 and acts passed under it, similar provision was made, until the matter was, 

 after the Revolution, devolved, by statute passed March 7th, 1788, upon 

 the several towns in the State. Thus, for nearly one hundred and fiftv 

 years, the agriculture of the county, from its infancy, contended against 

 the depredations of wild animals, as well as the blights and mildews of ad- 

 verse seasons. 



Through all this period it encountered a greater obstruction in the 

 method of conducting it. In all early settlements, when the axe clears the 

 forest and the plow inverts the virgin soil, where ages of repose have stored 

 up treasures of fertility, those treasures appear for years unexhausted and 

 inexhaustible. It so seemed to the first settlers on the Mohawk Flats, in 

 the Genesee Valley, in the vales of Ohio, ©n the prairies of the far West — 

 and it so seemed to our ancestors on the shores of Long Island. They 

 cropped field after field with little, and oftenerno manure; they fenced large 

 farms; they plowed, and raising more oats, and little wheat, and more rye, 

 left the land unseeded with grass for eight, ten or fifteen vears, hoping that 

 rest would restore the exhaustion of cropping. Up to the time, and long 

 after the Revolution this skinning process went on all over this county 

 and Island. What manure was made, and that was small in quantity and 

 poorly cared for, was applied on the few acres of mow land, and was 

 thought to be wasted if put on pasture. The vast old pasture lot, com- 

 prising often one-half the area of the whole farm, impoverished and skinned, 

 produced a few old bayberry bushes, such few weeds as worn out land 

 could grow, and the everlasting five-fingers and briers. Nine pasture lots 

 in ten were blackberry lots in my early days. This skinning process, that 

 run down the averages of ^vheat per acre on the Mohawk flats, in the Gen- 

 esee Valley, and through Ohio, to twelve or thirteen bushels, was per- 

 petuated here for nearly two hundred years. The pasture where I, when 

 a child, was sent to bring home the cows, was such a vast waste that often 

 in a fog I was lost for a time and could find neither cows nor the way to 

 th?'m or to my home. With all the abundance of fish in the waters, I find 

 no evidence that they were caught and applied as a fertilizer to any notice- 

 able extent until after the Revolution. The application of fish, ashes, 

 bone dust and other fertilizers, to any considerable extent, upon the farms 



