254 On Salt Marsh. 



meadow ; it grew very rank and stout, the heads, on an 

 average, six inches, and many nine inches, and even 

 twelve inches long : the lots upon which the grass had 

 but partially taken were re- sown, and the whole, when 

 winter set in, promised a full crop the ensuing season. 



In October, 1816, a lot, of about four acres, was 

 sown with wheat ; the ground was low, the winter cold 

 and wet, and the greater part of it froze out : it yielded 

 about twenty-five bushels of grain, of the best quality 

 and first appearance : on some lots, where the grass seed 

 had no taken well, we harrowed, and sowed oats, in 

 April and May last ; they did uniformly well, and would 

 have produced full forty bushels per acre, but we lost 

 more than half the crop, by the August storm ; we cut 

 the stubble high and burnt it preparatory to seeding the 

 ground ; we put about two acres into wheat and rye, and 

 no grain could look better than it did, when the winter 

 set in ; the remainder of the oat ground we laid down 

 with timothy. 



We commenced dyking the Newark marsh in the 

 spring of 1815, and that season embanked and sluiced 

 one thousand nine hundred acres, north of the road lead- 

 ing to Newark, and distant from New York about four 

 miles : the next summer we ditched near a thousand 

 acres of this tract, which is not, strictly speaking, a salt 

 marsh : the waters of the Hackinsack and Passaic rivers 

 are fresh one-half the year, and but slightly saline the re- 

 mainder : the indigenous vegetation of the marsh is com- 

 mon flag and water-rush, some blue grass, and a stout, 

 rank, three-square grass, none of which grew on the Ho- 

 boken marsh, which was covered with sedge ; the soil is 



