6 MR. newhall's address. 



vegetables, set out orchards and cut away the beaver dams, that 

 flowed many of our meadow lands, on which they afterwards raised 

 fodder for their cattle, remained about the same. 



It is true they improved their homesteads, by erecting better 

 buildings and better fences, but the sons would plough the same, and 

 generally only the same fields that had been ploughed by their fa- 

 thers ; and not being acquainted with the proper mode of cultiva- 

 ting the soil, so as to have continued its productiveness, very little 

 improvement was made in farming. It was thought that only a few 

 patches of the land in our county could ever be made into productive 

 and profitable farms. When we take a look among the farms of the 

 county, and find so large a proportion of them composed of gravel 

 knolls, sand banks, sunken swamps, and wet meadows, (the process 

 of reclamation at that time being unknown,) we have no good rea- 

 Bon to condemn their judgment. 



It is only about half a century since the first efforts were made to 

 increase our crops of hay by reclaiming wet meadows, and carrying 

 on to our dry gravel lands what was taken from the ditches to drain 

 them. Forty seven years ago this month, a young man in my 

 neighborhood, commenced the improvement of a piece of sunken 

 meadow and swamp land, by draining, and wheeling on gravel and 

 sand, from four to six inches deep. The neighbors unitedly sneered 

 at the undertaking, and some of them inquired of his father wheth- 

 er he permitted his son to trade and do business for himself. The 

 son, however, having succeeded by the third year to raise six tons 

 of timothy and foxtail, on two acres, called upon a son of one who 

 had ridiculed the undertaking, to assist in harvesting the crop. His 

 father on being made acquainted with the result of the experiment, 

 sent one of his younger sons into a swamp and kept him there dur- 

 ing his minority. But it was many years before much was done in 

 this branch of improvement; most of our farmers thought that land 

 that could not be ploughed could not be improved. 



Some pieces of meadow land of shallow soil, where the plough 

 would run to or near to the hard pan beneath, were cultivated, and 

 made productive of rich grasses, for one or two years only ; for al- 

 though they were sufficiently ditched to take the water from the soil 

 above the hard pan, the subsoil would retain the water so long be- 

 fore it found its way to the drains, rendering the earth at the bottom 

 of the roots of the grass so cold as to reproduce the natural grasses 



