1856. 



NEW ENGLAND FAHMER. 



531 



For the New England Farmer. 



LETTER ABOUT NORTH CAROLINA. 



Ealeigh — Capitol Grounds — Lunatic Asylum — The Severe Win- 

 ter — Care oC Animals — Roads — The Southern Pine — Method 

 of procuring Turpentine — Probable extermination of the 

 Pine. 



Lexington, Jlpril 20, 1856. 



Hon. S. Bro'wn : — Dear Sir, — It is quite a long 

 jump in time, as well as interval in space, between 

 Weldon, N. C, Jan. 10th, and Lexington, Mass., 

 April 20th. But time and convenience did not suf- 

 fice me to write you again upon my Southern jour- 

 ney, and you will be obliged to content yourself 

 with reminiscences. 



When I wrote you from Weldon, I think I said 

 little or nothing about Raleigh, N. C, the capitol 

 of the State. 



It is located, like a great manv other State capi- 

 tols, as near the centre as possible, M-ithout regard 

 to business so long as it accommodates State ])ur- 

 poses. The city is a mile square, and laid out in 

 rectangles, each street being either north and south 

 or east and west. The Capitol is a large stone 

 building ; its ground plan the Latin cross, and oth- 

 erwise rather Greek in style, which ought to have 

 cost about 820,000, and did in reality cost not 

 less than $60,000 ; so are things done for states. 

 When a state begins to spend and contract it is very 

 likely to suffer financially. 



Raleigh, as above said, depends upon the State 

 business to support it, and is inhaliited either by 

 officials or men of wealth who like to be in sight of 

 each otlier, for you know at the South, in the coun- 

 try, men are very apt to be a long way from sight of 

 their neighbors. The city has appropriated several 

 large squares for ornamental purposes, much in the 

 same manner with Savannah, — none of which are as 

 yet laid out and adorned ; for the capitol grounds of 

 about four acres, I made designs, but whether they 

 will ever be executed depends upon the whim of a 

 Legislature which may or may not be of the orna- 

 mental kind. 



Here, too, is the first Lunatic Asylum in North 

 Carolina. It owes its origin to the celebrated Miss 

 Dix, who stuck to the North Carolinians till they 

 appropriated the money. The building is very 

 large and capacious and the grounds of three hun- 

 dred acres very capable of improvement ; for this too 

 I had the honor and pleasure of prescribing, and I 

 hope some day, under its efficient manager. Dr. E. 

 C. Fisher, the estate will become as delightful as it 

 ought to be. During the whole of our stay in Ra- 

 leigh of a month, the ground was covered with 

 snow and ice, and it hardly thawed the whole time, 

 a condition of things that has not been known there 

 before for thirty years at least. No man, accus- 

 tomed to our care for cattle, could be here during 

 such weather without suffering every time he went 

 out, at the sight of the poor half or wholly starved 

 creatures, deprived of their accustomed forest and 

 town pickings and stealings by the snow, and for 

 whom their masters neither had made nor could 

 make any provision. 



As no summer supply is laid in against the win- 

 ter, when it comes with its cold and snow, the ani 

 mals have to suffer. It seems incredible that in the 

 South, to which we have been accustomed to attach 

 ideas of warmth and comfort, Ave should suffer 

 more from the cold than at home during ever so 

 severe a winter as the past, but such is the lack of 

 winter comforts, th^t it is literally true. I have sat 



for days in a room in a Southern hotel where all 

 the fire I could make would not warm the air for 

 ten feet around it. 



Nor in such times do the beasts of burden suf- 

 fer less. The roads are never made ; they get a 

 road by selecting the direction in which it is to run, 

 and then dig some of the earth off the hilly places 

 and cart it, with brush to keep the loam out of the 

 water, into the low lands to fill up, and without the 

 least care for ease of grade, or side drains for the 

 removal of standing or spring water, consider the 

 road made. Nor do they in numerous instances 

 take even this pains ; for it will more often be 

 found that no digging has been done at all, but the 

 line being selected, the people drive over it any- 

 where within ten rods, and suit themselves about 

 the best place for animal and wagon, making a 

 great numlier of tracks very confusing to a stranger, 

 and not very desirable any of them. Where roads 

 are so made they become mere canals for the pas- 

 sage of the water down the hill-sides, which settles 

 in the hollows, and I have often in a few miles' 

 drive, forded half a dozen ponds or streams that 

 would rise above the hubs of the wheels. While 

 the frost is coming out, such roads are absolutely 

 impassable for loaded teams, and it is no rare thing 

 for a carriage to get bogged even after a heavy 

 rain. The badness of the road is also owing in 

 some measure to the awkward, heavy, springless 

 wagons in general use. It is well known to all 

 those engaged in constructing roads, properly, that 

 the wear and tear will be diminished one-third 

 by the use of springs. Thus you see the miser- 

 able economy of this kind of management; the 

 road is badly built, is always out of repair, is ren- 

 dered worse by the veh'cles being in their turn 

 cumbersome and badly constructed, and as a result, 

 demand the use of double or treble the team^ to 

 haul them ; cutting thus into the purse of the peo- 

 ple, in a three-fold manner. 



I mentioned in my last the manufacture of tur- 

 pentine, &c., and how important it is to the States 

 possessing the long-leaved pine. I did not, how- 

 ever, describe the method of making it. The long- 

 leaved pine is a tree so unlike any Northern tree 

 that it is almost impossible to describe it to the un- 

 botanically scientific. It resembles our yellow field 

 pine somewhat, but has leaves often twelve to 

 eighteen inches long. These trees cover the sandy 

 plains of South and North Carolina in millions, and 

 yet at the present rate of consumption, must at no 

 distant day entirely disappear ; a plantation of these 

 (by plantation, I mean the trees contained in any 

 one plantation,) lasts about thirteen years from the 

 time operations commence upon them, so that 

 whilst they may be a source of profit to one gener- 

 ation, they will be lost to the next, thus killing the 

 goose for the golden egg. 



The process of working the crop is as follows : — 

 a gash is cut into the tree near its bottom, hollow- 

 ing below like a cup, bu„ rising above to the outside 

 of the bark ; the turpentine, or sap of the tree, 

 runs down and is caught in the cuj) ; every few davs 

 a negro goes out and scoops out whatever has col- 

 lected, and as the sap runs less freely, gouges or 

 scores the trunk for a line perpendicular to the 

 middle of the cup-shaped gash at bottom, out to a 

 line perpendicular to the side of the same; of 

 course, the sap runs out afresh a^ the new wound, 

 and is collected as before. This process is contin- 

 ued en all sides of the tree, till it is exhaust- 



