HUSBANDRY FOR THE REGION OF THE BLUE RIDGE. 99 



guiding motto — it would be to add the Sugar-Maple ; our native broad-leafed Elm, 

 with its long and graceful branches ; and the Hacmatac, or Taraarac, the most 

 beautiful of the Pine family, to which it belongs. These, intermingled wiih the 

 native Oak, the Spruce and Pine, the Cedar and other pines and evergreens, the 

 Poplar, Locust, Mulberry, Hickory and Walnut already there, in all their majesty 

 and beauty, would be sufficient both for shade and variety. 



Leaving Montpelier, the road to the Valley of Shenandoah leads through 

 " Thornton's Gap" in the Blue Ridge, to Luray, the Capital of Page County, 

 (formed out of parts of Rockingham and Shenandoah, in ISOl,) intersecting the 

 Macadamized turnpikes leading from Winchester to Staunton at Wewmarket in 

 Shenandoah. 



HUSBANDRY SUITED TO THE COUNTRY THROUGH WHICH WE HAVE PASSED. 



Looking back now to the Agriculture, of the counties east of the Blue Ridge, 

 it appears to me that as far as the inhabitants of the region from Fredericksburg 

 to Thornton's Gap depend upon the cultivation of grain with slave labor — or with 

 any labor — as a reliable source of income, and with any expectation of even check- 

 ing their lands in the progress of exhaustion, they are too surely doomed to dis- 

 appointment, if not to ruin, with which, alas ! in this, more than in any other 

 pursuit, men are apt to be overtaken without suspecting its approach or knowing 

 precisely whence it comes. How should they know Avho enter into no calcula- 

 tions, and keep no accounts ? — as though "where ignorance is bliss 'twere folly to 

 be wise." And so it would be if — the bliss would only continue ! My impres- 

 sion, from personal observation and the best information I could get, (and making 

 the proper allowance for the overestimates generally made by the most candid 

 farmers as to their own settlements,) is that the average produce in Wheat 

 does not come up to seven bushels to the acre, and 15 or 20 of Corn, through the 

 whole region here referred to — between Fredericksburg and Thornton's Gap, and 

 until you get into Page County on the Shenandoah. The corn is probably nearly 

 all consumed in these counties for the subsistence of the inhabitants and domestic 

 animals — most of it by that most expensive of all machines, the horse, which 

 here is used exclusively for farming purposes, against the plainest rules of econ- 

 omy that would suggest, to a much greater extent, at least, the use of the longer- 

 lived and less delicate mule, and the coarser-feeding, patient, and at last edible 

 ox. This system leaves for an exclusively grain farm very little except the 

 wheat. Deducting from that what must be reserved for seed, and making 

 a fair charge for expense of cultivation, harvesting, threshing and transportation 

 to Fredericksburg — and there will remain, at the utmost, not more than three 

 bushels clear per acre, or, say, $300 for the produce of 100 acres. Thus, to ray 

 eye, the want of adequate physical force for thorough tillage, and for making at 

 home and applying the manures so necessary, after all, for carrying land up to and 

 maintaining it in any thing like its full capacity — the absence and dearness of 

 lime — the face of the country — the great expense of transporting gypsum from 

 tide-water and of sending the grain crops to market — the badness of the roads at 

 the season of comparative leisure — and above all the evident natural congeniality 

 of the soil to the growth of the various grasses, far beyond what would be yielded 

 of them by lands of the same low capacity for producing grain on the tide- water : 

 all and every consideration seem to suggest tliat the rearing of stock — horses,.. 

 and more especially mules, cattle and sheep — is the true policy and business 

 pointed out by Nature, and the change in its circumstances wrought by steam- 

 power fur the landholders generally in the region here designated. The clover — 

 especially white clover — orchard-grass, timothy and red-top flourish almost every- 

 where, even over all the hills, and to all appearance naturally. Even the steep 

 mountain-sides, when cleared and the brush burned, throw up excellent pasturage 

 for sheep. It is, in fact, Sir, impossible to look at this fine, liealthy, undulating 

 country — with its numberless and never-failing springs of the purest water, capa- 

 ble of being so conducted as to convert so many hill-sides into water-meadows, 

 and yet where not a drop of stagnant water offends any sense — thus to see fields 

 that, by all comparison with lands of similar appearance elsewhere, would brin^ 

 nothing but poverty grass, yet here covered with white clover and other good 

 herbage : it is, I say, impossible to look — however transiently — at such a dist"rict, 

 and to note its water-pov/cr so dispersed and abundant for driving all sorts of 

 (2«) 



