132 



&l)c .farmer's iHontljIn bisitor. 



us hundreds and thousands of the enterprising 

 sons who have been instructed in all that is good 

 in every worldly word or work by their excellent 

 fathers and mothers. 



There is no part of the American world which 

 1 have visited that will compare with the valley 

 of that river of New England which discharges 

 to the ocean the waters now running near about 

 us: a specimen of the excellent soil — richer 

 than the primeval soil of the Merrimack river 

 valley eastward of it — I have long known to ex- 

 ist in that part of the town in which we are as- 

 sembled which is not to be seen in the most 

 travelled roads on either side. Since my resi- 

 dence in Concord below, the seat of govern- 

 ment, the Concord above sent down by its farm- 

 ers as a surplus for the market flour of wheat 

 that made us bread which in palatable sweetness 

 and flavor was unrivalled by all the west can 

 now produce: the wrinkled healthy hardiness 

 of age, and the fair round visage of men in the 

 time of their greatest strength are remembered 

 in the faces of a Young, a Harris, an Oakes, a 

 Savage, a Quimby, a Ball and a Parker of this 

 town, and those of Heath, Emery, Mouhon and 

 Mason, a Cogswell and a Rix, a Brownson and 

 a Noyes, of the elder Hutchins and Woods and 

 Carletons, in the towns adjacent. Some of 

 them used to come down by us in their annual 

 produce-trading voyage of mid-winter sleighing 

 bringing each his lumber-box drawn by pairs of 

 fat and sleek horses, heavily laden so as to make 

 a part of the cargo desirable for unlading to be 

 sold half way down to the seaboard. The idea 

 of good and rich livers always came along with 

 this annual visit: the farmers of Littleton, Ly- 

 man and Lisbon, of LandafT and Bath were al- 

 ways welcome customers — doubly welcome were 

 they to me twenty-five and thirty-five years ago, 

 because they brought us better things than 

 money with which to pay for the newspapers 

 and books as the work of my own head and 

 hands, which I did not doubt were as welcome 

 to their good taste as their fine wheaten flour, 

 their rich butter and cheese, were to our most 

 sharpened animal instincts. The clays of "aultl 

 lang syne" will not be forgotten as the whiten- 

 ed, silvery locks, and the wrinkled brow and 

 shrivelled face and trembling limbs, one after 

 another, are laid low: 



" Now we maun totter down, John : 



But hand in hand weMI goj 

 And we'll sleep the gither at the Toot, 

 John Anderson, my jo." 



Was not this fine country opening by that 

 beautiful river which is the boundary of the 

 most extended line of New Hampshire on the 

 one side and of Vermont on the other, and 

 which passes near the centre the entire width of 

 Massachusetts first and Connecticut last before 

 it reaches the sea, sufficiently inviting in its fer- 

 tility and its ever-healthy climate to the pioneers, 

 the fathers and mothers who reared a race of 

 men that have done New England honor whe- 

 ther remaining at home, or seeking their for- 

 tunes abroad? None who came here, or very 

 few indeed, were disappointed in then early an- 

 ticipations. They expected all the privations 

 and inconvenience's of men going far into the 

 woods, where it required a great labor to get out 

 at till, and where the more weighty produce of 

 the land could not be transported — consuming 

 in the lightest and most valuable the greater 

 part of that value as the expense of transport. 



If there were strong inducements to come 

 and settle down in this country fifty and seventy- 



five years ago, how great must be the motive for 

 settling and remaining here now? After reflec- 

 tion I stake my better judgment on the position, 

 that every young man commencing for himself the 

 business of a farmer will lose at least the price of 

 the cost of removal of himself and his effects, besides 

 encountering the chance of loss of health in the 

 change of climate, by leaving his native Slate of 

 New Hampshire for any of the best lands of the 

 South and IVest. 



There is a charm peculiar to this section of 

 country opening now to its husbandry that has 

 not existed heretofore, and seems not yet to ex- 

 ist in other distant points, inviting us to their 

 settlement: we can lay out our labor here upon 

 our poorest lands with as much advantage in the 

 investment of capital as we can expend the 

 same labor and capital over a greater surface in 

 richer land at a greater distance from the sea- 

 board. The reason of this is that our near con- 

 tiguity to the best market, the greater demand 

 for produce here than the land produces from 

 the number of consumers being greater than the 

 production, gives us better prices and more 

 ready pay than we can obtain for the same 

 amount of. labor on land which at its opening is 

 considered and undoubtedly is much more pro- 

 ductive. 



In the occupation of the farmer the last dozen 

 years on a small scale, I have enjoyed a satisfac- 

 tion which only those who have felt a similar 

 satisfaction can realize. That there is something 

 in this enjoyment more than mere imagination 

 and fancy I am at liberty to think and believe, 

 since the English gentleman one hundred and 

 fifty years ago has described it without any mis- 

 take in the book from which I have quoted: he 

 goes further back thousands of years and de- 

 scribes the great ones of the earth, the greatest 

 of mighty men emineDt for their civic virtues 

 and their valor and strategy in war, philosophers 

 and philanthropists, as being influenced by the 

 same impressions. We thus begin with the 

 strong points, that the occupation of the farmer 

 is most desirable to the man who thinks his 

 greatest earthly happiness is to be found in the 

 best exercise of his physical faculties, and that 

 this occupation must become, if it be not so al- 

 ready, at the head of the callings most respecta- 

 ble in life, contributing alike better to the. wealth 

 as it does to the steady reputation of those who 

 successfully pursue it. 



In the true and right pursuit of this calling, 

 none are better situated to profit by the best 

 knowledge to be derived from the best experi- 

 ence of others than the citizens of this part of 

 the country. The most, if not all of you are in 

 the way of opening facilities of communication 

 which will make you accessible to a ready mar- 

 ket to take what you would sell at the higher 

 prices, and sell what you would buy at the 

 cheapened prices. The heavy growth of your 

 forest lands is coming better and better in de- 

 mand : you can even see in the vista of futurity 

 value in the spontaneous annoyances which 

 seemed to disfigure the fields abandoned par- 

 tially from the exhaustion of the earth's first fer- 

 tility: the unseemly bushes and sprouts spring- 

 ing in neglected pastures ami fields are every 

 day growing into a value which the owners of 

 the land yet scarcely begin to realize. 



The transition of a country from new to old — 

 from its early 'first production to that which ; j to 

 settle down in an increasing stable population — 

 requires a change in our husbandry, of which it 

 is not easy to convince those who are not to be 



turned in the steady pursuit of any particuar 

 business without a conviction that they are im- 

 proving their condition. Superficial, exhausting 

 cultivation must be abandoned, or the land must 

 he abandoned for production: I say this of most 

 of better lands and all the poorer lands. I favor 

 no fancy farming, where the outlay exceeds the 

 present, if not all the prospective income. It is 

 this fancy farming which discourages if it does 

 not disgust those who feel that they will be 

 obliged to exchange the farm for some mote 

 available pursuit: a man improves hind and gets 

 one great crop at an expense of twice its value; 

 he makes bis ground artificially beautiful by an 

 expensive process — he pays a great price for 

 some field which he adorns and beautifies with 

 a still more extravagant expenditure. The con- 

 sequence is, he takes from other means the capi- 

 tal which he here expends, and be makes a bad 

 investment because the product of bis land will 

 not bring back the money he has expended. The 

 rich man, the man of abundant means, may 

 pursue the occupation of the husbandman in 

 this way, as I have kuown some to do, and years 

 after his example has a bad effect on those 

 around him. So distrustful has become the 

 greater part of the community that they are 

 hardly willing to give a man a fair hearing 

 while attempting any improvement before they 

 condemn him for doing a losing business. 1 

 confess that I have in this way been annoyed in 

 my best directed efforts to make those improve- 

 ments in the art of husbandry, the successful 

 experiments in which would give me a greater 

 satisfaction than all the honors and emoluments 

 which office could give me: not only my neigh- 

 bors who were esteemed some of them farmers 

 of good judgment and others pursuing different 

 callings, some embracing speculation as present- 

 ing a quicker method of becoming rich than the 

 best of productive labor, but my own family for 

 years took so strong an impression that my pas- 

 sion for husbandry was all the time sinking a 

 dilapidated properly that had been going away 

 despite of any effort of mine to retain it, that 

 I even felt myself culpable before them, and 

 contrived ways to prevent their trouble on the 

 premises by lessening permanent hired help at 

 home in the employment of temporary help 

 when it could not be avoided where the work- 

 men boarded themselves. In this way I carried 

 on the little business of farming which I have 

 done — and you will give me credit for at least 

 the merit of perseverance — for ten years with 

 wife and children so indifferent to all my im- 

 provements in farming that if I had been sud- 

 denly taken away not a soul of the four grown 

 persons could have told where my cultivated 

 grounds distant from the home lot were to be 

 found. I have lived for the hrsl five years to di- 

 rect this fanning in that enfeebled slate of health 

 which in the summer season has prostrated me 

 so that I could not at several former seasons 

 make the journey I have done in coming here; 

 and I think I may now say, that I have fairly ar- 

 rived at the point where perseverance has proved 

 my case. 



My improvements began not with the possess- 

 ion of any thing that could be called a farm: 

 my land, in detached fragments, has become 

 what would be equal to a common farm in New 

 Hampshire, in which I have to combat the ex- 

 pense of working daily at a distance in fields 

 apart. My help has been all hired at a cost 

 which those farmers who do much of their work 

 without directly hiring would consider ruinous. 



