246 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



The letting of land to a tenant who agrees to bring it into 

 cultivation for all he can make on it for a given period of time 

 has been practiced continuously in the undeveloped sections of 

 the United States and is in use to-day. An interesting illustra- 

 tion is found in the method used by N. Longworth, near Cin- 

 cinnati, in 1845. A small vineyard was let to a German tenant 

 for half the proceeds on condition that the tenant would " trench, 

 bench, and wall the south side hill and plant in grapes " two 

 acres per year for three years. Longworth said this work was 

 worth $300 per acre. He said also that the thirty-five acres 

 occupied by the tenant and which had three acres of grapes at 

 the beginning of the tenancy, cost him $630. Obviously the 

 German tenant, ignorant of American conditions, had paid dearly 

 for the use of cheap land. Longworth said, " I made a hard bar- 

 gain with him." l And no one can question the statement. 



Longworth is not the only name connected with national 

 politics to-day which was related to the tenant farmer of the 

 first half of the nineteenth century. The Wadsworth estate in 

 the Genesee Valley, with headquarters at Geneseo, N. Y., has 

 been occupied in part by tenants for more than a hundred years. 2 



In 1835 the tenants on the Wadsworth estate gave one-third of 

 the crops as rent, and defrayed all the expenses of cultivation. 3 

 In 1841 Captain Barclay visited Geneseo. His Journal gives a 

 more detailed picture of the tenant system on the Wadsworth 

 estate, which can best be given by quoting : 



"I arrived at Geneseo about nine o'clock in the evening of the 2oth 

 of May, 1841. . . . Next morning I called on Mr. Wadsworth, one 

 of the largest if not the most extensive landowner in the State of 

 New York, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction. He lives 

 in a fine house exactly resembling that of an English squire, pic- 

 turesquely situated on a rising ground and commanding views similar 

 in character and not excelled in beauty by the prospects from Rich- 

 mond Hill or Windsor Castle. His family consists of two sons and 

 a daughter, one of the former married and residing about a mile off ; 

 the other son and the young lady living with their father. 



1 Contribution by N. Longworth, U. S. Patent Office Report, 1845. 



2 Breeders' Gazette, Vol. 54, p. 255. 



Adby's "Tour in North America," Vol. I, p. 277. 



