162 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



turned themselves into expressmen, and tlie daughters of one of 

 those farmers at least, whose father had died just about that 

 time, turned the old farm into the production of vegetables for 

 the Lawrence market, and it was not three years before those 

 two girls had the best barn in the town ; and in three years more 

 they had as good a house as there was in the neighborhood, and 

 in five years more they had cleared m6ney enough to retire and 

 sell their farm to the first purchaser who came along. 



My farm is situated within half a mile of Salem, and I never 

 raised anything in my life that I could not sell the instant it 

 went into market. My market wagon starts in every morning, 

 and the vegetables are delivered from it by the ingenuous young 

 man who goes with it. There is no middle-man to divide the 

 profits. My milk wagon follows the vegetable wagon, and there 

 is a milk route that goes with the farm, just as much as the pas- 

 ture lands and fields go with it. 



This same rule is adopted by the farmers in the vicinity of 

 Newburyport. I know one man who is a prosperous farmer, 

 who never did anything else but carry on a milk farm, and 

 never would try to do anything else. He has loaded his mar- 

 ket-wagon for the last twenty-five or thirty years with what milk 

 he could produce on his farm, and on top of his milk he puts as 

 many vegetables as he can haul with one horse, and he is as 

 prosperous a farmer as there is in Essex County, 



So it is with tobacco in the Connecticut Valley. That is the 

 appropriate place for it. The farmers in that valley are growing 

 rich by raising tobacco, because they have selected the crop 

 adapted to their locality. There is the little town of Sunderland 

 up on the river, where the farmers are growing rich, by devot- 

 ing themselves to the cultivation of onions and tobacco. Tiiere 

 are eiglit hundred and sixty-five men, women and children in 

 that town, and you do not meet any one of its citizens in the 

 cars, or anywhere else in this State, who does not ask you, the 

 first thing, if you come from an onion region, " Will you be 

 kind enough to tell me the price of onions ? " They are just as 

 keen and shrewd for the market in that town as the wool-growers 

 of the West to find out the price of wool, or the cotton-growers 

 of the South, or great wheat-growers of the North- West. They 

 understand the business perfectly well, and the agriculture of 

 that town is so well managed that the amount of artificial 



