A QUEER NOTION. 15 



sto'ck, at times, had to be imported from England, to keep 

 the people from starving, and to keep the cattle alive, even so 

 late as 1750. . • 



Of the mode of keeping cattle in the Virginia colony. 

 Glover, a contemporary, as appears by the Historical Register, 

 says : " All the inhabitants give their cattle in winter is only 

 the husks of their Indian corn, unless it be some of them that 

 have a little wheat straw, neither do they give them any more 

 of these than will serve to keep them alive ;' by reason where- 

 of they venture into the marshy gronnds and swamps for 

 food, where very many are lost." And Clayton, another 

 contemporary authority, says that " they neither housed nor 

 milked their cows in winter, having a notion that it would Mil 

 them.^^ A still later Swedish traveler, Kalm, after whom our 

 beautiful mountain laurel, theKalmia, was named, in speaking 

 of the James River colony, in 1749, says : 



"They make scarce an}^ manure for their corn-fields, but 

 when one piece of ground has been exhausted by continual 

 cropping, they clear and cultivate another piece of fresh land, 

 and when that is exhausted proceed to a third. Their cattle 

 are allowed to wander through the woods and uncultivated 

 grounds where they are half starved, having long ago 

 extirpated all the annual grasses by cropping them too early 

 in the spring, before they had time to form their flowers or to 

 shed their seeds." 



This statement will apply with nearly equal force to the 

 other colonists at that date. That the description is strictly 

 correct, I may quote from a distinguished Virginian, the Hon. 

 James M. Garnatt, who, in 1842, said : 



" Previous to our Revolutionary war, as I have been told by 

 the farmers of that day, no attempts worth mentioning were 

 made to collect manure for general purposes, all that was 

 deemed needful being saved for the gardens and tobacco-lots, 

 by summer cow-pens. These were filled with cattle such as 

 our modern breeders would hardly recognize as belonging to 

 the bovine species. In those days they were so utterly 

 neglected that it was quite common for the multitude starved 

 to death every winter to supply hides enough for shoeing the 

 negroes on every farm. This was a matter so generally and 



