44 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



and a half, while in 1854 it went up to over twenty-seven 

 millions of bushels. 



We have seen that wheat was cultivated, to some extent, 

 by the early settlers of the country. Occasionally, to meet 

 the exigency of a short crop in England, France, Portugal, 

 Spain, or the West Indies, it was exported, to some extent, 

 in the early part of the last century. By the year 1750, New 

 Jersey had come to take the lead of all the Colonies in raising 

 W'heat, and may be regarded as at that time the great centre 

 of the Avheat-growing region. Its culture had grown to be 

 very considerable along the Hudson and Mohawk, and in 

 Pennsylvania. Maryland, Virginia, and the provinces fur- 

 ther south had made tobacco the leading object of culture, 

 almost from the first of their settlement, and this crop consti- 

 tuted for a long time the most important export from the 

 British provinces, though North Carolina had shipped, on an 

 average, about 130,000 barrels of pitch, tar and turpantine, 

 and South Carolina considerable quantities of rice. But the 

 product of tobacco had been diminishing for some years 

 previous to the Revolution, on account of the exhaustion of 

 the soil for that crop, and the planters there had turned their 

 attention, to a greater extent, to the growing of wheat and 

 other grain. They could by law export tobacco only to Great 

 Britain, but they could ship wheat, flour, lumber, &c., to the 

 West Indies and elsewhere. Wheat, therefore, had begun 

 to enter into the exports of the more southern provinces prior 

 to the Revolution. 



INCREASE OF PEODUCTIOX. 



But that the production of wheat and flour had not risen 

 to anything like the relative importance which it holds at the 

 present time, will appear from the fact that in 1791 the ex- 

 port of this grain was but 1,018,339 bushels, and 619,681 

 barrels of flour; while in 1800 it was but 26,853 bushels of 

 wheat and 653,052 bjrrrels of flour. In 1810 the amount 

 sent abroad w^as 325,024 bushels of wdieat and 798,431 

 barrels of flour. No statistics of the actual production of this 

 grain were gathered previous to the census of 1840, but it is 

 reported in that year to have been 84,823,272 bushels. From 

 that time to 1850 the increase appears to have been but 15 



