510 MASS. BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Farms and Improvement of Lands. 



The committee, instead of indulging in general remarks, to 

 which the subject strongly invites, confine themselves to a few 

 observations on two or three particulars respecting the condition 

 of our farms. 



In looking at the farms in Massachusetts, that which would 

 most strike a stranger is, t4ie great irregularity not only in their 

 exterior forms, but in their interior subdivisions. Look at a 

 map of almost any of our older farms, and you will be struck 

 with this fact. Every variety of angle that delighted the gen- 

 ius of Euclid, could be matched by the subdividing lines of 

 our farms. Could we imagine some intelligent being, unac- 

 quainted with the inventive genius of a Yankee farmer, look- 

 ing, for the first time, at the map of a New England farm, he 

 might well suppose that it had been drawn for the purpose of 

 solving problems in geometry. Our fields present to the eye all 

 the different forms of obtuse and acute angles, and specimens 

 even of the serpentine and the curvilinear, a mighty maze, and 

 all without a plan ! 



The fields of our farms are of all sizes, as well as of all 

 shapes, from the small enclosure of a quarter of an acre, to the 

 rambling pasture of twenty acres. 



The unseemly and inconvenient shape of our farms, is 

 owing, in great part, to the manner in which our lands were 

 originally laid out in the settlement of the country. Compa- 

 nies were formed who, with the consent of government, pur- 

 chased townships, or other large tracts of unoccupied land, and 

 made divisions, from time to time, of small quantities of the 

 common lands among the proprietors, leaving each one to se- 

 lect and locate his own lot. Of course, an individual having a 

 right to lay out in the undivided lands a certain quantity at a 

 time, say ten acres more or less, would cause it to be surveyed 

 in such shape as to include within its boundaries the greatest 

 value, without regard to any general arrangement, or the form 

 which his tract would present on the map. We feel the effects 

 of this unfortunate system, (or, with more truth, this total want 

 of system) in the division of the public lands, at the settlement 

 of the country. Many, if not the most of these lots so laid out, 



