NANTUCKET CATTLE SHOW. 419 



II. 



REPORT ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CATTLE 

 SHOW OF NANTUCKET. 



As the appointed delegate from the State Board of Agri- 

 culture, I attended the twenty-seventh cattle show and fair 

 of the Nantucket Agricultural Society on the island, Sept. 

 6 and 7, 1882. 



I arrived there on the second day before the fair, that I 

 might spend a day in going over the island to gather such 

 facts as I could of the condition of its agriculture, and to 

 see what improvements had been made therein in the twenty 

 years since I visited it on a similar mission. 



The ishind of Nantucket is about thirty miles from the 

 main land, about fifteen miles in length, and from three to 

 four in width, containing about fifty square miles, of which 

 nearly fifteen thousand acres are unimproved and unenclosed. 



That the island was once well wooded is a matter of his- 

 tory ; but it is not within the memory of any living man 

 that any trees have existed there, though the trunks and 

 stumps of undecayed trees, occasionally found in the peat 

 beds, are unimpeachable witnesses to the former existence 

 of woodland. 



There were returned in 1875 one hundred and seventy- 

 three acres of woodland, which was pine, resulting from 

 the planting by public-spirited men, about forty years since, 

 of large tracts with the seed of the common pitch-pine 

 {2)inus rigida), which were generally strewn in light fur- 

 rows from four to eight feet apart, and which, for years, in 

 spite of browsing, fierce winds, and destroying fires, flour- 

 ished and grew successfully. In late years a sort of blight, 

 in the form of a fungoid growth, has attacked the foliage of 

 a large number, which ultimately destroys the trees, and 



