88 



A part of the farm was a wet swamp, of no use in the con- 

 dition in which it was at that time. A small portion of the 

 farm had been partially cultivated, or, perhaps more properly 

 described, skinned, yielding annually five or six tons of hay. 



This farm was given to Mr. Herrick by his father, as it 

 seemed to the committee, for the purpose of testing the quality 

 of the stuff his son was made of, and also to see if the Massa- 

 chusetts Agricultural College was educating its students away 

 from the farm, or whether they were acquiring a knowledge of 

 practical and scientific agriculture, by which a young graduate, 

 with no other opportunity of learning farming, could get a 

 living and make himself a home on seventeen acres of land, 

 the most of which was in the condition of thousands of acres 

 in Massachusetts, commonly called waste land. Surely the 

 test was about as severe as could well be selected for the pur- 

 pose. 



Young Herrick went to work with a stout heart, perseverance 

 and industry ; first, to thoroughly underdrain and bring under 

 cultivation the swamp, in accordance with the principles and 

 practice learned at the college ; and now it has the appearance 

 of a beautiful lawn, and being near the dwelling, is a fit 

 accompaniment of a tasteful home, besides yielding two heavy 

 crops of hay yearly. He then began on the rough rocky por- 

 tion nearest home (on an acre or two at a time"), cutting the 

 bushes and trees, digging up the stumps and boulders, blasting 

 those that were too large to move, and picking stones. 



He used the rocks thus obtained in building a barn cellar 

 wall, and also a very substantial and ornamental' faced wall 

 along one side of his farm, which was in the form of a paral- 

 lelogram, first digging a deep trench, the gravel from which 

 served to gravel a road alongside of the wall. The surface 

 soil from the road bed was first thrown out for composting 

 purposes, and both the trench for the wall and the road bed 

 filled with the stones gathered from the adjoining land, in pro- 

 cess of being cleared. In this way he has carried along 

 together, the clearing of the land, the building of a very sub- 



