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rejoicing heartily in the triumphant military success which has 

 crowned our country with added glory and in the return of 

 peace, with all its attendant and prospective advantages, they see 

 before them new fields of enterprise, new openings for the em- 

 ployment of capital and labor. They feel, also, new claims upon 

 their fidelity to their country, to liberty and to humanity. And 

 by no portion of the people will these claims be more sacredly 

 regarded or scrupulously and faithfully discharged. 

 For the Committee, 



CHARLES C. SEWALL, Chairman. 



STATEMENT OF A. W. CHEEVER. 



Gentlemen : — In compliance with the rules of the Society 

 and a request from your Chairman, I will endeavor to give you 

 some account of my mode of management on the farm owned by 

 Otis G. Cheever, and examined by you during the past summer, 

 together with my reasons for adopting my present course. 



The entire farm consists of about ninety acres, divided into 

 wood and sprout land thirty-three acres, old pasture, growing 

 up to wood, twenty-five acres, other pasture seven acres, mowing 

 and tillage twenty-five acres. Formerly all the pasture was 

 classed as improved land. I think it has really improved faster 

 since adopting the " let alone" system, than it did when it was 

 occasionally plowed, sowed with rye and re- seeded with the appli- 

 cation of little or no manure, or by the still later practice of mow- 

 ing the bushes every fall. It is now gradually coming up to 

 pines, birches and other kinds of forest trees. By the old man- 

 agement it was worthless land, as it would not pay expenses. 

 Now it is slowly, and without any expense, becoming valuable. 

 One lot of three acres on which I rode horse to cultivate a field 

 of potatoes twenty-five years ago, is now covered by a thick 

 growth of white and pitch pines that are about thirty feet high 

 and a foot through at the butt. 



Most of the seven acres now used for pasture was formerly in- 

 cluded in the mowhig and tillage, and took its turn at being 

 plowed, planted with corn and potatoes, and re-seeded to mowing. 

 It has been my aim to have no more land under cultivation than 

 what could be managed well, with the amount of capital at 

 command. 



The soil of the farm^is not above the average in natural fertility, 

 being rather cold and wet. The surface is made quite uneven by 

 many gravelly knolls, some of them topped out by huge ledges of 

 rock. Between the knolls the loam is deep, though, in many 



