23 



TOBACCO. 



Whether the good parson occasionally solaced his mind and 

 aided his reflections by a moderate use of that plant which was 

 for many years the staple crop and currency of old Virginia, I 

 have no present means of determining. That he raised more 

 or less of it he tells us in his diary in which we have it on 

 record that, on the 6th day of July, 1764, " he sat out the mis- 

 sing tobacco plants." If, two hundred years before this, the 

 great Sir Walter Raleigh could properly entertain prim Queen 

 Bess and her court, by smoking tobacco in their presence, and 

 force them to acknowledge themselves beaten, when asked the 

 weight of the smoke which he puffed in their faces, most 

 surely a quiet New Hampshire parson, back in the wilderness, 

 might be allowed to enliven his pious lucubrations by similar 

 fumings. 1 



Another of the crops raised by the first minister was flax. 

 The seed was sown early in May, at the rate of from three to 

 four pecks per acre, if seed was sought, and from eight to 

 twelve, if the fibre was wanted. It was weeded if necessary, 

 and harvested in the early part of August, by pulling up the 

 plants by handfuls and collecting them into small bundles. 

 Some weeks afterwards, these were spread upon the ground 

 "to rot," as the term then was, the object being by exposure 



1 Tobacco, though produced in a small way for home consumption, has 

 never been raised in New Hampshire as a commercial product. Her farmers 

 have never been attracted to it. Some years ago, the New Hampshire board 

 of agriculture held a meeting at Winchester, to which Deacon S. W. Buffum, 

 then the member from Cheshire county, had invited the brethren of a farmers' 

 club in a neighboring state, who were present and asked to address the meet- 

 ing. 



Many of them were producers of tobacco, and their talk was mainly upon 

 its culture, a subject not upon the programmes of the meeting. When they 

 had consumed much of the forenoon session the deacon and his New Hamp- 

 shire friends grew tired of it. But how to courteously arrest its flow was not 

 apparent. At length, however, endurance became a doubtful virtue, and a 

 plain spoken New Hampshire farmer got the floor and expressed, as emphat- 

 ically as plainly, his opinion that tobacco and rum were twin products, and 

 that the culture of the former was of as little importance to the farmers of 

 New Hampshire as the manufacture of the latter. That opinion seemed to 

 prevail and the farther discussion of tobacco raising ceased. 



