CHAPTER III 



FIELD AND GARDEN CROPS IN THE EARLY DAYS 



T has been noted that the earliest settle- 

 ments were along river valleys. This was 

 most natural for two reasons : the rivers 

 were the usual means of penetrating the 

 wilderness, and the valleys through which 

 they flowed were comparatively free from forests and 

 were composed of a kind of soil more readily cultivated 

 than the rocky areas on the hillsides. 



After a field was stripped of trees and freed from 

 stones, it was plowed and roughly harrowed. The only 

 plow In use up to the early years of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury was the unwieldy, heavy-beamed, wooden plow. It 

 was not of a type suited to lifting boulders in its course 

 through the soil. Perhaps this may account for the 

 thoroughness with which fields on our hills were cleared 



