214 Transactions of the American Institute. 



visit to hammonton. 



The committee appointed to visit Hammonton and the Squantum 

 marl pits, made the following report: 



" Those acquainted with the resources and recent progress of 

 New Jersey, find it difficult to beai* patiently with the unwarrant- 

 able outside prejudice existing against her, or the baseless misrepre- 

 sentations that prevail concerning the State and her people. The 

 only just gi'ound for either at this date is her railroad monopoly, 

 which, by the way, is soon to be numbered among things of the 

 past. Since the State has given satisfactory proof that the reign of 

 local monopolies will soon be over, new towns have sprung up 

 within her borders, and large tracts of land that a few years since 

 were considered worthless have been practically proved to be pro- 

 ductive under judicious management. The tide of eastern emigra- 

 tion that formerly flowed almost uninterruptedly toward the Far 

 West has been partially turned into New Jersey, and to such an 

 extent as to create no little newspaper alarm, lest the latter State 

 would depopulate many of the New England towns. Among the 

 most conspicuous of these new settlements may be ranked the 

 town of Hammonton, situated on the Camden and Amboy railroad, 

 thirty miles southeast of Philadelphia, and eighty from New York. 

 It has been in existence about ten years, and it already has a popu- 

 lation of from 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants, principally from New 

 England. On the 13th of June, the Farmers' Club of the Ameri- 

 can Institute accepted an invitation from the citizens of Hammon- 

 ton, to visit their settlement, and witness the results of their ten 

 years' occupancy of the ' Sand Barren,' formerly sacred to the 

 scrub oalv and pine. The undersigned, being appointed a committee 

 to make a brief statement of the result of their observations during 

 their two days' visit to this locality, report as follows: 



"The soil is a deep, sandy loam, and in some instances so light 

 as to be quite at the mercy of the winds. A moderate gale not 

 unfrequently covers A's farm with an inch coating of neighbor B's 

 sandy soil, to the former's serious detriment. This is more likely 

 to occur on knolls and elevated lands, but on the larger part of the 

 tract there is enough clay mixed with the sand to make the soil 

 easily worked, and retentive of moisture and manures. The people 

 mainly have made the culture of small fruits a specialit}^ and have 

 at present 1,000 acres in strawberries, 600 of which produced a full 

 crop during the past season. The variety is almost exclusively Wil- 

 son's seedling, cultivated in hills, the rows three feet apart, and the 



