Rural Economy in New England 335 



extent than now. Besides this, the consumption of wood for fuel 

 was enormous. The open fire-places demanded constant replenish- 

 ing during the winter months and consequently the wood-pile formed 

 an imposing eminence behind every farmhouse. In their wholesale 

 and seemingly reckless destruction of timber in clearing the land, 

 the settlers seem not to have anticipated the subsequent importance 

 of this material to them.^ As a result of their improvidence there 

 seems to have been in 1810 little first-growth timber standing, ex- 

 cept in the more lately settled counties of western Massachusetts 

 and Connecticut.^ And even in the management of such woodland 

 as they had, the farmers of this period followed a bad system. The 

 policy was to cut ofif close a certain tract every year, depending on 

 the natural growth to replace it after a term of years. The better 

 method, that of selecting certain trees over the whole extent of the 

 woodland to be cut every year, was discarded because of the larger 

 amount of labor which would have been necessary in gathering the 

 wood. Ignorance of the better policy may also have been responsible.' 

 The scarcity of wood,* which was inevitable, had begun to be felt, 

 especially in the matter of fuel. In regions of naturally sparse 

 forestation, as on Cape Cod, fire-wood was imported and experi- 

 ments were being made with the use of peat as fuel.^ 



^ The author of American Husbandry severely condemned this waste and seems 

 to have anticipated to some extent the modern conservation movement in advo- 

 cating legislative restraint. Op. cit., I. 84. See also Whitney, History of the 

 County of Worcester, p. 249; and Belknap, History of New Hampshire, III. 26. 



2 Dickinson, Geographical and Statistical View, p. 9, describes the forests still 

 existing in Massachusetts, ca. 1810. 



'There seems to have been little agreement as to the time required for re- 

 forestation. See Dwight, Travels, I. 80; and Mass. Agric. Soc. Papers, II. 1807, 

 47. 



* In a number of works this is given as the reason for the substitution of stone 

 walls for rail fences- See Statistical Account of Litchfield, p. 92; Goodrich, Statis- 

 tical Account of Ridgefield, p. 8. 



^ Joseph Felt wrote in 1834: "The first settlers thought no more of burning 

 twenty or thirty cords of wood annually than we do of burning five. . . . 

 Peat began to be used in some famiUes about fifty years since .... It 

 was made into coal sixty years past and used on the forges of blacksmiths." His- 

 tory of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton, pp. 25-26. In his Observations on the 

 Agriculture of the United States, WilUam Strickland wrote that timber and wood 

 had doubled in price in every part of New England within ten years. Strick- 

 land was an Englishman who spent a few months in this country as an agent 

 of the British Board of Agriculture. He seems to have been diligent in his col- 

 lection of factS; although his generahzations are colored by prejudice to some 

 extent. The result of his work, a seventy-four page pamphlet, was published in 

 London in 1801. 



