i^' . '^y>w :"*% !;^r '*.■ ' .^w'^ -I' ^ ' *VK ' * 



^*»r^^w7e^WP«:»^pw^»nwrj?5rTTF««wpW9iP!^^ 



L 



To a arge diamond plow, (an invention c^ 

 this ne. 'iborhood,) they attached the for® 

 whe«l8 of the farm wagon, with a short 

 axle and old cart tongue, drawn by two> 

 stout yoke of oxen. The plow was put ia 

 six inches deeper than ever a plow ran in 

 that field before, and turned up the "argillo- 

 calcarious" earth from beneath; and there 

 is enough left below to supply the same field 

 for a century to come. The result was a 

 fine crop of wheat in 184T, not less than 

 twenty five bushels to the acre. 



My old fields, when properly cultivated, 

 and where the soil has not been washed 

 away by excessive rains, will produce as 

 much corn as they did thirty years by-gone. 

 My opinion has long been formed, that 

 where our Illinois soils are properly culti- 

 vated, by a rotation of crops, deep plowing, 

 aabsoiiing, and plowing under all the corn 

 stalks, stubble and weeds, whether on land 

 originally covered with timber or on prairies, 

 it will last forever. The great chemical 

 laboratory of Almighty God, in the at- 

 mosphere and on the surface of the earth, 

 will keep our prairie soil in order, if man 

 will do his duty in cultivation. 



The general method of'cultivation, till 

 within a few years, has been unfavorable to 

 deciding fairly the capability of our soil for 

 a succession of crops. Our pioneer farmers 

 raked into wiurows and burned all their 

 corn stalks before spring plowing. Wheat 

 and oat stubble was also bnrut over, and 

 the prolific crop of weeds frequently were 

 cut, dried and burned. The soils in this 

 portion of Illinois not only need "humus" 

 for the successful growth of cereals, but the 

 earth should be kept loose with these arti- 

 cles in an undecomposed state* else, in a 

 wet season the clayey soil will run together 

 like melted lead, and when the drought 

 comes, it bakes. 



The French, who settled the villages on 

 the American bottom, about the beginning 

 of the last century made "common fields" 

 for cultivation. Each owner cultivated his 

 separate plateau, but all under a comcon 

 fence. They raised for successive genera- 

 tions a small kind of white flint corn, and 

 gathered from 25 to 35 bushels per acre — 

 though no one recollects how long they 

 cultivated this variety of corn on the same 

 plat successively. More than thirty years 

 since, I inquired of an intelligent and aged 

 Frenchman how long corn had been raised 

 each yoar on the land he was then working, 

 but he could give me nothing definite. He 

 remembered that his grandfather made corn 

 on that plateau, when he was a small boy. 



American immigrants came into the pres* 

 ent counties of Randolph and Monroe, 

 nearly every year from 1781 to 1800. They 

 commenced making farms in the prairies and 

 about the skirts of timber on the upland of 

 Monroe county, near the present site of 

 Waterloo, before 1790. Farms in that lo- 

 cality have been in cultivation ever since, 

 and we hear of no failure of crops. The 

 first American settlers came to the uplands 

 »of St. Clair county about the commence- 

 nsent of the present century. Captain 

 Joseph Ogle, brought his family from 

 Western Virginia, to the Illinois country in 

 1786, He and his three sons settled on the 

 north side of a prairie, and long known as 

 Ogle's prairie. 



Each made a farm and cultivated it while 

 life lasted. Corn was their principal, 

 though not exclusive crop, for they raised 

 wheat for domestic purposes and manufac- 

 tured some flour for St. Louis market. 

 They, and some other old settlers I shall 

 mention, when preparing for a crop of 

 wheat, threw open the field from which they 

 had gathered corn the preceding autunm, to 

 the inroads of all the horseb, cattle and 

 swiiae in tha neighborhood, to destroy the 

 gra&is and weeds. After corn planting was 

 over^ the field was broken up and left till 

 about tde last of September, when it was 

 plowied again atid the seed wheat put in, 

 either with a light plowing, or with the har- 

 row. When cultivated in this mode the 

 yield was from 25 to 35 bushels. Our 

 wheat in this county is regarded as defec- 

 tive, if it does not weigh from 62 to 66 

 pound:S to the bushel. A nommon method 

 of rstiting wheat in early times, was to sow 

 among the corn rows, the latter part of 

 August, and cover it with a light plowing 

 between the rows. By this mode the farm- 

 ers get from ten to fifteen bushels per acre. 

 Next crop would be corn again with a suc- 

 cess£"ve wheat crop intermixed. 



James Lemen, sr., brought his wife and 

 two boys to the Illinois country in 1786. 

 He settled first in the American bottom, 

 and then in the prairie at New Design, (as 

 the settlement was called, about four miles 

 south of Waterloo. ) His three eldest sons, 

 •Robert, Joseph and James, about fifty years 

 sine- , settled with their young families on a 

 prairie which they rightly denominated 

 Richland. Their farms joined the north line 

 of St. Clair county. The same soil makes 

 the surface of all our prairies, on an aver- 

 age of three feet deep, that once existed be- 

 tween the American bottom and the Kas- 

 kaskia river. 



