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the day. But just previous to the Civil War and during several 

 decades following it, there occurred in our western country 

 the most rapid and extensive opening up of new lands for agri- 

 cultural purposes that civilization ever witnessed. In half a 

 century the center of our population and of our improved farm 

 land moved from West Virginia to the middle west. Rapidly 

 developing railroads, two hundred thousand miles being built 

 between 1850 and 1900, not only carried settlers to the prairies 

 but transported their vast output of corn, wheat and cattle to 

 eastern markets. 



Accompanying this enormous expansion of our productive 

 areas and indeed as an essential part of it came the develop- 

 ment of labor-saving machinery which either destroyed or 

 greatly minimized the industrial activities of the farm home 

 and small village and centralized manufacturing, even of agri- 

 cultural commodities, in factories mostly located in the centers 

 of population. The spinning wheel, the loom, the churn and 

 the cheese vat have disappeared from the farm home, and the 

 shoemaker, the tin knocker and the grist mill are no longer 

 found in the small village. Home-raised flour, home-spun 

 jackets, linsey-woolsey dresses and boots from the nearby cob- 

 bler no longer have much place in the economies of the rural 

 family. In short, the farm has lost much of its economic inde- 

 pendence and now must resort largely to an exchange of com- 

 modities for meeting its increasingly varied needs. 



Another modifying clause has operated in New England from 

 the day the first new land was cleared up to the present time. 

 Just as ignorance, indifiference or unscrupulous greed have 

 devastated the nation's wealth of waterpower, forests and min- 

 erals, so many farmers, blind to their own interests and un- 

 moved by their obligations to promote human welfare, or else 

 mentally unequal to sound agricultural practice, have been 

 profligate of the fertility of their soil. The settled portions of 

 New England present a varied panorama of depleted farms 

 scattered among those that are still prosperous, a condition that 

 is intensified by the practical abandonment of rugged area 

 which under existing conditions no longer furnish a margin of 

 profit from tillage. 



We must also reckon with the ideals that have prevailed 

 around the firesides of New England farm homes, for even 

 there industrial and commercial conquest and professional sue- 



