AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
FOP. THB 
ITarm, Grar-clen, and Udo 11 seTiold. 
“ariuculture is the most health i l l, most useful, ani» most noble employment or m X 'S. 19 — W ASHINOTO.Vo 
ORANGE JUDD COMPANY,) ESTABLISHED IN 1842, { TEEMS : SI.50 per Annum in Advance, post-free, 
Publishers and Proprietors, 245 Broadway. ( Germa.ii Edition issued at the same rates as in English. I Four Copies S3.—Single Number, 15 Cents. 
VOLUME XXXVIII.—No. 11. NEW YORK, NOVEMBER, 1879. NEW SERIES—No. 394. 
S C O M I N Gr. — DRAWN BY Edwin Forbes.— Engraved for the American Agriculturist. 
Many of our readers—and they need not be very 
old—can recollect when Thanksgiving day was an 
exclusively New England Holiday, and in which 
the others of the older States did not partici¬ 
pate. As New Englanders migrated westward, 
and helped to found new States, they carried with 
them their usage of annually observing a day of 
thanksgiving, it is thus that the custom has 
spread to other States, until now, having been con¬ 
firmed by the action of recent Presidents, Thanks¬ 
giving has become no longer a partial, but a Na¬ 
tional Holiday. It is well that this, originally a 
farmer's holiday, has a general observance. It is 
most fitting that the farmers of this broad land 
should, on one day in the year, gather in their 
scattered children, and in one of the Holiest of 
Temples— Home —give thanks for that upon which 
the prosperity of the nation rests—the abundant 
harvest. It is pleasant to think upon Thanksgiv¬ 
ing day in its higher aspects, but not the less so in 
its associations and its minor influences. Being 
emphatically a home holiday, it more than all oth¬ 
ers affects the homes of the land, not less the 
homes in towns and cities than homes upon farms, 
and long before the day is at hand the thought that 
“Thanksgiving is coming” controls the move¬ 
ments in households everywhere. The home that 
is not upon the farm is none the less to observe the 
day; it, too, is to have its “ feast of fat things,” 
and the city housekeeper looks to her sister in the 
country for the fatted turkey “ wherewith to make 
merry.” Our artist, in the above engraving, shows 
one of the signs that all over the country foretell 
that “ Thanksgiving is coming,” and that the influ¬ 
ence of the day is far-reaching. A large share of 
the demand for the turkey, the bird that has be¬ 
come so essential to the thanksgiving feast, is sup¬ 
plied by those farmers whose flocks number hun¬ 
dreds; but aside from these, the turkey plays an 
important part on many small farms, and the bird, 
besides “furnishing forth” the material for 
many a home feast, is in itself a cause for grateful 
thanks. Many a mother, to help the family purse; 
many a daughter, in pride at being independent of 
her father’s hard earnings, to meet her personal 
Entered at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., as Second Class Matter. 
Copyright, 1879, by Orange Jcdd Company 
