AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
296 
cess is repeated. They then lie in a dry and cool 
place for a couple of weeks, when they are ready 
for smoking. No brine is used to toughen the pork 
or hams, or affect the flavor. The smoking is con¬ 
tinued at intervals, with care not to get up a heat 
by a continuous fire. Two fires a day are made 
with corn cobs, or dry oak or hickory. The total 
smoking, that is the time the meat is well surround¬ 
ed with smoke, is 100 to 120 hours in all. After 
smoking enough, the bacon or hams are packed dry 
in barrels, or hung up, and kept dry and cool. That 
to be kept into or through the next summer, is 
rolled in plenty of newspapers, packed in barrels, 
and covered over with a thick layer of dry wood 
ashes. He says he has never lost a pouud, and 
never failed to have bacon and hams sweet and de¬ 
licious to the taste, and commanding the highest 
price in the market. We should add, that in curing 
very large hams by this process, as a safety precau¬ 
tion, he makes small openings down to the bone 
joints, and fills them with the hot salt.—He cures 
beef in the same way, but only puts it through the 
first salting process. Indeed some of his neigh¬ 
bors give pork and hams only the first salting, but 
he deems the second application, above described, 
as better, and insuring perfect success always. 
An Ohio Cheese Factory. 
Friend Gillette drove me out to the South Am¬ 
herst Cheese Factory, which is conducted as fol¬ 
lows : The Messrs. Eggleston, Bramon & Co. own 
the factory and apparatus, receive the milk from the 
producers, attend to all details of making, curing, 
and marketing, deduct 1# cent per lb. for the cheese 
and 4 cents per lb. for the butter made, as their pay, 
and the balance, received every month, is divided 
among the milk producers, in proportion to the 
number of pounds of milk each has furnished. 
(The Factory charge last year was 2 cts. per lb. for 
cheese, and 5 ets. per lb. for butter). The sales are 
made at the discretion of the manufacturers, but 
they are glad to divide the responsibility as to the 
best time of selling, by taking counsel with the 
owners. The milk brought in at evening, is set in 
small cans in cool water, and the cream removed 
in the morning and made into butter. The skimmed 
milk is then mixed with the fresh morning milk, 
and made into cheese. We understand that the 
cheese thus made sells within one cent a pound of 
that made from whole-milk, with no cream removed. 
—About one pound of butter is taken from 86 lbs. 
of the night’s milk.—Ten pounds of milk yield one 
pound of cheese, on the average. This Factory 
received the milk of 600 cows during 1878, from 
which it produced about 206,000 lbs. of Cheese, and 
35,000 lbs. of Butter.—In 1877, the producers re¬ 
ceived $1 for each 100 lbs. or 50 quarts of milk ; in 
1878, sixty cents for each 100 lbs., or say l>/ 5 cent 
per quart, reckoning milk at 2 lbs. per quart.—The 
producers received in 1877 about $50 per cow on 
the average. In 1878, about $35 per cow. Some 
were dissatisfied with last year’s results, and only 
500 cows contribute milk this year. The produc¬ 
ers at a given hour, morning and evening, strain 
the milk into a large can or cans, standing upon a 
platform on the side of the street, at home. Con¬ 
tractors pass around on specially fitted long plat¬ 
form wagons, and gather these cans and take them 
to the factory, receiving for this and returning the 
cans, $2 per cow for the season, from April to No¬ 
vember. Each producer receives back daily in his 
cans his proper share of the whey from the factory. 
This is valued at $5 per cow and upward, for feed¬ 
ing to calves and swine, and is taken into account 
in estimating the profits. The whole working is 
regular and simple. The entire dairying work upon 
the farm is reduced to milking and depositing the 
milk in the covered cans by the roadside, twice a 
day, receiving and using the returned whey, and 
washing the cans.—I have only given a general 
outline of the system, without going into details of 
manufacture, profits, etc. The fact that such estab¬ 
lishments are very frequent in many sections of the 
country, and are multiplying instead of diminish¬ 
ing, is evidence of their utility. The better pro¬ 
ducts obtained, and of course better prices, are in 
their favor. Whether the proprietorship plan above 
described, or the cooperative one—the producers 
owning the factory and employing agents to make 
and sell the butter and cheese is the better, is 
still a question. 
Fultz Wheat—(Winter). 
Mr. Gillette scores one point in favor of the U. S. 
Agr. Department. He received therefrom a parcel 
of wheat which he has multiplied until he now ex¬ 
hibited to me a 4-acre field that I estimate will yield 
120 to 140 bushels this year, or 30 to 35 bushels per 
acre. It is on heavy clay land, from which two suc¬ 
cessive com crops have been taken, the first from a 
pasture sod turned under. No manure has ever 
been applied to the land, I believe. The Fultz is a 
white-chaff, bald variety. It was sown in drills, 
and tillered from 10 to 25 stalks—15 to 18 stalks be¬ 
ing very common. Unfortunately this has been, 
accidently, mixed with some of another hard- 
bearded variety, and can only be saved for pure- 
seed by careful and laborious hand-picking. 
Permanently Good Land. 
The soil is, in one sense, the farmer’s machine for 
manufactoring crops. Its wearing power is an im¬ 
portant element in its valuation. A good loam, 
while easy to work, may produce well during a few 
years and wear out; the same of a dark peat or 
vegetable moulfl. A strong clay soil, on the con¬ 
trary, is hard to work at first, and but moderately 
productive, except when lying so as to have a nat¬ 
ural drainage, and at the same time have a consid¬ 
erable accumulation of humus (decaying vegetable, 
leaves, etc.), in its surface. But when freed from 
water by under-draining, or by a thorough system 
of ridges and deep dead-furrows, and thoroughly 
broken up by tillage and exposure to frosts and 
ameliorated by mixing with it turned under sods, 
or green crops, or manure. There is no better, 
permanently good farming land than the original 
strong clay soils. They will last, and be productive 
generation after generation, with small expense for 
foreign fertilizers. They contain inexhaustible sup¬ 
plies of fertilizing elements, that are gradually re¬ 
leased as wanted by the crops. The straw pro¬ 
duced suffices to keep them mellow enough for the 
roots of plants. With their straw, and an occasional 
clover crop turned under, they increase in fertility 
with successive cropping. 
Some soils of this class may in time need the ad¬ 
dition of phosphates, though in many cases the 
phosphoric acid seems to be abundant after 40 or 
50 or more years of continuous cropping. 1 write 
this at evening, after spending a day in examining 
some clay farms on the “ Western Reserve,” and 
studying the experience of those who have been on 
them 30 to 40 years. Some of the most thrifty 
farmers tell me that they neither need nor use any 
other fertilizers than an occasional plowed-in sward. 
They save and apply all the barn-yard manures pro¬ 
duced, and when they can buy at the village stables 
manure for 50 cents per wagon load they get it, and 
apply it upon the surfaces of meadows, or upon 
potato or corn ground, which has not recently had 
a sod turned under. When produce is high, or 
they have special need of manure for particular 
fields or crops, they can afford to pay as high as $1 
per load if they do not have to haul it over three 
or four miles. That it will not pay to give over $1 
per full farm wagon load, as plowing-in sod or 
green crops would be cheaper. 
A Grindstone Manufactory. 
I visited in North Amherst, O., the Halderman 
Quarry, and chanced to meet as one of the foremen 
an old subscriber of the American Agriculturist, Mr. 
Henry Ludwiek, who took me through the works. 
This is similar to, if not a continuation of, the noted 
Berean deposit, and it is claimed that the stone 
here has a better “ grit” for grindstones. The de¬ 
posit extends for miles (I know not how far). At 
this quarry the sand-stone, nearly white, is in a 
solid deposit, without any perpendicular seams or 
cleavage, and goes down to an unknown depth— 
improving with the descent. They are working 
some 65 feet below the surface. There is some 
horizontal cleavage, sufficient to allow partially 
regular splitting. Deep grooves are cut down with 
picks, through a layer, on all sides of a large mass. 
This is broken into smaller squares or pieces by 
picked grooves and iron wedges. It is then split 
horizontally into sheets or blocks of the desired 
[August, 
thickness. The blocks are rough dressed with 
picks, and in part sent to cities east and west as 
building (dressed cut) stone, and in part worked 
into grindstoues. For the latter purpose, the large 
blocks are roughly worked round with picks. A 
square hole is picked and finished with chisels 
through the center, and the great stones, weighing 
anywhere from 100 to 4,000 lbs. or more, are put 
upon the shaft (mandril) of an immense turning 
lathe. While revolving rapidly, a man with a sort 
of pointed crow-bar turns the stone down to the 
desired diameter, thickness, and smoothness, 
when they are slipped off the lathe, and are ready 
for market. They are sold by the pound. I meas¬ 
ured a few of those the weight of which was 
marked, and found them thus : 
D ameter. Thickness. Weight. 
4 y. feet. 6 inches. 1,112 lbs. 
5 feet. 8 inches. 1,832 lbs. 
5 feet. 10 inches. 2,290 lbs. 
6 feet. 10 inches. 3,298 lbs. 
6 feet. 12 inches. 3,958 lbs. 
The last, a pretty big grindstone, lacking only 42 
lbs. of weighing two tons ! Larger stones even are 
sometimes worked out. They can get them of any 
size, however large. These one or two ton grind¬ 
stones were handled with all ease, by one or two 
men, using cranes and steam power.—There is 
evidently material enough in this part of Ohio to 
supply all the good grindstones and whetstones 
the whole world will want for centuries to come. 
Wood and Timber for the Prairies. 
Omaha, Nebraska, July .—Through the kindness 
and courtesy of the Hon. O. F. Davis, we have en¬ 
joyed an instructive ride through the country south¬ 
west of Omaha, one special object being to see the 
40 acres of forest grown on the high open prairie, by 
Mr. J. T. Griffin. He was originally from Otsego 
Co., N. Y.; then resided at Oakland, Mich., and set¬ 
tled here in May, 1856, taking up a farm of 400 
acres. He was absent from home, but we met him 
on the way to the city, and gathered some of his ex¬ 
perience. He first planted Black Walnuts in the 
fall of 1856, making holes about one foot apart, 
dropping in the Walnuts, and covering about two 
inches deep. They started well in spring, grew' 
finely, and in the spring of 1858 were planted out in 
the fields, 10 feet apart, in the quincunx order. 
This, he says, was far too thickly, and it is very evi¬ 
dent. There is a multitude of small, well-grown 
trees. Where, from any cause, one was left 20 or 
more feet from the other.-,, it has grown much 
larger. As it is, Mr. G. has a dozen acres or so of 
fine, straight, thrifty Black Walnut trees, yielding a 
good deal of fruit (nuts), and worth, acre for acre, 
many times as much as the cultivated land. 
While young, occasional trees were trimmed a 
little, but they usually grew straight and erect 
without it.— Maples. —In 1860 he gathered Maple 
seed as soon as ripe in May, and at once sowed 
it in drills near together. It sprouted quickly, 
and by autumn there was an immense supply of 
young Maples a foot high or more. Mr. G. says 
the great point is to sow the seed shallow 
just as soon as it is well matured and before it has 
time to dry. They were transplanted 2 to 3 years 
from seed, and half a dozen years from the seed 
he began cutting out for fuel, and in 10 years 
the 8 or 10 acres supplied all the wood for 
fuel wanted on the farm. He planted the Soft 
Maple, gathering the seed from wild trees growing 
along the river. He grows successfully the White or 
Green Ash, and Cotton-wood, taking young plants 
of each from the native groves. Hard Maple does 
fairly. Chestnut grows, but does only fairly. 
Honey Locust is good, and he has a large number 
of thrifty trees. The Black Locust would be first 
rate, but the borers destroyed it after a time ; yet 
he would grow some of them. In order of value, 
Mr. Griffin prefers : 1st. Honey Locust for timber, 
etc.—2d. Black Walnut for timber, fuel, etc.—3d. 
Soft Maple for early fuel.—4th. Cotton-wood 
for fuel, and many uses as timber, set 4 to 6 
feet apart, and as they enlarge, cut out for 
fuel. Mr. G. says he would guarantee to ob¬ 
tain any number of young Cotton-wood trees 
wanted for planting for $2.50 per 1,000, loaded on 
the cars. They grow rapidly almost anywhere, 
and there is no reason why prairie farmers should 
not have them in abundance. He advises sowing 
