AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
FOR THE 
IT ami, Garden, and H ouseliolcL 
“AGRICULTURE IS THE MOST HEALTH FUL, MOST USEFUL, A.\l> .MOST NOliLE EMPLOYMENT OF M AN.”—WiBHmotoN. 
7 ‘\ 
ORANGE JUDD COMPANY, 
Publishers end Proprietors, >445 Broadway 
ESTABLISHED IN 1842. 
(Herman Edition issued at the same rates as in English. 
TERMS: $1.50 per Annum in Advance, post-free; 
Four Copies $5.-Single N umber, 15 Cents. 
VOLUME XXXIX.—No. 4. 
NEW YORK, APRIL, 1880. 
NEW SERIES—No. 399. 
CLEARING UP A PARM.-Drawn BY R. E. ROBINSON .—Engraved for the American Agriculturist. 
The history of the first century of the settlement 
■of this country is one of forest-fellins: and land¬ 
clearing. The labors, trials, and hardships of those 
-who in early days engaged in a struggle with the 
wilderness can only be appreciated by those who 
have made or are now making for themselves and 
their families a home in the wild, wooded regions 
still unoccupied. To go into the woods and “clear 
up” a farm is no easy task ; and the scene which is 
presented in the engraving will carry the thoughts 
of many of our middle aged readers back to the 
days of the hardest work of their lives, but days 
that were bright in the hopes of future comfort and 
prosperity. Before the com and wheat could grow, 
or the green pasture furnish food for the stock in 
summer, and the meadow its burden of hay for the 
winter, the trees must he felled, the tangled brush 
be burned, the virgin soil broken, and the seed sown 
in the rough, but rich and willing ground. All this 
demanded toil, and toil of the most severe kind. But 
what changes were wrought! Every tree brought 
down opened a new space on the ground below, 
aDd a new inlet for the sunlight above ; every stump 
or every stroke of the axe was an encouragement 
for the next. Look now at the aggregate results of 
this labor. A wild, savage country transformed 
into a peaceful, prosperous land of‘ plenty. In 
some cases the change was slow, and several years 
elapsed before the land was thoroughly subdued to 
cultivation ; but often the transformation has been 
so sudden as to almost make one doubt his senses. 
In the space of a few short months the unbroken 
forest, known only to the Indian in pursuit of his 
game, was changed into open fields of waving 
grain. The wonderful story of the changes that 
accompanied the progress of the settlement of our 
forest regions, seems like fiction to him who has 
always lived in a long settled or prairie country. 
But to one who returns after a few years absence 
from the forest-side home of his boyhood days, the 
change is real. The woods have been swept away 
as by a whirlwind, and the picture that he has long 
held so dear in his memory, i^onger exists in real¬ 
ity. The land has been “cleared up” and even the 
stumps of the old trees have yielded to slow decay 
or the more rapid blasting dynamite, and the mower 
and reaper run smoothly over the ground. Year 
by year the “wood lots” have been narrowed 
in, until they are now in many cases too small to 
furnish the proper protection from stormy winds 
to the wide open stretches of country, or against 
other sudden, violent meteorological changes. The 
desire to get all the acres into grain and grass 
has been too strong, and the results are not to the 
country’s advantage. We may from necessity be 
called upon to restore by the slow process of 
plant-growth what has been destroyed as by fire. 
Copyright, 1880, by ©range Judd Company. 
Entered at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., as Second Class Matter. 
