THE CULTIVATOR. 
303 
NOTES of TRAVEL in the SOUTHWEST— No. VII. 
BY SOLON ROBINSON. 
Once again, my friends, I come with my monthly greet¬ 
ing. Well, where parted we company last? Let us re¬ 
flect.* We had just visited Mr. Leigh, and given a 
slight sketch of his method of farming , which I have 
italicised to give the term a contradistinction from that 
of planting—the latter term meaning only the cultivation 
of cotton. But before leaving Mr. Leigh’s neighbor¬ 
hood, I must notice that I was on President Polk’s plan¬ 
tation, and earnestly hope that his cultivation of Uncle 
Sam’s big plantation will be as well managed under the 
overseership of Mr. Polk, as his Mississippi cotton plan¬ 
tation is reported to be. The next point of interest that 
I visited was the plantation of Captain Wm. Eggleston, 
of Holmes county, who is one of the good farmers of 
Mississippi. He is a Virginian, from Amelia county, 
and having an introduction from his friend, Mr. Leigh, 
I met with a very hearty reception. 
The 17th of February was an uncomfortably warm 
day. The peas in Captain E.’s garden several inches 
high, lettuce in full head, and other things in proportion. 
Captain Eggleston has about 1,400 acres of land under 
cultivation, and upon which live 20 whites, and 150 
blacks, 70 of which are field hands; about one-third of 
his land is kept in corn and oats, the proportion of corn 
being as two to one. He keeps up a continued rotation 
of crops, and puts all the manure that he can upon the 
corn, which averages about 25 or 30 bushels to the acre; 
plants corn and sows oats in February. He is now work¬ 
ing 43 mules and horses, and 28 oxen, and makes 560 
bales a year, which he has to haul 10 or 12 miles. He 
also raises all the grain and meat required upon the plan¬ 
tation^ feeding his negroes at the rate of 3-§ lbs. clear ba¬ 
con per head per week, with about a peck and a half of 
corn meal, besides vegetables and fruit, melons, &c. 
Like Mr. Leigh, he gets his flour from Virginia, and 
asserts that no other will keep well through the summer. 
I saw in his garden some very fine fig trees, which as 
far north as this produce remarkably well. Peaches are 
unfailing, but with grapes he has not been successful. 
Apples are not a southern fruit, yet many are attempting 
their cultivation. And now a word of Captain Eggle¬ 
ston’s system of cultivation. His place is all hilly, thin, 
oak land, very light soil, that melts away in water not 
quite so easy as salt or sugar; and yet he has scarcely a 
gully upon the whole farm; but he has more than 20 
miles of side hill ditches, which are so constructed that 
they take up all the surface water before it passes far 
enough over the ground to form gullies. 
While riding over the plantation, I found one of the 
overseers engaged, with a large force of hands, laying 
off and making ditches upon some new ground, it being 
a rule never to put in a second crop until the land is 
ditched. 
I will attempt a description of the very simple instru¬ 
ment used as a level. It consists first of an upright 
standard about five feet high, the lower end sharpened 
to stick in the ground, and about a foot above is a shoul¬ 
der, upon which rests a frame made of thin cross bars, 
tennoned at each end into uprights, about four feet long, 
one bar at top and one at bottom, and one in centre, with 
holes through which the upright passes, and upon which 
it plays freely. This standard being set in the ground 
and a plum line brought to rest upon a scale previously 
graded to the required fall of the ditch, the operator 
sights along the middle bar until it strikes the ground at 
the point where he would commence the ditch, and then 
moves it round the face of the hill he wishes to circle, 
having the various points marked as far as he could ex¬ 
tend the view from that point. And here I cannot re¬ 
frain from mentioning a very remarkable fact which I 
saw, and which Captain E. assured me that he had often 
witnessed, but could not account for. He had a negro 
boy-—not a very remarkably bright one either-—about 
a dozen years old, who being stationed at the starting 
point of the ditch, would start upon asmarttrot round the 
face of the hill, and when he had gone as far as he 
thought necessary to strike a stake, he would stop, and 
never four feet out of the way. Query, had he a water 
level in his head? How can his leveling faculty be ac¬ 
counted for? I wish some political levelcrs had as happy 
a faculty of always being right. 
When the line is thus staked off, the same boy walks 
back upon his track, picking up the stakes, while the 
overseer guiding a horse drawing a slightly marking 
plow held by another hand, follows on, and thus makes 
the line of the ditch for the big plow that follows, and 
in turn is followed by hands with hoes until the ditch is 
completed. 
The alteration that I would recommend in this instru¬ 
ment, would be to substitute a spirit level for the plumb 
line, as on a windy day the line is too much affected. 
This level upon hilly land is much preferable to th# 
rafter level, and is as easily made. 
As before remarked, the rows have to conform to the 
ditches, however crooked, and the manner of plowing is 
to lay off the rows in the first instance, the middles often 
being left unbroken until after the corn is planted, and 
perhaps up. Captain Eggleston’s plan is to plow deep 
directly under the corn, and plow shallow while tending 
the growing crop. His motto is to plow deep for all 
crops. He assures us that since he has adopted the level 
system of ditching and plowing, that in addition to the 
advantage to the land, that his crops are better and the 
soil improving instead of deteriorating. 
All of his mechanical work is done by his negroes upon 
his plantation. He has two negro carpenters that he oc¬ 
casionally hires out to others at the rate of $40 apiece 
per month. He estimates that he has ten miles of plan¬ 
tation roads, and 20 miles of rail fence, more than half 
of which is to fence against other folks’ cattle instead of 
his own; and this fence has all to be renewed once in 
seven years, as in this humid climate that period is the 
length of durability of rails. What an enormous tax! 
And with the enormous waste of timber going on, how 
long will it be before all the rail timber is exhausted? 
What is to be done then? What is to be substituted? It 
is time this matter was thought of even amid the forests 
of Mississippi. There is another matter that ought to 
be thought of too by every cotton planter. What are 
they going to do when the supply of basket timber is 
exhausted, as it already is in some parts of the state? 
Will they send to the north for these indispensable arti¬ 
cles? Well, so be it. We are ready to furnisfi you, and 
we will soon learn that you cannot pick cotton without 
baskets. I advise you to commence immediately the cul¬ 
tivation of Ozier Willow. It will grow upon all your 
creek banks, and it will make a more handsome and 
valuable fringe than many that I have seen in the middle 
of your fields. There is another article that grows al¬ 
most spontaneously upon some of the rich bottoms and 
waste corners of your plantations, that would bring mo¬ 
ney if sent to market; and that is red pepper the grind¬ 
ing of which you can do in your own mills, and pack 
in your empty flower barrels—try it. You can get the 
willow from New-York; I don’t know in particular 
from where, but I will venture to name my friend, 
Charles Downing, nurseryman, Newburgh, whose ho¬ 
nesty I have great faith in. 
And begin in time to husband your resources for fen¬ 
cing. Don’t pursue a course that I witnessed a few days 
ago. Deadening good rail trees within the proposed en¬ 
closure to stand and rot down, and going outside among 
the standing timber and cutting down the trees for rails, 
and for the reason that by so doing it saved the trouble 
of clearing up the tops within the field—those outside 
could lay undisturbed to rot. 
Leaving Captain Eggleston on the 18th, the first plan¬ 
tation I passed was one that once had been a very fine 
one, of comparative level and rich soil, now in utter ru¬ 
ins: Cause—debt, law and taxes. Fences, buildings and 
land all in ruins; the former rotted and fallen down, and 
the latter gullied away. In the midst of all this desola¬ 
tion, an ancient mound reared its lofty head, looking still 
more the lonely monument of an extinguished race than 
it would when met upon the wild waste where civiliza¬ 
tion had not yet set its more enduring mark. Even here 
upon this monument the hand of the white man had been, 
