American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man .”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 114 For the Week Ending August 23, 1924 Number 8 
The Man Who Buried Crockery 
The Story of John Johnston and a Farm That Has Made Good 
E DITOR’S NOTE: Some time ago in look¬ 
ing ower a volume of American Agri¬ 
culturist published in 1874, we found 
the picture of, and an article about, a 
man who was one of the most famous farmers of 
his time, and a man whose name has gone down 
in farm history as the one who first introduced 
tile drain in America. He was John Johnston 
of Geneva, New York. The article was so 
interesting that we wrote to our friend, Air. 
Charles R. Mellen, who now owns the old John 
Johnston farm at Geneva, and asked him for 
further information as to what the old place is 
still doing. 
Mr. Mellen replied briefly in a letter which we 
are also printing below. You will find that this 
material holds your close attention, not 
only because nearly every farmer wants 
to know about drainage problems, but 
because all of us are especially interested 
in men like John Johnston and Charles 
R. Mellen, whose lives have been produc¬ 
tive of real accomplishments, and who 
have been real leaders for progress in 
their times and communities. 
The following is the story written in 
American Agriculturist just fifty years 
ago of John Johnston, the man who 
insisted on “burying crockery in the 
ground 
John Johnston was born’ in New Galloway, 
Scotland, in the year 1791. Many of his early 
days—and nights also—were spent on the hills 
tending his grandfather’s flocks of sheep. 
“Whatever I know of farming,” he once said 
to us, “I learned from my grandfather.” 
And right nobly have these early lessons been 
reduced to practice throughout a long and em¬ 
inently successful life. “Verily all the airth 
needs draining,” was a remark of grand¬ 
father Johnston in Scotland. We shall see 
how well the boy Johnston, some years later, 
in far distant America, applied the idea to 
practice on his recently purchased farm. 
Mr. Johnston married in 1818, and came to this 
country in the spring of 1821. After looking about for 
a few months he selected and purchased a farm lying 
on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, near Geneva, N. \ . 
The land lies on a high ridge, and a casual observer 
would not be likely to suspect that it needed draining. 
The soil is a rich, calcareous clay, but when be purchased 
was in a badly run-down condition. Mr. Johnston, 
being poor, had to run more or less in debt, and his 
neighbors predicted that he would soon be sold out. 
Here he commenced his life-work, and here he has lived 
for 52 years. “I have always been an anxious man, 
he once said to us, but his anxiety was of that kind 
which stimulated industry and quickened thought. 
He believed in hard work and good farming. He had 
his trials and discouragements like the rest of us, but 
when he stumbled he came up ahead. He had un¬ 
bounded faith in himself. He was not afraid to run in 
debt for land or for the capital necessary to improve it. 
He did not believe in small farms. “I do not know how 
to manage a small farm,” he once said to us. He was 
quite as capable of managing his farm of three or four 
hundred acres as one of fifty acres. 
Mr. Johnston’s leading crop has always been wheat. 
Everything else was secondary to this. But he has 
also made a good deal of money by fattening sheep and 
cattle in winter. “But,” said he, “I never made any¬ 
thing by farming until I commenced to drain.” 
He commenced draining his land in 1835. He sent 
to Scotland for a pattern and got tiles made by hand. 
His neighbor, the lamented John Delafield, imported 
a machine for making tiles in 1848, and from that time 
Mr. Johnston laid tiles as rapidly as he could get the 
work done by the ordinary labor of the farm. “It 
cost me more,” he once said to us, “than it would to 
have had the whole work done as Mr. Swan did it, 
at once, but I had to get the money from the crop on 
the drained field to pay for draining the second field.” 
In fact, his draining paid for itself as it progressed. 
The extra yield of one crop of wheat frequently paid 
the whole expense of the draining; and in no instance 
did he fail to get all his money back in two crops. In 
1851 he had laid sixteen miles of tile drain on his farm. 
John Johnston 
In 1856, when we visited him again, he had between 
fifty-one and fifty-two miles of tile drains, and we be¬ 
lieve nearly every tile had been laid with his own hands. 
Underdraining was a new thing in those days. Some 
of the neighbors said, “John Johnston is gone crazy— 
he is burying crockery in the ground.” But mark the 
result. When the so-called weevil, or midge, proved 
so destructive to the wheat of Western New York that 
nearly all the farmers thought they should have to 
abandon the crop; when on many farms the wheat 
would not yield ten bushels to the acre, we visited 
John Johnston (in 1856) and found he had sixty-two 
acres of wheat that almost bid defiance to the midge. 
He had that year twenty-five acres of Soule’s wheat 
that averaged 33G bushels per acre; and his red wheat 
was as stout as it could grow. In 1859 his crop of 
white wheat averaged over 41 bushels to the acre. 
It would be an error, however, to attribute Mr. 
Johnston’s success solely to underdraining. He has 
cultivated his land very thoroughly. He is a strenuous 
advocate for summer-fallows—plowing three, and oc¬ 
casionally four, times. He has made his land dry, 
clean, mellow, and rich. He grew great crops of clover 
for many years, dressing the fields liberally with plaster. 
After his land became rich he has grown timothy grass 
as well as clover, as he thinks he gets more and better 
hay. He has used lime with great benefit on his wheat. 
He has also used salt—a barrel per acre on his wheat— 
with remarkable results; he has sometimes used as 
much as seventy-five barrels of it in a year. He has 
also used more or less Peruvian guano. But in all his 
operations he has never lost sight of the manure heap 
in his barnyard. He has raised great crops of clover 
and fed it out on the farm. He does not plow it under. 
His corn, stalks, and straw, are all consumed on the 
farm, and for many years he bought tons and tons of 
oil-cake to feed with his straw. In this "Way he made 
great quantities of manure—and it was rich manure, 
not rotten straw. He piles his manure in the spring 
and uses it as a top-dressing on grass in the summer or 
autumn, the land being plowed up the next spring for 
corn. 
Personally, John Johnston is tall and fine-looking, 
every inch a gentleman. He is temperate in 
all things. He neither drinks spirituous liquors 
nor uses tobacco in any form. A stranger 
seeing him in a select company would pick him 
out as a gentleman of the old school—but per¬ 
haps a distinguished general or statesman. 
He would hardly suppose he was “nothing but 
a farmer”—that he had spent his life in a 
quiet farmhouse; that he had followed the 
plow, dressed hundreds of sheep for foot-rot, 
and laid fifty miles of underdraining tiles with 
his own hands. And the stranger would be 
right. John Johnston is a distinguished man. 
He has led a most useful and honorable life. 
He has made money—and made it solely by 
farming, not by speculation. He has lived 
comfortably and brought up and educated a 
large family. His children, grandchildren, and 
great-grandchildren, delight to visit the old 
quiet home on the borders of the deep and 
beautiful lake. Here, too, many of our fore¬ 
most farmers like to go, as on a pilgrimage, 
to pay their respects to the man whom they 
have learned to honor. Here, respected and 
loved by all who know him, may his life long 
be spared, as a grand specimen of an indus¬ 
trious, intelligent, true, and independent 
American farmer. 
Dr. Liberty Hyde Bailey, in an article 
in American Gardening of 1893, writes as follows 
about the old Johnston farm and its present owner, 
Charles R. Mellen: 
“The old farm and the country are fortunate in 
finding an owner who is fully alive to the value of his 
charge. The estate is now owned by Charles Rose 
Mellen, a connection of the early occupants of Rose 
Hill, and no man could be prouder of his possessions. 
He lives in the old homestead, and crops the fields in 
the most approved methods. The drains are all in 
perfect condition, and the fields are still as productive 
as ever. Last summer he showed me a field from 
which, the year before, he had harvested an average 
of over forty-two bushels of wheat per acre; and the 
oat-field across the way was a miniature forest shoulder 
high. Below the house, next Rose Hill farm, a broad 
pasture, with trees here and there, contained flocks of 
sheep, as it did, no doubt, a generation ago. ‘Young 
man,’ said a neighbor recently to Mr. Mellen, as he 
admired the winter lambs, ‘I don’t give you a bit of 
credit for these fine, healthy sheep; it is the pure spring 
water you give them, and the high dry, underdrained 
farm.’ ‘Perhaps he was right,’ Mr. Mellen said to 
me; ‘at any rate, he spoke a good word for the dear 
old farm.’ 
“The late Joseph Harris was always a warm friend 
an ardent admirer of John Johnston, and a few sketches 
from his pen will portray the character of this sturdy 
pioneer: ‘John Johnston talked of giving up farming 
(Continued on page 127) 
