GENEEAL EEPOET. 
37 
back but a few years and is of such importance as to require 
.notiee in this general review. 
Its introduction and extraordinary run in this State are 
mainly due to three circumstances—the failure of the crop, or 
rather repeated and utter failures of it, owing to ravages of its 
insect foes, in New York and other portions of the East, 
whence Western supplies even had been largely drawn ; to the 
fact that some of the largest establishments in the country— 
and a good many of them—were located in our own metropoli¬ 
tan city; and to the further reason that the climate and soils 
of Wisconsin were found to be admirably adapted to its 
healthv growth. 
The crop in 1860 was so trifling as scarcely to deserve men¬ 
tion. But in the year 1864 it amounted to 885,538 pounds, 
as shown by the incomplete returns to the Secretary of State, 
with a value of $185,127; and in 1865 to 829.877 pounds, 
with a total value of $347,587. But even this was onlv the be¬ 
ginning. In 1866 the business of planting and poling began in 
earnest, and before the season was over the fever raged like 
an epidemic. Gathering renewed force with every new acre 
planted in the county of Sauk, where it may be said to have 
originated, and where the crop of 1865 was over half a million 
of pounds, it spread from neighborhood to neighborhood, and 
from county to county, until by 1867 it had hopped the whole 
State over; so completely revolutionizing the agriculture of 
some sections that one in passing through them found some 
difficulty in convincing himself that he was not really in old 
Kent, of England. Even many of our old-fashioned wheat 
farmers caught the infection, and for once have disturbed the 
routine of their operations. In 1867 the crop in Sauk county 
alone, which still has the honor of being foremost among the 
forty or more counties that have enthuaiastically followed, is 
believed to have been over four million of pounds, with a cash 
valuation of but little if anything short of $2,500,000 ! Cases 
are numerous in which the first crop has paid for the land and 
all the improvements; leaving subsequent crops a clear profit 
minus the cost of cultivation and harvesting. The crop of the 
