For the first few baskets of early tomatoes I sent to market, I obtained two dollars per basket of three pecks each. Other growers coming in competition with me, the price rapidly diminished as the supply increased, until it fell to twenty-five cents a bushel. At less than this the growers refused to pick them; and seasons have been repeatedly known when tens of thousands of bushels were left to perish on the vines. When this low price could be no longer obtained, they were gathered and thrown to the pigs, who consumed them freely. But as the season advanced the supply diminished, and the price again rose to a dollar a basket, the demand continuing as long as any could be procured. The tomatoes are at this season picked green from the vines, and placed under glass, where they are imperfectly ripened; but such is the public appreciation of this wholesome vegetable, that when thus only half reddened, they are eagerly sought after by hotels and boarding-houses.
But of latter years measures have been taken to prevent, to some extent, the enormous waste of tomatoes during the height of the season, by preserving them in cans. Establishments have been started, at which any quantity that may be offered is purchased at twenty-five cents a bushel; and now they can be kept through the whole year, and be preserved for winter consumption, the same as potatoes or turnips. By hermetically sealing them in cans from which the air has been expelled by heat, they are not only preserved, but made to retain their full flavor; and may be enjoyed, at a very moderate cost, in the winter as well as the summer. The demand for them is constant, large, and increasing, and putting up canned tomatoes has become an extensive business. One person, who commenced the business two years ago, is literally up to the eyes in tomatoes once a year. He provides for a single year’s trade over fifty thousand cans, all of which are manufactured by himself; and he employs over thirty persons, most of them women. He engages tomatoes at twenty-five cents a bushel, a price at which the cultivator clears about a hundred dollars an acre, and they come in at the rate of a hundred and fifty bushels a day, requiring the constant labor of all-hands into the night to dispose of them.
The building in which the business is carried on was constructed expressly for it. At one end of the room in which the canning is done is a range of brick-work supporting three large boilers; and adjoining is another large boiler, in which the scalding is done. The tomatoes are first thrown into this scalder, and after remaining there a sufficient time, are thrown upon a long table, on each side of which are ten or twelve young women, who rapidly divest them of their leathery hides. The peeled tomatoes are then thrown into the boilers, where they remain until they are raised to a boiling heat, when they are rapidly poured into the cans, and these are carried to the tinmen, who, with a dexterity truly marvellous, place the caps upon them, and solder them down, when they are piled up to cool, after which they are labelled, and are ready for market. The rapidity and the system with which all this is done is most remarkable, one of the tinmen soldering nearly a hundred cans in an hour.
The tomatoes thus preserved are readily salable in all the great cities, both for home consumption and for use at sea. Thus, few vegetables have gained so rapid and wide-spread a popularity as this. Until lately, but few persons would even taste them; and they were raised, when cultivated at all, more from curiosity than any thing else. Now scarcely a person can be found who is not fond of them, and they occupy a prominent place on almost every table.
My single acre of tomatoes produced me a clear profit of $120. I am aware that others have realized more than double this amount, but they were experienced hands at the business. My gains were quite as much as I had anticipated.
From all the remainder of the three acres but little money was produced. It gave me parsnips, turnips, and pumpkins. Between the rows of sweet corn a fine crop of cabbages was raised, of which my sales amounted to $82. Thus, an abundant supply of succulent food was provided for horse, cow, and pigs during the winter, all which saved the outlay of so much cash. I admit that a few of my vegetables did not yield equal to the grounds of some of my neighbors, thus disappointing some of my calculations. But I was inexperienced, had much to learn, and was not discouraged. On the other hand, I had gone far ahead of them in the growth of my standard fruits; and the evident hit I had made with the new blackberry had the effect of impressing them with considerable respect for my courage and sagacity.
This business of raising vegetables for the great city markets, “trucking,” as it is popularly called, is now the great staple of New Jersey agriculture. All the region of country stretching from Camden some forty miles towards New York, once enjoyed the reputation of being either all sand or all pine. It is traversed by the old highway between Philadelphia and New York, laid out by direction of royalty in colonial days, and protected at various points by barracks, in which troops were garrisoned. Some of the barracks remain to this day; though in chambers where high military revel once was held, devout congregations now worship. Along this royal highway passed all the early travel between the colonies; and after they had been severed from their parent stem, up to the advent of steamboats and railroads, it was the only thoroughfare between the two cities of New York and Philadelphia. Stages occupied five weary days between them, the horses exhausted by wading through a deep, laborious sand in summer, or the still deeper mud through which they floundered in winter. On miles of this road the sand was frightful. No local authorities worked it, no merciful builder of turnpikes ever thought of reclaiming it. It lay from generation to generation, as waste and wild as when the native pines were first cleared away. Access was so laborious, that few strangers visited the region through which it passed; and the land was held in large tracts, whereon but few settlers had made clearings. All judged the soil as worthless as the deep sand in the highway. Where some settler did clear up a farm, his labors presented no inviting spectacle to the passing traveller. If manure was known in those days, the farmer did not appear to value it, for he neither manufactured nor used it. Phosphates and fertilizers had not been dreamed of. If he spread any fertilizer over his fields, it was but a starveling ration; hence his corn crop was a harvest of nubbins. Wheat he never thought of raising; rye was the sole winter grain, and rye bread, rye mush, and rye pie-crust, held uncontested dominion, squalid condiments as they all are, in each equally squalid farm-house. Ragweed and pigweed took alternate possession of the fields; cultivation was at its last point of attenuation; none grew rich, while all became poor; and as autumn came on, even the ordinarily thoughtless grasshopper climbed feebly up to the abounding mullein top, and with tears in his eyes surveyed the melancholy desolation around him. Such is a true picture of the king’s highway up to the building of the Camden and Amboy Railroad.
No wonder that the great public who traversed it through this part of New Jersey should think it, and speak of it everywhere, as being all sand, seeing that in their passage through it they beheld but little else. Hence, the reputation thus early established continues to the present day, and the tradition has been incorporated into the public vernacular. The sandy road alone was seen, while the green and fertile tracts that lay beyond and around it were unknown, because unseen. Like the traveller from Dan to Beersheba, the cry was that all was barren. But time, improvement, education, railroads, and the marvellous growth of Philadelphia, New York, and fifty intermediate towns, have changed all this as by enchantment. Every mile of the old highway is now a splendid gravel turnpike, intersected by a dozen similar roads, which stretch away up into the country.
As good roads invite settlement, so population, the great promoter of the value of land, has come in rapidly, and changed the aspect of every farm-house. Good fences line the roadside, rank hedge-rows have disappeared, new farm-houses have been everywhere built, low lands have been drained, manures have been imported from the cities, wheat is now the staple winter-grain, rye has ceased to be cultivated, and rye bread is now a mere reminiscence of the old dispensation. But chief, perhaps, of all, the whole agricultural world of New Jersey has been educated by the agricultural press to a high standard of intelligence and enterprise. Its labors have led to the establishment of numerous extensive nurseries, by the pressure of a general demand for trees and smaller fruits, whose wilderness of blossoms now annually blush and brighten upon every farm. It has taught them to cultivate new vegetables and fruits for city consumption alone, salable for cash in each successive month; in doing which, they have changed from a poverty-stricken to a money-making generation. It has taught them, what none previously believed, that no good farming can be done without high manuring, and banished the ignorance and meanness that prevented them from spending money to secure it. It has introduced to their notice new and portable manures, improved tools, better breeds of stock of all kinds, and sharpened their perceptions, until they have now become men of business as well as farmers, and so proved its value to them, that he upon whose table no agricultural journal can be found, may be written down as the laggard of a progressive age.
But in addition to all these stimulants to progress the Camden and Amboy Railroad came in, giving it a vast momentum. Terminating at Philadelphia and New York, it opened up a cash market among thousands asking for daily bread. When this road was first opened, its annual way-freight yielded less than one hundred dollars a year. But its managers wisely built station-houses at every cross-road, as the farmers called for them. To these nuclei the produce of entire townships quickly gathered in astonishing quantities. Agents from the great cities traversed the country, and bought every thing that was for sale. A cash market being brought to their very doors, where none had previously existed, an immense stimulus to production followed, and a new spirit was infused into the whole region. Hundreds of farms were renovated, cleared of foul weeds, drained, and liberally manured. New vegetables were cultivated. Tomatoes, peas, rhubarb, and early potatoes rose into prime staples. Green corn has been taken from a single county to the extent of two thousand tons daily. Other products go to market by thousands of baskets at a time. Way-trains are run for the sole accommodation of this truck business, stopping every few miles to take in the waiting contributions collected at the stations. To both railroad and farmer it has proved a highly remunerating traffic. These way-freights, thus wisely cultivated by the railroad, now amount to many thousands annually, and are steadily growing larger. Meantime, steamboats on the Delaware stop several times daily at new wharves on the river, sometimes taking at one trip two thousand baskets of truck, from a point where, twelve years ago, the same number could not be gathered during an entire season. The grower thus has the choice of the two richest markets in the country. He reaches Philadelphia in one hour, and New York in three.