"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

It was surprising to one accustomed to the small farms of the fertile district in which I live to find such large farmers as many of the English. Said one of my acquaintances in Huntingdonshire, “One who farms fifty acres is scarcely called a farmer. He farms a little land. In another county I know a farmer who holds fifteen hundred acres.” The tendency of course is largely to increase the number of farm-laborers, while diminishing the number of those who farm themselves.

The farmer with whom I boarded employed a large number of hands, forty I think, in the spring. In July he had four men hoeing turnips, potatoes, “mangles” (mangel-wurzels?), and kohl-rabi. He had also about eleven children pulling weeds out of wheat, barley, and oats.

He kept twenty working horses, and with them had eight or ten hands. In the earlier season he had twenty hands hoeing wheat, barley, oats, beans, and peas. He had a shepherd to look after about two hundred sheep. He employs some women, girls, and boys. In the early morning I heard a peculiar cry as of a boy calling the cows, but he was crying to keep away the birds that depredate on the wheat,—linnets, sparrows, and blackbirds in the hedges. Benton also employed hands to go over fields that were to be planted in potatoes, turnips, buckwheat, and to pick twitch out of them. This, he said, is a wild and very troublesome grass, that fills the ground with roots, so that nothing else can grow.

I have just mentioned buckwheat. Benton had about thirty acres in this grain. It is fed to pigs and other animals; he said that he had never heard of its being eaten by men.

One of the most surprising things to me was the short number of hours that the farm-laborers made. That men should quit farm-work in July at or before six in the evening was novel to me. But all the work that is possible Benton puts out by the piece.

The price of land in this arable region is differently reported. One told me that it can be bought in fee simple for from two to three hundred dollars per acre. Perhaps this is the fen land and more valuable. The village in which I boarded was at a small distance from the fens. Land around this village sells at from one hundred to five hundred dollars per acre, but the latter are nice bits around the village. Land can be rented in this or the fenny region for farming at about nine dollars per acre. The tenure on which lands are held it was hard for me to understand. For instance, I was told that copyhold is nearly as good as freehold. At some length a friend endeavored to explain to me copyhold fine arbitrary, and then said that copyhold fine certain is more desirable.

In the depressed condition of farming of which I have spoken, it has been found that grazing and dairy farms are more profitable than grain. The abolition of the corn laws, said a friend, made bread cheap and enabled the mechanic and manufacturer to live, and they can buy more meat than before, and grazing and dairy farms are very profitable. Grain, which can readily be transported by sea, comes more closely into competition with the English grain than meat does.

One of the persons whom I met in Huntingdonshire was a retired farmer, and must have been a successful one. When he began to farm the fen land, that which he held had lately been brought under complete drainage, and was comparatively new. About 1835, on twenty-four acres of land he had the exceptional crop of sixty-four bushels of wheat to the acre. He has often grown four hundred bushels of potatoes to the acre on twenty-five acres, and he thought that his average yield had been three hundred bushels. He has had potatoes growing to the height of three feet, level as a floor, and not a weed to be seen. “There should not be a weed seen in an acre. I have grown,” he continued, “one hundred and twelve bushels of oats to the acre, and did not think that I had a crop under eighty-four. However, I did what none of you Americans do. In the latter part of my time, when I farmed only one hundred acres, I used six thousand dollars a year (twelve hundred pounds) in fertilizing my farm. Thus I bought six thousand dollars’ worth of grain and fed animals, especially pigs. Further, I sold the best of my wheat, oats, and potatoes, and consumed all the rest of my produce on the farm. I find no one who has fed so much on one hundred acres.”

Mrs. Benton took me one evening to see a steam-plough or cultivator at work. It did the ploughing well here when the weather was sufficiently dry. It was an immense affair. There were two steam-engines, one on each side of the field, sending the cultivator back and forth. The whole cost of the machine (including the van for the men to sleep in) was about ten thousand dollars. The charge for ploughing was three dollars per acre (twelve shillings), and the farmer furnished coal and perhaps also one hand. The men who brought the plough boarded themselves. They were making long days, from four in the morning to nine at night. By working until ten, they could cultivate twenty acres per day, and in these high northern latitudes summer days are very long.

During my short stay in the east I heard the price of a few articles, principally farm products. Mrs. Jackson, wife of the carpenter with whom I boarded, had prepared for me (in July) a very nice sparerib of pork, for which she paid eighteen cents per pound. She thought that no mutton could be bought under twenty. She had understood that meat was dearer than with us and clothing cheaper. Bread was cheap, she said. But I have before quoted the saying that they would have starved lately but for America.