< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
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379
THE ATLANTIC FOREST REGION

the land. The forest and the ocean set limitations to the aboriginal American. The Atlantic once crossed by the agricultural Europeans, though it served to hold them to their new home, became their highway of communication with the world. To them it was no longer "a gap in the belt of human habitation."

The Teutonic blood evinced its trait of dogged persistence in the settlement of the land. Acre after acre of the primeval woodland was cleared and planted. Of the species indigenous to the new country only maize and tobacco became rivals of the old-world culture plants. We can picture to ourselves the rude farm lands of the first period of settlement, with stumps scattered through the fields, charred and blackened in many places by the firing of the fallen growth, with the maize and the English grain springing up; the kitchen-garden of old-world vegetables and herbs; the dooryard blooms—wallflower, daffodil, marigold, larkspur, and other sweet, homely flowers brought from across the sea; the young orchards with their seedling fruit trees or newly set-out transplantings of peach, apple, plum and pear. Most of the houses at this period were built of rough-hewn logs or sawed planks, while some of the more pretentious were of stone or brick. Peter Kalm, the Swedish traveler, has left us a picture of the countryside about the Delaware in the middle of the eighteenth century, after three quarters of a century of settlement. Speaking of the farms near Philadelphia, he says in one place:

As we went on in the wood, we continually saw at moderate distances little fields, which had been cleared of the wood. Each of these was a farm. These farms were commonly very pretty, and a walk of trees frequently led from them to the highroad. The houses were all built of brick, or of the stone which is here everywhere to be met with. Every countryman, even though he were the poorest peasant, had an orchard with apples, peaches, chestnuts, walnuts, cherries, quinces and such fruits, and sometimes we saw the vines climbing along them. The valleys were frequently provided with little brooks which contained a crystal stream. The corn on the sides of the road, was almost all mown, and no other grain besides maize and buckwheat was standing. The former was to be met with near each farm, in greater or lesser quantities; it grew very well and to a great length, the stalks being from six to ten feet high, and covered with fine green leaves. Buckwheat likewise was not very uncommon, and in some places the people were beginning to reap it.

A month later (in October) he writes:

Wheat was now sown everywhere. In some places it was already green, having been sown four weeks before. The wheat fields were made in the English manner, having no ditches in them, but numerous furrows for draining the water, at the distance of four or six feet from one another. Great stumps of the trees which had been cut down, are everywhere seen on the fields, and this shews that the country has been but lately cultivated.

The "worm fence" appears to have been a feature of the farm lands in Kalm's time, at least in the middle and southern regions. He comments at some length on the wastefulness of wood in the construction of these worm fences.

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