Page:Evolution of American Agriculture (Woodruff).djvu/41

 American history. The great land hunger of the race was being fed, the wilderness being peopled, the promised land entered, Caucasian destiny fulfilled. As a child, I stood with my father at the gate of our farm in Illinois and saw the later tide of this great migration pouring onwards toward the West. He had come from Poland on the crest of an earlier flood of immigrants and could appreciate the wonderful significance of their endless wagons, the trudging pilgrims, the worn and weary livestock. From him I caught an understanding and an inspiration that more than forty years have not been able to efface.

The American "settler" with his ax, the most energetic and destructive agent the world has ever seen, leveled the great forest which stretched continuously from the Atlantic Coast to the end of Lake Erie on the North and far beyond the Mississippi River on the South. A genius of the lamp! At his call whole states have risen over night! And yet, during the period of this expansion there were comparatively few changes in the general character of agriculture. Some significant beginnings were commencing to appear, prophetic of the changes that later would occur. In 1797, Charles Newbold invented the cast iron plow, but the farmers said it poisoned the soil, and wouldn't use it. Jethro Wood also took out patents on cast plows and was the first man to seek a mouldboard that would give the least resistance.

Societies for the improvement of agriculture began to form in this period and an intelligent importation of improved breeds of livestock from Europe got under good headway.

In 1783, Ringgold, Groff and Patton of Baltimore began the importation of Shorthorn and Hereford