Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/171

 �found by Dr. Boyle, of Columbus, Ohio, growing in a .similar state in the Carson A'^alley. It was, doubtless, brought there by the early Spaniards. In 1530, one of Cortez's slaves found several grains of wheat accidentally mixed with the rice. The careful negro planted the handful of grains, and succeeding years saw a wheat crop in Mexico, which found its way northward, probably into California.

Turn where we may, wherever the foot of civil- ization has trod, there will we find this wheat plant, which, like a monument, has perpetuated the memory of the event; but nowhere do we find the plant wild. It is the result of .cultivation in bygone ages, and has been produced by "progress- ive development.'

It is beyond the limit and province of these pages to discuss the composition of this important cereal ; only its historic properties can be noticed. With the advent of the white men in America, wheat, like corn, came to be one of the staple prod- ucts of life. Iff followed the pioneer over the mountains westward, where, in the rich Missis- sippi and Illinois bottoms, it has been cultivated by the French since 1690. When the hardy New Englanders came to the alluvial lands adjoining the Ohio, Muskingum or Miami Rivers, they brought with them this "staff of life," and forth- with began its cultivation. Who sowed the first wheat in Ohio, is a question Mr. A. S. Guthrie answers, in a letter published in the Agricultural Report of 1857, as follows:

" My father, Thomas Guthrie, emigrated to the Northwest Territory in the year 1788, and arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum in July, about three months after Gen. Putnam had arrived with the first pioneers of Ohio. My father brought a bushel of wheat with him from one of the frontier counties of Pennsylvania, which he sowed on a lot of land in Marietta, which he cleared for that purpose, on the second bottom or plain, in the neighborhood of where the Court House now stands."

Mr. Guthrie's opinion is corroborated by Dr. Samuel P. Hildreth, in his "Pioneer Settlers of Ohio," and is, no doubt, correct.

From that date on down through the years of Ohio's growth, the crops of wheat have kept pace with the advance and growth of civilization. The soil is admirably adapted to the growth of this ce- real, a large number of varieties being grown, and an excellent quality produced. It is firm in body, and, in many cases, is a successful rival of wheat

��produced in the great wheat-producing regions of the United States — Minnesota, and the "farther Northwest.

Oats, rye, barley, and other grains were also brought to Ohio from the Atlantic Coast, though some of them had been cultivated by the French in Illinois and about Detroit. They were at first used only as food for home consumption, and, until the successful attempts at river and canal naviga- tion were brought about, but little was ever sent to market.

Of all the root crops known to man, the potato is probably the most valuable. Next to wheat, it is claimed by many as the staff of life. In some localities, this assumption is undoubtedly true. What would Ireland have done in her fam- ines but for this simple vegetable? The potato is a native of the mountainous districts of tropical and subtropical America, probably from Chili to Mexico ; but there is considerable difiiculty in deciding where it is really indigenous, and where it has spread after being introduced by man. Humboldt, the learned savant, doubted if it had ever been found w^ild, but scholars no less famous, and of late date, have expressed an opposite opinion. In the wild plant, as in all others, the tubers are smaller than in the cultivated. The potato had been cultivated in America, and its tubers used for food, long before the advent of the Europeans. It seems to have been first brought to Europe by the Spaniards, from the neighbor- hood of Quito, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and spread through Spain, the Netherlands, Burgundy and Italy, cultivated in gardens as an ornament only and not for an article of food. It long received through European countries the same name with the batatas — sweet potato, which is the plant meant by all English writers down to the seventeenth century.

It appears that the potato was brought from Virginia to Ireland by Hawkins, a slave-trader, in 1565, and to England by Sir Francis Drake, twenty years later. It did not at first attract much notice, and not until it was a third time imported from America, in 1623, by Sir Walter Raleigh, did the Europeans make a practical use of it. Even then it was a long time before it was exten- sively cultivated. It is noticed in agricultural journals as food for cattle only as late as 1719. Poor people began using it, however, and finding it highly nutritious, the Royal Geographical Society. in 1663, adopted measures for its propagation. About this time it beo:an to be used in Ireland as

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