tobacco raised in California.

There has, however, been no lack of efforts to produce here tobacco fit to
manufacture into cigars and for smoking and chewing purposes. The soil in
many parts of the State is peculiarly adapted to this plant; the climate,
mild and regular, favored its growth and hastened its perfection. The best
seed was procured from Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and Cuba.
But for many years the product was rank, coarse, and fitter for sheep-wash
than for any other purpose.

Meantime, however, not a few men familiar with the old processes of
raising and curing the plant have tried their best ingenuity to improve
the quality. It was thought that the soil was too rich, because the
tobacco makes a rapid and heavy growth; but planting on thinner or older
soil did not answer. Several methods of curing were contrived, and there
is now reason to believe that the one known as the Culp process, from the
name of its patentee, will produce the desired result. I had heard and
read so much about it, and about the merit of the tobacco produced by
it, that I went down to Gilroy, seventy or eighty miles south of San
Francisco, to see what had really been accomplished. The account I give
below will probably interest many tobacco growing and manufacturing
readers, while it will, I fear, painfully affect the spirits of the
anti-tobacconists; for there is reason to believe that tobacco will become
presently one of the most important and valuable crops of this State.

I must premise that I am not an expert in tobacco, nor familiar with the
methods pursued in the East. I have seen a tobacco-field and the inside of
a Connecticut curing-house, and that is about all. I give, therefore, not
opinions, but facts.

Gilroy stands in a long and broad plain, a very rich piece of alluvial
bottom, with water so abundant that artesian wells are easily bored and
very common. At the depth of one hundred and thirty feet they get flowing
wells, and it happened in one case of which I heard that the water came up
with such force as to prevent the casing going down into the well, and
the pressure of the water broke away the ground, enlarged the bore of the
well, and threatened to flood a considerable area, so that the farmers
gathered in force, and by means of an iron caisson loaded with stones, and
with many cart-loads of stones besides, plugged up the dangerous hole.

The land is a deep alluvial loam, easily worked, and here, an