earing new ground, everyone followed the ancient custom of girdling
the tree trunks and letting them stand in spectral ugliness until they
rotted and fell. This is a quick and easy way to get rid of the shade
that otherwise would stunt the crops, and it prevents such trees as
chestnut, buckeye and basswood from sprouting from the stumps. In the
fields stood scores of gigantic hemlocks, deadened, that never would be
used even for fuel, save as their bark furnished the women with
quick-burning stove-wood in wet weather. No one dreamt that hemlock ever
would be marketable. And this was only five years ago!

The tillage was as rude and destructive as anything we read of in
pioneer history. The common plow was a "bull-tongue," which has aptly
been described as "hardly more than a sharpened stick with a metal rim."
The harrows were of wood, throughout, with locust teeth (a friend and I
made one from the green trees in half a day, and it lasted three seasons
on rocky ground). Sometimes no harrow was used at all, the plowed ground
being "drug" with a big evergreen bough. This needed only to be withed
directly to a pony's tail, as they used to do in ancient Ireland, and
the picture of prehistoric agriculture would have been complete. After
the corn was up, all cultivating was done with the hoe. For this the
entire family turned out, the toddlers being left to play in the furrows
while their mother toiled like a man.

Corn was the staple crop--in fact, the only crop of most farmers. Some
rye was raised along the creek, and a little oats, but our settlement
grew no wheat--there was no mill that could grind it. Wheat is raised,
to some extent, in the river bottoms, and on the plateaus of the
interior. I have seen it flailed out on the bare ground, and winnowed by
pouring the grain and chaff from basket to basket while the women
fluttered aprons or bed-sheets. Corn is topped for the blade-fodder, the
ears gathered from the stalk, and the main stalks afterwards used as
"roughness" (roughage). The cribs generally are ramshackle pens, and
there is much waste from mold and vermin.

The Carolina mountains are, by nature, one of the best fruit regions in
eastern America. Apples, grapes, and berries, especially, thrive
exceeding well. But our mountaineer is no horticulturist. He lets his
fruit trees take care of themselves, and so, everywhere except on select
farms near the towns, we see old apple and peach trees that never were
pruned,