[Illustration:  By permission of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association The Mount Vernon Kitchen (restored)]

Although tobacco was the great staple, some of the Virginia planters had begun before the Revolution to raise considerable crops of wheat, and most of them from the beginning cultivated Indian corn.  From the wheat they made flour and bread for themselves, and with the corn they fed their hogs and horses and from it also made meal for the use of their slaves.  In the culture of neither crop were they much advanced beyond the Egyptians of the times of the Pyramids.  The wheat was reaped with sickles or cradles and either flailed out or else trampled out by cattle and horses, usually on a dirt floor in the open air.  Washington estimated in 1791 that the average crop of wheat amounted to only eight or ten bushels per acre, and the yield of corn was also poor.

So much emphasis was laid upon tobacco that many planters failed to produce food enough.  Some raised none at all, with the result that often both men and animals were poorly fed, and at best the cost of food and forage exhausted most of the profits.  A somewhat similar condition exists in the South to-day with regard to cotton.

Almost no attention was paid to conserving the soil by rotation of crops, and even those few planters who attempted anything of the sort followed the old plan of allowing fields to lie in a naked fallow and to grow up in noxious weeds instead of raising a cover crop such as clover.  Washington wrote in 1782:  “My countrymen are too much used to corn blades and corn shucks; and have too little knowledge of the profit of grass land.”  And again in 1787: 

“The general custom has been, first to raise a crop of Indian corn (maize) which, according to the mode of cultivation, is a good preparation for wheat; then a crop of wheat; after which the ground is respited (except for weeds, and every trash that can contribute to its foulness) for about eighteen months; and so on, alternately, without any dressing, till the land is exhausted; when it is turned out, without being sown with grass-seeds, or reeds, or any method taken to restore it; and another piece is ruined in the same manner.  No more cattle is raised than can be supported by lowland meadows, swamps &c. and the tops and blades of Indian corn; as very few persons have attended to growing grasses, and connecting cattle with their crops.  The Indian corn is the chief support of the labourers and their horses.”

As for the use of fertilizer, very little was attempted, for, as Jefferson explained, “we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one.”  It was this cheapness of land that made it almost impossible for the Virginians to break away from their ruinous system—­ruinous, not necessarily to themselves, but to future generations.  Conservation was then a doctrine that was little preached.  Posterity could take care of itself.  Only a few persons like Washington realized their duty to the future.