The Eastern Shore
Folly Creek, Va., April 25.
Being at Norfolk recently, we decided to return to New York by the new line, making a leisurely progress along the Eastern Shore. The "new line," written out, is the New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk Railroad, the creation of Pennsylvania Central capitalists, with a view of opening a new short line between New York and the South. It has ninety five miles of rail between Delmar, Del., and Cape Charles, and thirty-six miles of steamer service between Cape Charles and Norfolk. We take the steamer at 10 a. m., and after a delightful sail over the bright waters of Hampton Roads, calling at Fortress Monroe by the way, reach Cape Charles. It is some ten miles north-west of the geographical cape, an embryo city, the creation of the railroad, with a breakwater, long piers, and sundry warehouses and other buildings. Over the flat low surface of the peninsula northward, the railroad stretches almost in air line, walled in by pine forests.
At "Keller," thirty miles up, we leave the train and ride over to Folly Creek to visit Captain Orris A. Brown, who has the reputation of being most intimately acquainted with the resources and antiquities of the Eastern shore. Our path leads through the odorous piny woods that cover the peninsula wherever "cl'arings" do not prevail. These clearings are the farms. They comprise 500 to 1,000 acres, and are usually separated from each other by narrow belts of forest. In the centre, preferably on the bank of a creek, if one flows there stands a farmer's dwelling, with usually a row of small negro cabins in the rear -- relics of the slave era. The house is the exponent of the owner's character and condition. If it is neat, white-painted, shaded, a yard filled with flowers in front, with walks, and stars, squares, and pentagons bordered with conchshell (they have no turf here), one may conclude that the cultivation of the one staple -- sweet potatoes -- has made the owner prosperous. If on the other hand, it is a brown, dilapidated structure, yard untidy, gate on one hinge, a window pane gone, may know that the farmer has had a "poor crap" for years back, and is in arrears to the butcher, baker, and fertilizer dealer, with a long score at the tavern bar.
A cluster of graves surrounded by a wooden railing is often seen, private burial being the rule rather than the exception on the peninsula. After four miles we stopped an intelligent looking gentleman in a buggy, and inquired the way. "Well," said he, "pass yonder belt of woods and you will see a cabin with the chimney leaning over -- looks as if it needed propping. Take down the cross road on the right, and it will lead you direct to Capt. Brown's." The "cross-road" was a lane that led through a gate over a clearing of a thousand acres, and through another gate to the hospitable door of Captain Brown. The house is prettily built on a bluff at the head of a little bay, just where Folly Creek entered it. The booming of the Atlantic three miles out was heard plainly, and we caught glimpses of its waters through the trees.
The Captain unfortunately was not at home, and I crossed the clearing to chat with a farmer, whom I saw on the other side turning up the sandy loam with one mule power. He threw up a furrow, a colored woman followed dropping a kernel every two feet, and a negro came behind with a harrow to cover it -- this was his method of planting corn. The workman -- tall, lank, with that sand hued complexion which an exclusive diet of hog and hominy, the curse of the Southern poor white, is almost certain to produce -- was quite willing to sit on his plow handles and talk. Mean time I took a mental inventory of his effects -- four room frame dwelling, hot beds in the rear filled with growing sweet-potato plants, 500 acres of good sandy loam cleared and fenced, two sorry mules, rope harnesses -- and the background of sombre, all encircling pine forest. He spoke in a slow, drawling way which I quite despair of reproducing.
"Yis, the land is good--takes kindly to manewre when we get it. Not good fur corn -- five barrels is a big crap -- good fur yaller backs (sweet potatoes), and they du say good for all kinds of truck; meluns, onions, peas, beans, berries, an'sich. We raise yaller backs, nothin else, plant 'em in March, set 'em out in May, dig 'em in August, cart 'em down to Nancock and send 'em all over the world. Net us $3 a barrel early, and $2 latter. A right smart drap is fifty bushels to an acre; some farmers make a-thousand barrels to a crop. Sometimes the crap fails and then we don't have money till the next crop come." The "manewre" depended on to bring this "crap," I found, was pine needles, "shadders" he called them, raked up in the neighboring forest and "composted" with creek mud and wood mould. Continuing, I asked him if it would not be better to raise early vegetables and fruits, and not depend altogether on one crop.
"Yis, mister," he replied, "I reckon 'twould. Ther was a trucker hyar from Jersey, last week, talkin'. 'If I had that pertater patch,' sez he, (indicating a square of five acres), 'I should put four tons of fertilizer on her fust thing; then, with my peas, beans, onions, melons, and tomatoes, I should take $100 off her where you get $10.'"
"And why don't you do it?" I asked. "Well, mister, we don't know how. We knows all about rasin' yaller backs, but about the rest we's dubersome; we ain't no money to trade off for 'speriments. Ef some Northern trucker 'ud come down an' show us how, 'twould be a blessin', I reckon. We uns is way down in the rut, an' we cant git out by pullin' on our boot straps."
I could but smile at last confession. It recalled a speech made a few weeks before which this man evidently heard. A party of railway magnates were inspecting the road, and one was deputed to address the farmers along the line. He was very frank with them. "The great trouble with you farmers," he began "is that you are incorrigible lazy. Nature has done too much for you. Fish, oysters, terrapin in your waters, game along shore, a kindly soil, render getting a living too easy. You ought to be the wealthiest, most advanced community on earth; and what are you! Content with a bare subsistence, wedded to potato raising, when you know that one bad year will bring you next door to the poor house and a second will inevitably put you there. You need to get out of the rut, and the railroad, we hope, will bring new ideas to you and new methods and products to your fields." Fancy the buzzing such an address would have created among Northern farmers: but the men of Accomac seem to have accepted it as a fair statement of their condition. They are down in the rut, as the orator said, and they lack the knowledge, courage, and enterprise to climb out. They are timorous, they have no money to spend in experiments, they know nothing of truck raising or of marketing the crop when raised, and they are waiting patiently for some Northern man to come down and teach them. That is the burden of every conversation I have had thus far with East Shore farmers. And yet I am assured by some who know that if a Northern man were to come here and demonstrate that some things could be done a little better that others, they would still cling to their old ways.