The Virginia Peninsula
It Is New York's Great Sweet Potato Patch. Millions of Bushels Raised Every Year -- Facts About the Culture and Sale of the Product -- The Peninsula Farmer's Life.
Tasley, Accomack county, Va., May 10. -- If the planters of the Virginia peninsula do not grow rich hand over fist, it is not for lack of opportunity, particularly since a railroad has been built there to carry their produce to New York city.
At first sight the country is not especially attractive to a stranger making his first visit. The soil is generally white and sandy; it looks as if the first big wind storm that came along would blow it over into the next county. The forests are chiefly of pine, and, to judge by the looks of the fields adjoining the pine woods, the tendency of that kind of tree to spread is likely to keep the grubbing hoe a-swinging. The fences would not restrain an able calf, while the houses are not of the sort to be found in the Mohawk valley. The other farm buildings are less valuable than the houses.
Nevertheless, there are certain evidences that the land produces something. Around the railway stations there are heaps of broken barrels and crates, and factories for the making of such vegetable packages are found at intervals along the road. In every field there is a group of darkies at work, and so much planting as is done indicates a harvest later.
The one crop that takes precedence of all others on the Virginia peninsula is the sweet potato. Like the peach orchard in southern Delaware, the sweet potato patch rules the peninsula. The centre of the patch is at Onancock, on the Chesapeake Bay, opposite the little station from which this letter is dated. Everybody plants sweet potatoes, and on the product and price of that crop depend the welfare of two counties.
The sweet potato crop requires some little attention the year round, but the work is never heavy and is brisk only during the planting and harvest seasons. The planter begins to prepare for the next year's crop in midsummer by cutting eight-inch sprouts from the growing vines. These he buries in pretty poor soil somewhere handy to the house and leaves them there, keeping the weeds away from them, however, until they have produced a crop of fingerlings, or little potatoes the size of a man's finger. These he gathers and stores away in a shed or barn by burying them in what he calls pine shat, the long, wiry leaves raked up in the pine woods. There the little potatoes lie until March. Then the planter takes them out and puts them in a bed.
This bed is much like those used by the farmers up town in New York city for early vegetables. The soil is dug out of a hillside (the hills are very low in this county) that slopes to the south until a wide trench a foot deep is made. Into this he shovels barnyard manure and packs it down until it is eight inches deep. Then he covers the manure with two inches of black mould brought from the woods. If the weather is cold he may wet the bed with boiling water. On the mould he lays the fingerlings so that they are about half an inch apart all over the bed, and then covers them with two inches more of the black mould. Then around the trench he builds a shallow box with a window glass cover, just as hotbeds are arranged around New York. Though the wind may be cold, the sun is warm, and the temperature in the bed rises. The little potatoes sprout right speedily, and the farmer must needs hump himself to prepare the fields by the time the plants are ready.
The fields are worked as if for a garden, ploughed and thoroughly pulverized but the soil is so friable that the work of preparing it would seem a picnic to a man used to breaking sod on the Western prairie. Having gotten the soil fine enough, it is turned up in ridges eighteen inches apart from crest to crest. Then the farmer "walks it off." Setting up a stake eighteen inches from the end of a ridge, the farmer goes to "yon side of the field." Then with his eyes firmly fixed on the stake, he walks back toward it, stepping on the crest of each ridge as he goes. Let it be said that the typical Brother Jonathan tall, lank, round-shouldered, and thin-faced lives on the Virginia peninsula and when with chin out and arms swinging and vibrating, he walks off the sweet potato patch, the spectacle is one likely to be remembered by the stranger.
Behind the boss, who walks off the patch, come the hands to plant. First there is a man of a woman or a big boy with a little scoop-shaped trowel. This hand straddles the ridge, and, lobbing the trowel into the soft earth between the footmarks, draws it back toward himself three or four inches, forming a little trench. Right alongside is a boy or girl with a basketful of shoots from the little potatoes in the hotbeds. The youngster hands a shoot to the man, who drops it into the little trench he has made and goes on to repeat the operation midway between the next two footmarks. Behind the pair comes a hand with a bucket of water and a cup. Each plant and little trench is moistened with a cup of water. Last of all comes one who, straddling the ridge, stoops down and with his hands draws the earth up over the plant, but does not pat it down.
Farmers say that one gang of hands can plant a five-acre patch in a day. As the plants grow the weeds are kept down by ploughing the field both ways, the young folks about the place following the plough to see that no spreading vines are left covered by the soil.
In July the harvest begins, and it is a golden harvest, worth gathering. A short crop is fifty barrels to the acre, and a good one is 100 barrels, while exceptional seasons produce such crops as may not be told of without exciting incredulity. A Northern farmer would pay for his farm out of every crop and live well.
At Onancock alone 1,000,000 barrels were sold last season, while the shipments from even the least favored villages were numbered by the thousand. Every day two trains of freight cars roll up over the Cape Charles route. They stop at every station, and grow with the stops until at last the locomotives can handle no more. Then away they go and just before daylight the next morning roll into the Pennsylvania's yard at Jersey City. Between the tracks in this yard there is scarcely standing room, because of the trucks gathered there, while a driver lies asleep on every truck. With the arrival of the truck trains the yard wakes up, the teams begin to move, the drivers to yell and swear, and though there before had seemed no room for men the trucks go up and down till the right cars are found and the right barrels taken on the trucks when away they go to the ferry.
Nor does this railroad take all the sweet potatoes to market. From Patchogoe, from Sayville, from Northport, from Huntington, and from about every other little Long Island port, and from Jersey as well, a fleet of little light-draught sloops and schooners comes down to the bays and inlets that mark the much indented shores of this peninsula. They bring cash and check books as a rule, and buying their cargoes outright sail away for the metropolis.
Not only is the crop profitable; it is pleasing to the peninsula farmer from the growing of the plant to the serving of the well cooked product on the table. Along in September, when the crop has been pretty well gathered, the young of the opossum has reached maturity and grown fat. Let him who will dance beneath the full September moon, but the peninsula young man goes 'possum hunting, and with invariable success. Next day for dinner that 'possum is served in the wide iron pan in which it was baked, and lying under and around it where they could absorb the juices of the game, are such golden beauties from the sweet potato patch as make a man's mouth water but to think of.
It is interesting to note that not only does the darky do about all the work of raising the crop for which he gets about 75 cents a day (man's wages) and boards himself, but now and then he develops into a planter on his own account. Each of the two counties has a number of conspicuous examples of colored thrift. Land is cheap -- say from $10 to $25 an acre, according to the improvements -- and the rentals low. The market for the crop is good, and the returns for labor certain. Both the whites and the negroes are showing signs of financial improvement. There are new houses building along the roads, and old ones are being repaired. They do not hurry in such matters however. They do not have to. It makes a Northern man a trifle nervous to see their deliberation of movement, but when he considers the facts -- that they have everything they want; that because of their lack of hurry to get rich they devote more time to books than Northern farmers ever dream of doing; that lacking hurry they lack also worry and anxiety -- the Northern man wonders whether after all the peninsula farmer does not come as near solving the problem of life as any one.
Whether he does or not it is unreasonable to expect him to hurry. The climate is against it. The sea lies to the east, the bay to the west. The air comes warmed in winter and cooled in summer. At night the salt wind fills his lungs and he sleeps like a healthy child. And then there are the inlets, alive with wild fowl and fish and bedded with oysters and clams. The quails are forever calling to him from their feeding grounds in the fields and their resting places in the thickets. the woods are fragrant with the breath of the pines and the cedars. Having the soul of a sportsman and the love of nature by inheritance, it is too much to ask of him that he spend all his waking hours in grubbing for wealth, which because of the ceaseless toil he could not enjoy. He prefers the simple diet which his fish, his oysters, his pork, his quails, his canvasback ducks, and his vegetables, with a little old rye, furnish him to the more lurid pleasures of a champagne supper.
The stranger notices that the people drawl a bit in their speech, but if he have American prejudices he notices it with delight, for it is an American drawl and there is no foreign accent about it. The people of the peninsula may have been Confederates once but they are right good Americans now, and when once the Northern man meets them he is pretty apt to wish that they and their crop may be perpetuated forever.