About customs, usuages, implements and tools of the Americans. - Description of the dwellings there. - Love of the American women for cleanliness. -Roofs of the buildings there. - Arrangement of the farm buildings. - Agricultural advantages of the scattered farms. - Fencing of gardens, meadows and fields. - Fruits of the field and cattle pastures. - About corn and flax growing. - Fertility of the soil and easy preparation of the same.

All customs and usuages, also almost all occupations and the implements necessary for them are completely different in America from ours. Also the houses and farm buildings are very different from ours through exterior and interior arrangement and construction. Many house, barn, garden and field implements of the country people there are still very backward in practical arrangement compared to ours; but several of the same also excel those here. The stoves in the living rooms, for example, with their advantageous arrangement excel the best of ours that I have yet seen. One has there a kind of wooden chair on which the seat is made of one single piece of wood which is so fashioned that one sits on it especially comfortably and which nevertheless are so light that one can comfortably carry two of the same in each hand. A distinguished businessman in Hamburg had a half dozen of such chairs brought along with him from Philadelphia which I saw during the unloading of the ship in Hamburg. I could cite more of the same about domestic implements. The advantageous construction of the plows there I have already mentioned. Axes have already been named as being similarly practical. Both excel ours by far. Whoever could convince the Americans that many other of our implements and tools are far more practical and easier than theirs would be doing them a great service; but nothing is more difficult than this, for these people have a national pride as no other people and the high as well as the low, city people as well as country people, all of them believe that America excels the whole world over in enlightenment, insight and cleverness. At the very least will they allow themselves to be taught something by an immigrant German; for it appears scandalous to them to receive any kind of instruction from the stupid German as they call him. I myself as well as many other Germans have had various experiences of this.

Most of the old buildings such as dwellings, barns and stalls, are log buildings. The dwellings are built up with logs from cut down, long, straight, beautiful trees and the chinks between the trees are filled out with stones, bricks, pieces of wood and lime. Many such houses are also covered outside with clean boards, nicely colored, painted and marbleized and have the appearance of massive buildings. The barns and stalls of the old type, however, are built up from logs of only round, unfinished trees without filling out the chinks and spaces. The new houses of the farmers, however, are almost all massive, constructed of stones and bricks and very nice inside as well as out; especially, however, the dwellings of the big, well-to-do and rich country inhabitants which one should consider in part princely palaces. Their beauty from outside as well as their neatness inside and the comfortable arrangement of the same not seldom brought me to wonder and amazement. All the houses usually have beautiful plank floors which are almost all cleaned each Saturday by means of a big brush, soap and hot water and are constantly white as hail and almost mirror bright. The rooms one also finds frequently very tastefully painted and the floors and stairs, as I already remarked earlier, covered with beautiful colored wool and cotton carpets. The smallest farm houses are not at a disadvantage compared to the largest when it comes to cleanliness. In these too everything is clean and neat. Dirt is generally the greatest disgrace in the world to American women. However, as concerns their clothing and laundry, I would like to call their love of cleanliness and exactness itself overdone; for everything is clean and neat in the highest degree and washing, ironing and pressing has no end. If a dress has been on the body a day, then it already has to be washed and pressed again.

Would that many of our country women and maids compare themselves once in this regard with the American women, namely those in the country who often sweep the kitchen trash behind the door for several weeks until finally the pile becomes so big that one can hardly still climb over it and in addition get through! Would that those could see themselves in the mirror of the American women whose boarded floors of the living rooms can almost no more be distinguished from the dirty village streets, where the street dirt tramped in for years sticks inch high on the plaster and wooded floors and forms hills and lumps here and there over which one would stumble if one did not always look in front of his feet; and whose clothing, especially the front part of the dress and the apron is altogether sticky and stiff from fat and dirt; whose shirts and sheets when they are just washed and still hanging on the fence are almost still more gray than unwashed ash sacks; who do not have enough ambition at least to wipe off the window panes and these are so dark from dirt and soot that in bright sunlight it is not much lighter in the rooms than in regular dwellings by moonlight. Yet for such there is no lack of examples of cleanliness in their close proximity, they just pay no attention to it because for them the matter of dirt has become second nature. The dirt bug feels as good nowhere as in his stinking garbage. If one puts him on the leaf of a rosebush, he flies right away to his garbage again.

The houses of the Americans as well as their farm buildings have wooden shingle roofs that are so thick and solid that a ray of light can come through nowhere. These roofs are painted red, brown or dark blue with oil color and on most of them is to be found a lightning rod, on many houses also two of them. The buildings on a farm all stand rather distant from each other. When I once asked a farmer why he did not have his cattle stalls near the house? he answered: "Well, we don't like to have the smell close to our nose." The threshing floors are all boarded and do not consist of firmly stomped earth as ours, but rather of flat lying thick oak planks or boards. For many years they have erected all the barns, large and small, altogether massive of stone to under the roof, also both gables are bricked shut right up to the very top. On the lower level all the animal stalls are to be found, on the second is the entrance to the threshing floor and grain bins in addition to the granaries. The arrangement can in no way be made more suitable and advantageous than I found it there.

In America there are no farm villages as here, but rather the homes of the country people are all scattered. Each one lives on his estate; gardens, meadows, fields and forest are in the closest possible proximity and this is a great advantage for the farm. The whole plantation is enclosed with a fence. Woods, fields, meadows and gardens, also each particular field are surrounded by fences and set apart through the same. Each farmer has several clover fields; a portion of the same he designates for drying and for winter fodder for his cattle; three large fields, however, just for summer pasture for the same. Communal pasture one does not have. Until the clover comes to blossom the livestock has abundant fodder in the empty fields and in the woods where it is not tended, for of cattle herders one knows nothing. Since each field is enclosed with fences, the cattle cannot escape. When the clover gets the first blossoms all the cattle are first put into one field and when this is eaten off, into the second and then into the third. When this is also eaten away then the first field is completely in blossom again and all the livestock are then driven into this field again. So it goes the whole summer through and in fall abundant pasture is again to be found in the harvested fields and meadows. In the clover pastures more fodder is often tramped down than eaten off. What is tramped down in addition to the manure which has fallen on it is the fertilizer for the next year from which the grain grows very abundantly The livestock is given no fodder in the racks or in the feed boxes and troughs throughout the whole summer (with the exception of the horses, if they work). In wintertime some straw is cut short only for the horses, the rest of the livestock constantly has to eat the fodder long. The livestock is at all times, in summer as well as winter, almost constantly fat because it always has good fodder in abundance. The cows give far more and fatter milk than here and I believe the butter there could compete in excellence with that from Holland. Among horses one considers those coming from Canada the best and for this reason every spring a large number of stallions comes from there to Pennsylvania through which one lets the mares be mated, really beautiful big animals. In all of the hotels, also in other places where people gather, one finds on the walls pictures of these animals in addition to a printed description of their good qualities.

The fruits of the field there are: wheat, rye, corn, buckwheat and some oats. Barley grows superbly, but it is not raised as a rule. The remaining fruits of the field usual for us one does not know. Corn also substitutes for the lack of all other fruits very richly, for it excels in yield all kernel fruit. It cultivation demands the least effort and work and as fodder for cattle no other fruit can compare to it. Also cattle much prefer this fruit to any other and become fat from it easier. The meat of animals fattened with this fruit is far better tasting than that fattened with other vegetation. Even the eggs of chickens that eat corn distinguish themselves notably through good taste from others. An acre (1 1/2 Morgen) of land there often yields 100 bushels if the corn grows really well. One does not need to have it ground for pigs, but rather one dumps the kernels into the trough for them and adds to it sufficient water for them. Horses exist on this grain altogether superbly if it is ground and mixed wet with cut up straw.

The leaves of corn make the nicest hay for horses, cows and sheep. These animals eat it in preference to the best clover hay and the cows give more milk from it. Cornmeal mixed with half rye flour gives quite good bread. Out of mush or the groats of corn American women make a porridge which tastes superb and is a nourishing food.

The cobs of corn, when they are brought in and husked, are dumped into a building especially existing for that (Welschkorn-Häusel) in which they dry out completely, for the walls and the floor of this building are filled out with slats which are all about an inch apart from each other so that the air can come through and dry out this fruit.

On big farms these cobs, when they are to be threshed, are dumped onto the threshing floor on the sides in a circle about shoe height on top of each other, then four horses tied to each other are driven around in the circle as long as it takes for all the kernels to be stomped off of the cobs. In the middle of the threshing floor stands the servant boy with a shovel to throw back the cobs again that have jumped away to where the horses are moving and to keep them going. Also the rest of the grain is frequently threshed in this way. It can also, however, be threshed out very easily with a flail because it comes off the straw far easier than ours and does not require a third of the effort that it does here. The accumulated chaff is dumped onto the street and is not used.

The flax also grows very well and gets especially long; but it is also worked completely differently from here. One lets it get rather dry in the field before one pulls it up. After pulling it is set up in little bundles and stays standing in the field until the pods are so dry that one can rub them to powder. Then it is brought in and hulled and threshed at the same time in the following manner on a plank placed at an angle over the threshing floor with both ends resting on logs. Each person takes a bundle of flax which is no thicker than that one can reach around with both hands and hits it several times with the pod end on the plank; then the flax is free of pods and the pods are at the same time threshed. Such beautiful linseed, however, one finds nowhere as this is. The flax is then immediately spread out on a meadow or the field and stays lying there so long until it is brittle enough to brake. It is never put into water as is customary here in the country. Also before braking it is not, as here, beaten and not sunned; but rather it is put on a support near to the house under which a fire is burning so that the heat draws through the flax and right next to this place it is broken on a machine; this work the men take care of. Then it is swung onto a very well arranged machine and heckeled on it. The flax is not rippled. Everything happens with a speed at which I often wondered. One sows no foreign linseed, but rather always uses the same again that one harvested himself and yet it thrives almost constantly well; probably because one lets it become rightly mature?

The soil generally, where the land is otherwise just arable, is more fertile than here. The highest mountains, if they do not contain too many stones, are often used as farmland and bear splendid fruits, even there where the soil has a meager, paltry appearance and consists more of stones, gravel and sand than of earth. Often I stood still and wondered when I saw corn on high mountains in sand earth as strong as bean stems and rye as strong as I had hardly seen in my fatherland in the best earth. The grain there everywhere also yields far more than here.

The greater fertility one must also see in this, that one sees no barren mountain by nature. I found very high and steep mountains generally grown with trees as far as I came; even out of the cracks of boulders very strong trees grow on luxuriously.



Were the earth by nature not especially fertile, the farmer could not plant rye three or four times consecutively on one and the same plot without at least once fertilizing it, of which I often saw examples. Indeed, the farmer even harvests there where he did not actually sow and did not prepare the land for harvest, of which I want to cite the following example here:

A farmer named Johannes Schweier who lived in my vicinity harvested a big field of rye in which he had sown clover; for one always sows clover with the rye in spring which does very well. The next spring the rye again stood here just as well as in the rest of the fields and Schweier decided to let it become ripe. When it was cut off one found that, disregarding the good clover that grew with it very well, the number of rye sheaves were almost the same as in the previous year's harvest. Since the rye is cut there already in June, the clover had also not become too old and gave a good harvest; the second, however, was especially good. Schweier let the rye lay at a particular place and found in threshing that it was just as rich in kernels as that in the previous year.

I have seen many fields, especially on high steep mountains, that have been arable for a considerable time but never manured and still bore good fruits. The manure one lets rot in the barnyards in front of the cattle stalls and only then when it becomes too plentiful in the barnyard, one carts it away; but one takes it only to the meadows, gardens and to the fields that are very close where one wants to grow potatoes or beets. Most of the land gets no other fertilizer than the manure that falls on it from the livestock when it pastures on it, the clover roots, the tramped down clover and the extremely tall stubble of the harvested grain which is often taller than knee-high. Further; when the grain and other fruits have been harvested, then after four weeks the weeds on the fields are almost just as long as the grains were which stood thereon. These weeds then, when they are plowed under, become a good fertilizer. It is unusual that among the grain no weeds such as thistles, brome grass, quack grass, corn flowers, but rather occasionally a stalk of corn cockle is to be found. The rye and wheat are so free of weeds that one has to wonder about it. Weeds only make their appearance when the fields are harvested. I have not seen quack grass there.

The American as a rule plows his fields only once, when he wants to plant them, and nevertheless I nowhere found a field that was grown wild. But one also does not find the kinds of weeds through which our fields easily grow wild if they are not plowed properly or at the right time.

The farmer there has great advantages not only because he is free of all burdens such as interest, tithes, vassalage, etc. and encumbers only very little tax; but also because the working of his fields which are altogether close to him is so easy that he needs to keep only a few people and horses and does all of his work with the greatest ease. His help likewise has not a third of the work that ours has to do. None of them, for example, goes to work in the morning earlier than the time of the morning meal; in the winter at 8:30 or at 9 o'clock and in summertime at 7 or at 7:30. Only then does each one slowly go to his work; and at 12 noon the blast of the trumpet calls each one on the farm to eat again. After the setting of the sun no more work is done, even were it in the middle of harvest time.

Source: Edited by Bryan Wright