Plowing (Reenactment)

Historic St. Mary's City Commission

When Leonard Calvert, acting on behalf of his brother Cecil, second Lord Baltimore, arrived in Maryland in 1634, Virginia had been a going concern for more than a quarter-century, and other English-speaking colonies had begun in Massachusetts, Bermuda and the Bahamas, and several Caribbean islands. Those developments made it somewhat easier to begin farming in the northern Chesapeake, where planters could rely on the Virginians for plant and animal stock and have existing markets in which to sell. Upon arriving in Maryland, Father Andrew White noted the native grapes and several types of small fruit, but also wrote that peaches grew abundantly. Since peaches were of Old World origin, Father White may have seen these fruits on Kent Island, where William Claiborne had begun raising hogs around 1628 and might have introduced peaches to feed them. It is also possible that Indians had spread peaches from Virginia. Peaches, though, required honeybees for pollination, and since honeybees were a non-native species, they must have been introduced too. Having bees in Maryland also meant that this Catholic colony did not have to send orders back to England for altar candles.

Unsure how the Virginians would receive them, Calvert's colonists bought maize seed in Barbados before continuing to the Chesapeake. The chief feature of this "corn" ("corn" meant the principal cereal crop of a region; thus English "corn" was wheat) was its ease of planting-in mounds dispersed over roughly cleared land rather than hand-broadcast upon a cleared field, like wheat. A heavy hoe was the only implement necessary to grow Indian corn. What little evidence exists suggests that the Indians planted corn about three feet between mounds in all directions (i.e. one mound to 9 square feet) and the colonists followed the same practice.

Soil Preparation (Reenactment)

Historic St. Mary's City Commission

Presumably, someone (Indian or English) tried to space the plants more closely, but if so, this probably introduced a bacterial rot of the stalk, just above the soil line, that inhibited denser planting until the first scientific hybrids in the twentieth century. After three seasons, in 1637, Maryland's leaders considered enacting a "two-acre" rule as Virginia had done, requiring two acres of corn to be planted for every acre of tobacco. This failed on its first suggestion but became official policy in 1638/9 with "An act for planting of corne," which passed again in 1640, 1642, 1649, and so on, leaving the impression that self-sufficiency was not something farmers took very seriously. No doubt supposing they could always get victuals such as corn for bread from some other source-Indians, Virginians, or West Indians-Marylanders wanted to devote their energies to raising the money crop, tobacco.

Tobacco Cultivation
More than a century before Maryland's founding, the Spanish cultivated the Mayans' drug plant, tobacco, in the West Indies. It was grown in France by the mid-1550s, and in China, Japan, and South Africa before the settlement of Virginia. Farmers in England grew tobacco legally until 1619 (and illegally afterward), when a law aimed at generating import duties gave the Virginia Company a virtual monopoly of the market. By 1634, Virginia had been a royal colony for a decade, and nothing prohibited Maryland farmers from entering the profitable tobacco trade from their start.

A teaspoon of tobacco seeds was enough to plant six acres. The seeds were started in a seedbed, then the seedlings transplanted to mounds spaced like those for corn over a roughly cleared field. Both corn and tobacco required similar handling-hoeing down weeds, picking off bugs, chopping the stalk at harvest time and allowing the tobacco leaves or corn kernels to dry. The next year, the planter simply chose another spot, a few feet away, and repeated the routine. After a few seasons, however, planters would have noticed their plants were less robust than at first, and generally, that the plants produced less per field. This decline led farmers to think that the crop had depleted the soil of nutrients, leading to its "exhaustion."

Farmers responded by letting "old fields" "rest" for up to twenty years. In order to keep producing tobacco, growers moved to new fields, thus using up more and more land and deserting exhausted fields. Over decades, this practice made for a forlorn-looking landscape and tagged tobacco growers with the reputation of being slovenly and unskilled farmers at best, and rapacious at worst. "Soil exhaustion" also figured in arguments over slavery and for agricultural reform.

Tobacco growers in the seventeenth century, and even into the twentieth century, could not have known that diminishing returns actually resulted from microbes, tiny biological organisms, living in the soil. In a plant's immediate root environment, several formidable predators existed: principally, two genera of nematodes, or microscopic worms, and three fungal organisms. The populations of these tiny predators depended upon the amount of tobacco plant residue that accumulated. The more tobacco roots nematodes had to eat, the more their populations grew. And, every time tobacco roots were attacked by nematodes, the roots became more vulnerable to injuries from fungal organisms. After several seasons of the same crop, the soil indeed needed "to rest," but less from nutrient depletion than from the subterranean epidemics that had bloomed.

In the eye of the planter, the effect was the same-the plants looked weaker and a successful crop required a new field. Yet, this fundamental misunderstanding of the soil's biochemistry (not simply chemistry) shaped Maryland's agriculture, and historians' understanding of it, for more than 300 years. All saw land as "exhausted" after a certain number of tobacco crops were grown on it.

For most of the seventeenth century, tobacco held complete sway over Maryland agriculture. When prices were high, little else mattered; when prices fell, even ruinously, growers simply awaited a reversal of fortune. Rather than building fences, improving meadows, and storing up winter feed, as good livestockmen knew to do, tobacco farmers simply let their animals run in the woods to fend for themselves, or, at most, grew an orchard for their scrounging. Because nothing else earned as much money per acre as tobacco, the "sotweed" remained the mainstay of Maryland agriculture for better and worse. Until something else offered a similar opportunity for wealth, or even a living, tobacco dominated Maryland's agricultural practices and economy.

Carr, Lois G., Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh. Robert Cole's World: Agriculture & Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991.