Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 265

Explorers and settlers usually overestimate the capacity of an unfamiliar country to support intensive agriculture, 266 the agricultural asdid Eric the Red when he coined the name Greenland, the creators of the Oklahoma dust bowl, and those Englishmen who during the late 1960s imported ‘improved’ farming methods to the apparently underutilized savanna landscapes of Alentejo, Portugal (see O.Balabanian, Problemas agrícolas e reformas agrárias no Alto Alentejo e na Estremadura Espanhola (Lisbon, 1984)).

Is southern New England another example? The story goes that the pilgrim fathers and their successors tried to make it an English-style countryside. Like giants, they dug up forests and rolled boulders into walls; they wrested a meagre living from a glaciated granite landscape; but ultimately it was in vain. They fled to better land beyond the mountains, and the forest won back their field-walls and cellar-holes.

This book tells a rather different story. It deals with Concord, Massachusetts, from 1650 to 1770. It opens with the settlement established and ends before its finalboom and bust. The author contends that the landscape was complex and parts of it were quite good farmland. The settlers quickly learned what to do with each part; they adapted their farming, eating American maize instead of wheat and drinking rough cider. New England accommodated population growth – up to a point – and provided a comfortable and sustainable life-style.

However, winters were colder than in Old England and soils less fertile. Farmers needed more firewood andmore hay for their cattle. They had plenty of forest,and got just enough hay by converting swamps to meadow. More hay generated more manure. But these practices were labour-intensive, a point not sufficiently made in the book, and labour was short. With two acres of wood to cut, chop, and cart each year, thirty-odd acres of hay to mow, and dung from animals that had eaten all that hay to spread on the fields, and using oxen instead of faster horses or mules, how could a New England farmer have time to enjoy his comforts? Were his prolific children a substitute for slaves?

This fascinating story deals only summarily with earlier and later periods. Why did Kentish clothiers and Buckinghamshire tailors abandon good jobs in 1635 to turn peasant in a lonely, hostile land? How did they find time and skill to make fields as well as till them, to frame houses, to fence pastures? What did they eat while doing it? What happened when a scythe broke or they ran out of nails? How did they find out what was cultivable? What mistakes did they make?

The original land-grant of Concord was an exact six-mile square, but American obsession with geometry went no further. Inside the square, in fifteen years, there was aland-map as complex and irregular as any that had taken 1500 years to evolve at home. While open-field history review strip cultivation was declining in England it was introduced into the colonies, including Concord. The next town was called Sudbury; but Sudbury (Suffolk) had already abolished its open fields. Dr Donahue, alas, does not say how many settlers came from open-field English parishes.

I commend this book, the authoritative fruit of twenty years’ research by an author who is himself a New England farmer. But it can be confused and verbose. Details of climate emerge on page 95, and the perfunctory index does not find them. The computer-drawn maps have crude outlines and inconsistent scales and keys. I lost an intricate argument about watercourses because the map confuses them with roads. Much of the book traces every field that successive generations bought and sold, in long paragraphs that I found incomprehensible, having no map locating Elm Brook Hill, Shawshine Corner, etc. etc. Was unrelieved text the best way to convey this detail? Illustrations include photographs taken long after the events described, but no facsimiles of historic maps or other archives.

The notes are excellent. Why, Yale University Press, were they exiled to the end of the book? Your computer produces admirable footnotes; why not use it? And why did your editor not insist on a frontispiece map, with contours, identifying every place in the text?