Washington [333]
During the 1780s, with agricultural prices depressed, Washington found it hard to make any headway as a farmer. In November 1785 he told George William Fairfax that he never viewed his plantations “without seeing something which makes me regret having [continued] so long in the ruinous mode of farming which we are in.”24 The following year, perplexed by what to do, he launched an important correspondence with a renowned English agronomist, Arthur Young, who sent him his four-volume Annals of Agriculture. Candid about his own inadequacies as a farmer, Washington asked for advice about more than just the ruinous practices and backward farm implements at Mount Vernon. Rather, he saw the agricultural system of the whole country as bogged down in outdated methods and was especially critical of Virginia planters who exhausted their soil with endless rounds of tobacco, Indian corn, and wheat. Deciding to conserve his soil through crop rotation, Washington ordered a variety of new seeds from Young—including cabbage, turnips, rye, and hop clover—and under Young’s tutelage eventually planted sixty different crops at Mount Vernon. A severe drought and a boll weevil infestation drastically cut his wheat yield in 1787. Nonetheless, determined to rotate his crops, he had by 1789 planted wheat, barley, oats, rye, clover, timothy, buckwheat, Indian corn, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, peas, and flax. As president, he lent the prestige of his office to espousing a national board of agriculture that could diffuse scientific information to farmers.
In 1788 Washington commenced work on a two-story brick and timber barn, a hundred feet long, which would be “the largest and most convenient one in this country,” as he bragged.25 This massive construction project taxed the resources of Mount Vernon, where all 40,000 bricks were made; more than 35,000 board feet of pine planks and 100,000 juniper shingles were bought ready-made. Washington intended to store his grain and other crops in this commodious structure. “The barn is so well planned that a man can fill the racks with hay or potatoes easily and without any danger,” noted Brissot de Warville, who appreciated the novelty of both barn and barnyard, which “were innovations in Virginia, where they have no barns and do not store fodder for cattle.”26 Starting in 1792, Washington also erected a specialized sixteen-sided barn for threshing wheat. As horses circled around the barn at a trot, trampling the wheat, the grain fell cleanly between gaps in the wooden floorboards to a granary on the lower level.
Always musing about the future of American agriculture, Washington introduced ingenious innovations at a merchant gristmill that he had first installed at his Dogue Run farm in the early 1770s. He recruited a Delaware inventor, Oliver Evans, who had figured out a way to automate all the mill elements through gears and conveyor belts. Powered by a sixteen-foot waterwheel, the mill hoisted the grain by buckets, ground it, then spread the high-quality flour to cool before it was poured into barrels for export. The sheer variety of business activities at Mount Vernon would make President Washington as receptive to the manufacturing visions of an Alexander Hamilton as to the agrarian dreams of a Thomas Jefferson.