Any one who travels through the long settled parts of Virginia to-day will see many such old fields upon which large forest trees are now growing and can find there, if he will search closely enough, signs of the old tobacco ridges.

Only heroic measures and the expenditure of large sums for fertilizer could make such worn-out land again productive.

Washington himself described the character of the agriculture in words that can not be improved upon: "A piece of land is cut down, and left under constant cultivation, first in tobacco, and then in Indian corn (two very exhausting plants), until it will yield scarcely anything; a second piece is cleared, and treated in the same manner; then a third and so on, until probably there is but little more to clear.

When this happens, the owner finds himself reduced to the choice of one of three things--either to recover the land which he has ruined, to accomplish which, he has perhaps neither the skill, the industry, nor the means; or to retire beyond the mountains; or to substitute quantity for quality in order to raise something.

The latter has been generally adopted, and, with the assistance of horses, he scratches over much ground, and seeds it, to very little purpose." The tobacco industry was not only ruinous to the soil, but it was badly organized from a financial standpoint.