During the 1600s and early 1700s, planters in Maryland cultivated their land the simplest of tools—the hoe. Corn and tobacco were the major crops and hoes worked well for tilling the soil between the stumps and roots of what had been a tree-covered land. As markets changed in the mid-1700s, farmers turned to wheat and other grains, and growing them required a plow. Plows demanded well-cleared land and draft animals, most notably oxen and horses. Unfortunately, plowing greatly increased soil erosion and the silting up of rivers and streams. During the later 1700s, planters also built more specialized from buildings such as granaries and barns for animals. Livestock no longer ran free and were instead fenced and sheltered.
Pollen analysis gives us important clues about the changing landscape at different points in time. The 1758 granary and 1785 barn essentially capped the soil beneath the buildings and stopped the accumulation of additional, air-born pollen. Study by Dr. Gerald Kelso revealed that these soils contain different pollen frequencies. In particular, there was far more ragweed in the earth under the later building. Ragweed is closely associated with plow agriculture, and its pollen is broadly dispersed by the wind. The difference in pollen under the two buildings is probably because in the decades before Hicks built his granary in 1758, the main crop was tobacco grown with hoes. When Mackall built his granary 27 years later, wheat was widely grown and ragweed was abundant in the open fields.
[Captions:]
The eighteenth century witnessed the changeover from hoe cultivation to plow cultivation, illustrated above in a detail from Earl Hofmann's sweeping panorama, The Land and Man. The widespread adoption of wheat agriculture is confirmed by analysis of pollen from soil beneath the Hicks' and Mackall granaries.
Ragweed pollen recovered from St. Mary's City. Actual size of a ragweed pollen grain is about 1/25,,000 of an inch in diameter.
[Aside:]
Studies of the sediment and pollen in core samples taken from nearby St. John's Pond confirm the heavy erosion and siltation caused by the move to open field cultivation with plows. The size of the pond declined dramatically as the area filled in with topsoil washed from the surrounding fields.
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