of many generations farming the same field. In any one year, only a little stone picking had to be done. True, the stones were a bother. But the rewards of farming the Uplands till soils - high yields - more than made up for the little bit of extra work that the stones caused.

It is hard to imagine the appearance of the landscape at the height of farming in the Uplands. The Connecticut we see today is two-thirds forest land, one-sixth built-up land, and just one-sixth farmland. But in the mid-1800s, farmland covered three-fourths of the state." In place of the vast blanket of mature forest that native Americans knew and the extensive young forests we see today, Connecticut's landscape was a patchwork quilt of field after field, only occasionally interrupted by woods. The great productivity of Connecticut's farms, both in the Central Valley and in the Uplands, helped support a constantly growing population in continual need of more farmland. The peak came around 1860 when there was hardly an acre of arable land in the state that was not in pasture or crops."¹² And more land was needed.

The land shortage in Connecticut had two principal effects. First, the absence of more land to farm led to an exodus of families out of the state. This was Connecticut's "nursery of men" period (see Chapter 1). In the beginning, they travelled north to Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, and west to a portion of Ohio once owned by Connecticut. Then the journeys grew longer and the direction more consistently westward as wagons loaded up in Connecticut began rolling into the deep Midwest. Underneath the prairie grasses, the sod-busters found the richest agricultural soils in the world. Back home, the second effect of the land shortage was beginning to take its toll. The land had been worked too hard. Many steep hills had been cleared for farming that should not have been, and erosion had stripped away much of the topsoil. In addition, the fields were given too little time to lay fallow and restore nutrients to the soil. Farmers had pushed their plows too far and the decline of agriculture in Connecticut began. The land needed a rest.

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