The farmer and mechanic. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 18??-19??, 1909-09-28
BY OSCAR w. BLACKNALL.

Your genuine Southerner cannot
but feel deeply concerned at the in
Discriminatory slanderous attack on
corn bread now afoot. What shall be
spared? hall we next see challenged
the comistibility Of side-meat and tur-
nip said. Or will the shaft OF calum-
ny, seeking a higher blank enter the
very citadel of Southernism and COM
NIT assault and battery on the water
melon itself?
Corn bread to be fought shy Of?
Corn bread unWhOlesome! Why, my
dear sir, corn bread with it's fellows
aforesaid, tO-Wit: side-meat and tur-
nip salad) is about the only absolutely
and universally wholesome thing that
man has found since he lost the run
of the cha in Paradise. Does not
history show that it is the only bread
that you can raise men on, real live,
progressive, huStling men on? Pray,
sir, what did mankind do till it got
corn bread to eat?-stOOd stock, stone
still, or at best, marked time in a cir
Gle, a very small circle. EnerglSed by
corn bread and the meat raised on it
(Which is simply concentrated corn en-
ergy) man aWoke, sprang to his feet,
advanced further, thought more, in
vented more, did more in two centu-
ries since he, having lost his caudal
H"S - S@iSeC - AtSNSy
forced to quit arbored life and take
1t afoOt.
Why. sir, but for corn bread there
would never have been any United
States, any Declaration of Independ-
ence, any New World flame of liberty,
at which the Old World would relume
its long dead torches.
In all seriousness, have you ever re-
Elected on the incalculable debt that
the world, that civilization at large,
owes to corn bread and to corn, a debt
that is increasing at an ever acceler-
ating ratio. But for corn, whose
strange, and it does seem, Providential
vigor, fitted it to thrive amid stumps,
rocks and bushes of the American will
derness, this continent could not pos
sibly have been settled and developed
as it was. The white man could lot
live on near as exclusively g meat diet
as the Indian. Game was plentiful,
but to retain his vigor and multiply
and possess the land he must have
bread as we'll as meat. Wheat was
the product of h open, long titled
lands Of the Old World. Corn was the
child of the forest Of the New World.
Years of toll was required to fit the
rough soil of the wilderness for wheat,
and then after waiting nearly a year
from seeding time, the yield would
have been only ten-fold, possibly twen-
ty fold, in a grain hard to harvest,
IidEu TO InTeSIl, anu HdiuSI Stli IL
convert into bread. Corn could be
grown at a pinch with scarcely any
preparation at all. The pioneers sim
ply fired the dead dry leaves, thus de-
stroying, or at least, ~disposing Of.
most of the u~nderbrush, girdled the
large trees with an axe, scratched
holes at intervals In the rank mould.
dropped in the corn seed and covered
them with his foot.
Little more labor was required ex-
cept to chop down with his killing hoe
such random bushes that sprung up.
In less than three months he was
feasting on roasting ears (for the pio-
neers obtained from the Indians the
seed Of early and late corn much as
we have it now, and in four months
he had corn for meal or hominy. as
his facilities for pulerizing afforded.
And the yield was not as with wheat
tenfold nor twentyfold, but often a
t~housandfold. To ear an acre or
wheat. sixty pounds of seed would have
had to be luggcd through the painless
woods to the distant home. A pocket
full of corn would plant enough to
bread the pioneers family a year.
while the gathering, shocking. grind
ing and cooking. required compare
tfvely no time, skill or labor.
mus, [ repeat, were the men Of our