and grass and the field of buckwheat to be turned under for
manure would yield no money return. In other words the whole farm would
produce three thousand three hundred seventy-five bushels of grain and
potatoes worth a total of L539.1.3.

A second alternative plan would yield crops worth L614.1.3; a third,
about the same; a fourth, L689.1.3; a fifth, providing for two hundred
twenty-five acres of wheat, L801.11.0; a sixth, L764. Number five would
be most productive, but he noted that it would seriously reduce the
land. Number six would be "the 2d. most productive Rotation, but the
fields receive no rest," as it provided for neither grass nor pasture,
while the plowing required would exceed that of any of the other plans
by two hundred eighty days.

On a small scale he tried growing cotton, Botany Bay grass, hemp, white
nankeen grass and various other products. He experimented with deep soil
plowing by running twice in the same furrow and also cultivated some
wheat that had been drilled in rows instead of broadcasted.

In 1793 he built a new sixteen-sided barn on the

[ILLUSTRATION: Part of Washington's Plan for His Sixteen-Sided Barn]

Dogue Run Farm. The plan of this barn, drawn by Washington himself, is
still preserved and is reproduced herewith. He calculated that one
hundred and forty thousand bricks would be required for it and these
were made and burnt upon the estate. The barn was particularly notable
for a threshing floor thirty feet square, with interstices one and a
half inches wide left between the floor boards so that the grain when
trodden out by horses or beat out with flails would fall through to the
floor below, leaving the straw above.

This floor was to furnish an illustration of what Washington called "the
almost impossibility of putting the overseers of this country out of the
track they have been accustomed to walk in. I have one of the most
convenient barns in this or perhaps any other country, where thirty
hands may with great ease be employed in threshing. Half the wheat of
the farm was actually stowed in this barn in the straw by my order, for
threshing; notwithstanding, when I came home about the middle of
September, I found a treading yard not thirty feet from the barn-door,
the wheat again brought out of the barn, and horses treading it out in
an open exposure, liable to the vicissitudes of the weather."

I think we may safely conclude that this was one of those rare
occasions when Ge