February is here and usually at this time of year I am longing for the cold days to end and dreaming of warmer days ahead. It’s usually about this time that my wife and I begin to think about a garden. I know we are quite a way off, but we like to plan ahead and think about all the things we want to plant this year. I always find that we plan too ambitiously and by the time our plan is done, we have accounted for every square inch of the little plot we have. If we actually went through with all our plans, our plot would resemble a jungle, not to mention it would be unlikely that anything in the garden would produce given the cramped quarters. We usually grow zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, lettuce and sometimes, corn. My wife and I both came from families that always had gardens and it is an important part of our life to have them. Summer isn’t summer without a garden.

I would never say that we grow everything we need for our family of six, but we do our best to grow, preserve and produce as much as we can from the little patch of land we live on.

Thankfully, we have maple trees in which we make maple syrup in the early spring, apples and grapes in the fall and our garden, so we stay pretty busy around the various seasons of the year to take advantage of what we have. I am thankful that we have a variety of planned and natural plantings here that have paid dividends to us over many years.

Planting and agriculture have naturally been an important way of life in our valley since before the first settler ever set foot here. Native Americans were here long before any pioneer arrived cultivating crops for their families. When the settlers arrived, crops were similar to those planted by their native counterparts. According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, corn, wheat and buckwheat were all grown by our earliest settlers.

Space for animals was important, so land was cleared for livestock, too. Cows had poor grazing opportunities on the frontier, so milk production was not always guaranteed. Joseph Doddridge recounts in his book “Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of Western Virginia and Pennsylvania,” published in Wellsburg in 1824, that most settlers planted crops or corn or some sort of grain in addition to growing potatoes, pumpkins, squash and beans.

Most farmers had livestock of many varieties. Large fields of corn would have been entirely impractical because Doddridge mentions that in the very early days of life on the frontier, corn was milled by hand, either by a wooden pestle in a hollow log, a hand mill consisting of stones or a mortar sweep. Joseph’s family came to the valley in 1773 and lived off the land. There were many native plants he and his family foraged for in those years as well. Doddridge describes the plants in which his family used such as the wild strawberry, a plant that grew on poor land and was much more sour than the cultivated type.

Service berry grew along creeks and was the first fruit to ripen in June. I have never tried one, but I have read that they taste somewhere between a blueberry and a blackberry. Raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries and blueberries or, as Doddridge calls them, whortleberry, were somewhat available in certain places on the frontier. Wild plums, buckberries and wild grapes were abundant, but in the time of Doddridge’s book in the 1820s, he was not certain how long they would be able to survive in the wild.

A plant I had never heard of called a black, red or sugar haw grew abundantly and was a favorite among children of our area in the 18th century. Doddridge even had a few cultivated varieties of these plants in his garden in the 1820s. Wild cherries, Paw Paw and crab apples, like today, were plentiful. Nuts were an important part of the settler’s diet and Doddridge mentions hickory, walnuts, both black and white, hazel and chestnuts that they foraged for as well.

When settlement matured here in our area, farms still specialized in crops and raising of livestock, but in orchards and fruit. There were many orchards that were cultivated in our area in the 19th century. And some that even survived to the beginning of the 20th.

Looking at the agricultural data from the past is extremely fascinating as it gives a great look at the farming history of our area. Joseph Doyle in his book “History of Steubenville and Jefferson County” explain some of those statistics. For instance, in 1908 in Jefferson County, corn was grown over 10,445 acres, being one of the most planted in the county at that time.

Statistics of that year show oats at a close second with 9,831 acres sown. Farmers at that time grew wheat, rye, buckwheat, barley, tomatoes, peas, potatoes, onions and grasses. Other items of interest are that Jefferson County farmers produced 750,776 gallons of milk, 483,245 pounds of butter in home dairies and 64,660 pounds in factory dairies and 488,806 dozen eggs. In 1908, 2,062 maple trees were tapped in Jefferson County, producing 1,217 gallons of syrup and 20 pounds of maple sugar. Around 5,717 pounds of honey was harvested from 1,055 hives and 100 gallons of wine were produced from four acres of grapes. Thousands of acres of orchards were planted with apples, peaches, cherries, pears and plums.

Truly this area was an agricultural community.

It would be interesting to make a comparison between the numbers of 1908 and those of today just to see if we still produce as much today as we did then. My gut tells me we produced more then, but as with everything else, I am sure the story is more complicated than that of just a layman reading statistics.

So even though the weather is still cold, and the ground is too hard to turn over, I am dreaming of this year’s garden, the sweet maple syrup, the apples from the trees and the grapes from the vine. It’s those things that make all the hard work of planning, planting, weeding, pruning and growing all worth it.

(Zuros is the Hancock County administrator)