François Andre Michaux, botanist and silviculturist, a traveller in America, and author of a work on the forest trees of North America, first came to America in 1787 with his father, Andre, who established two nurseries in the young United States and proposed an exploration of the Missouri River and the American West in 1793, ten years before the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Young Michaux accompanied his father to Charleston, where one of the nurseries was planted, but returned to France in 1789. There he studied medicine and became involved in the revolutionary events of the time. In 1801 he was sent out to America to sell the nurseries his father had established, and while there he made the journey west of the Allegheny Mountains that took him to Carlisle. His Voyage a l'ouest des Monts Alleghanys .. . was published at Paris in 1804, and was translated into English the next year.
Returning to France from a third visit to America in 1809, Michaux prepared and published in 1818-19 a three-volume work entitled The North American Sylva, or a Description of the Forest Trees of the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia. In America both Michaux had been cordially received and helped, especially by members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. They retained grateful memories of their reception, and accordingly the younger Michaux bequeathed the Society some 92,000 francs, whose income has continued for nearly a century and a half to encourage and support research in silviculture and the history of forests and forestry.
The account of François Andre Michaux's travels to and through Cumberland County that is printed here, is taken from his Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains ... 1802 (London, 1805) as reprinted in Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, I748-1846(Cleveland, 0., 1904), III.
I fixed my departure from Philadelphia on the 27th of June 1802: I had not the least motive to proceed on slowly, in order to collect observations already confirmed by travellers who had written before me on that subject; this very reason induced me to take the most expeditious means for the purpose of reaching Pittsburgh, situated at the extremity of Ohio; in consequence of which I took the stage at Philadelphia, that goes to Shippensburgh by Lancaster, York, and Carlisle.1 Shippensburgh, about one hundred and forty miles from Philadelphia, is the farthest place that the stages go to upon that road.
It is reckoned sixty miles from Philadelphia to Lancaster, where I arrived the same day in the afternoon. The road is kept in good repair by the means of turnpikes, fixed at regular distance from each other. Nearly the whole of the way the houses are almost close together; every proprietor to his enclosure. Throughout the United States all the land that is cultivated is fenced in, to keep it from the cattle and quadrupeds of every kind that the inhabitants leave the major part of the year in the woods, which in that respect are free. Near towns or villages these enclosures are made with posts, fixed in the ground about twelve feet from each other, containing five mortises, at the distance of eight or nine inches, in which are fitted long spars about four or five inches in diameter, similar to the poles used by builders for making scaffolds. The reason of their enclosures thus is principally through economy, as it takes up but very little wood, which is extremely dear in the environs of the Northern cities; but in the interior of the country, and in the Southern states, the enclosures are made with pieces of wood of equal length, placed one above the other, disposed in a zig-zag form, and supported by their extremities, which cross and interlace each other; the enclosing appear to be about seven feet in height. In the lower part of the Carolines they are made of fir; in the other parts of the country, and throughout the North, they are comprised of oak and walnut-tree; they are said to last about five and twenty years when kept in good repair.
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