R. I. AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. This institution is situated twenty-seven miles south of Providence, between the villages of West Kingston and Kingston, and a short distance to the north of the highway connecting the two villages. The farm contains 139.65 acres, about half lying on the westerly side of "Kingston Hill" and the remainder made up of "Plain" land extending to "Laurel Lake" or "Thirty Acre Pond" and the Chippuxet river. The south line of the farm is practically straight, except where broken by the avenue to the highway, and is over a mile long from east to west. The easterly or hill end of the farm is about 1,625 feet in width and the westerly or Plain end about 765 feet wide. Just four years ago in December the Station Farmer moved his family and goods into the farm house, and the actual work of the Experiment Station began. Three men were hired at moderate wages and board for the winter months. Bush-hooks, axes and bush-scythes were the first tools purchased, and the work of clearing up commenced with the cutting of brush during the cold days of winter. The farm was found to have an interesting history, being a portion of a tract of 1,000 acres purchased by the five first white settlers on the west side of Narragansett Bay and divided by lot among them in 1691. The changes of ownership by sale and will have been traced in the town records and quite fully outlined in Bulletin No. 2 of the Station. For more than half of the past one hundred years the farm has been leased, and the general average inference in such cases is that the lessee gets all he can from the farm, year by year, and pays little thought to its future productiveness. Bushes grow up in the pastures and when cut are especially tenacious of life in the moist, rocky and more fertile soil of the hillside. In this particular case the forty acres of pasture were thickly set with white birch, alder, blackberry, whortleberry, bayberry and other bushes, which were cut, piled and burned, and the underbrush in about two acres of wood trimmed out. During the fall, photographs of the buildings had been taken and a survey of the farm made. The approach to the farm previous to its purchase by the State was across two pastures, through three bars or gates, and over a pathway "hub-deep" with mud after frost or during wet weather. Early in the spring a contract was made for the construction of a roadway from the highway to the buildings along the avenue purchased. The earth was excavated to a width of fifteen feet and sufficiently deep to admit of putting in a foundation of stone twelve inches thick at the sides and eighteen inches in the center; the surface covered with small or broken stone and then with six inches of earth. The interior division farm walls were used to furnish stone for the foundation and nearly one and one-half miles have been so used. Most farm walls occupy a strip of land five feet in width, and for two or three feet on each side the earth must be dug over by hand when the field is cultivated, so that practically every foot in length of wall spoils a piece of land ten feet wide; therefore more than one and three-fourths acres of good land was made available by converting the walls into roads. The removal of useless walls and fences on many farms would improve the appearance, increase the area of available land under cultivation, be more economical and largely decrease the "fence corners" and waste places far too often found growing noxious weed seeds, briars and bushes. The cut of the farm house, from one of the photographs taken soon after the farm was purchased, will, when compared with a view taken recently, serve to illustrate the improvement the removal of walls and the substitution of a lawn sometimes makes. Additions to the barn in the way of stables and sheds were made during the summer of 1889, and the Chemical Laboratory begun. The latter was constructed of stone quarried on the farm. A small |