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INCIDENTS IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE SAGINAW VALLEY BY JUDGE ALBERT MILLER
In 1833 Duncan McLellan raised 800 bushels of potatoes, the yield being between 300 and 400 bushels to the acre. In November, 1830, the elder Mr. McCarty and his son, Thomas, came from the city of Boston and settled on the Tittabawassee, neither of them ever having chopped a stick of timber previous to that time. They cut the logs and built a house with their own hands, in which they lived and cooked their own food, and during the winter and spring cut the timber into short lengths that they could roll into heaps by hand, and cleared the land, upon which they raised! a crop of corn that they sold in the fall of 1831 for $60. Edward McCarty,, a younger brother of Thomas, now (1886) occupies the same and surrounding lands, and is one of the richest farmers in Saginaw county. The McCartys raised their first crop without any team work. After that date it was; customary for settlers to fell the timber and pile the brush neatly and burn
it in the spring, and plant and raise their first crop of corn among the logs A settler once told the writer that he could raise a larger crop in that way than if the land was cleared for he always planted close to the logs each side.
It must not be supposed that the early pioneers were possessed of more peaceful dispositions than the average of mankind, and that no jealousies or feuds existed among neighbors at that early day, for such was not the fad Sometime previous to 1833, a feud had existed between Duncan McLellan and Charles McLean, neighbors on the Tittabawassee, the cause for which prob ably neither of them could have told, which eventually culminated in a lawsuit, the first that the writer recollects, in Saginaw.
Michigan
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