The Nation's River

Since then their successors have used the land for farming and for other purposes. In using it they have changed it, and the changes have registered in the river system that drains it. For land, water, vegetation, wildlife, minerals, and men's habits are not separable from one another in the natural frame. So that if the early planters, using methods of hoe tillage scarcely less primitive than those of the Indians, mined the Tidewater soils for tobacco production in a way that required new fields every few years, one result was that those soils tired and thinned and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence that had gro