Stock of every kind except horses was left to find a support in the forest, and at that time, when their range was unlimited, they found it in abundance. Increasing wants stimulated the cultivation of a market crop to supply them, and indigo and tobacco were first resorted to. Tobacco was the principal staple, and the method of its transportation was extraordinary. As at the present day in Kentucky, it was pressed into very large hogsheads. Upon these were pinned large wooden felloes, forming the circle of a wheel around the hogshead at either end, and in the centre of each head a large pin was inserted. Upon these pins were attached shafts or thills, as to a cart, and to these teams, and thus the hogshead was rolled along rough roads and through streams for sometimes ninety miles to Augusta, for a market. When sold, the shafts were reserved, and upon these was then erected a sort of box, into which the few articles purchased were placed, and dragged home. These articles almost universally consisted of some iron and steel, and a little coffee and sugar, and sometimes a quarter of a pound of tea--universally termed store-tea, to distinguish it from that made from the root of the sassafras and the leaf of the cassia or tepaun-bush. Cotton was, to some little extent, cultivated near the seaboard in Georgia and South Carolina, and cleaned of the seeds by a machine similar to that used at the present day for preparing the sea-island cotton for market. This was a tedious and troublesome method, and was incapable of doing the work to any very great extent. Indigo, of a superior quality to the American, was being produced in British India and Central America, and the competition was reducing the price to the cost of production. The same difficulty attended the growing of tobacco. Virginia and Maryland, with their abundance of labor, were competing, and cheapening the article to a price which made its production unprofitable. At this juncture, Whitney invented the cotton-gin, and the growth of cotton as a marketable crop commenced upon a more extended scale. In a few years it became general--each farmer growing more or less, according to his means. Some one man, most able to do so, erected a gin-house, first in a county, then in each neighborhood. These either purchased in the seed the cotton of their neighbors, or ginned it and packed it for a certain amount of toll taken from the cotton. This packing was done in round bales, and by a single man, with a heavy iron bar, and was a most laborious and tedious method; and the packages were in the most inconvenient form for handling and transportation.