Alvin Smith Unforgiven

I find it fascinating and touching that, as late as April 13, 1842, when addressing the newly arrived English converts on the subject matter of health and doctors, Joseph Smith Jr can still use the overdosis of Calomel that killed Alvin Smith in 1828 as a negative example to warn about quack ("Calomel Doctors").

Discussions of Mormon Geography

In 1993, William J. Hamblin, history professor at BYU, broke a lance for the Limited Geographical Model approach to the book of Mormon. His interpretative approach was rejected by an ex-Mormon, Richard Packham, as well as by a Mormon layperson, Wunderli, in a paper published in Dialogue.

Peckham's account is excellent, because as a lawyer and computer scientist, he is both logical and good in exposition. Wunderli is cool because he points to the work of the Reverend Lamb, The Golden Bible, and exposes some of the things that Hamblin writes as the flip side of the arguments that Lamb made, eg. on the preservation of names in Biblical Palestine vs. the Americas, pp.274ff. Lamb also made some interesting ones, such as rejecting the notion that any singular culture, Nephite or Lamanite, ever spanned the American continent.

The farmer's guide in hiring and stocking farms...

Arthur Young, premiere English agronomist, correspondent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on farming matters, wrote this book

The farmer's guide in hiring and stocking farms...

both for the gentleman farmer and for the husband man.

A most fascinating read.

Handbook of clearing and grubbing methods and cost

The Handbook of clearing and grubbing methods and cost : Gillette, Halbert Powers, 1869- from 1917 is but one in a whole slew of engineering and costing books by Mr Gillette. I was brought to this book by reading about the Erie Canal, where the dense forests of the middle section of the Erie Canal, between Seneca and Rome, surveyed by Benjamin Wright, included the grubbing of the heavy forests as part of his $1,500 per mile estimate; cf. Hulbert, Erie Canal, p.109.

Manual for Road Construction from 1850

This book, A manual of the principles and practice of road-making : comprising the location, construction, and improvement of roads (common, macadam, paved, plank, etc.) ; and rail-roads, covers how to build plank roads, McAdam roads, etc.