rews concedes-but his phrase "rather too late" suggests that he wanted to complete the separation before the female plants were fertilized-and this was a practice related to drug potency rather than to fiber culture. British mercantile policy hampered American hemp culture for a time during and after the colonial period by offering heavy bounties on hemp exported from Ireland; but the American plantings continued despite this subsidized competition. At various times in the nineteenth century large hemp plantations flourished in Mississippi, Georgia, California, South Carolina, Nebraska, and other states, as well as on Staten Island, New York. The center of nineteenth-century production, however, was in Kentucky, where hemp was introduced in 1775. One Kentuckian, James L. Allen, wrote in 1900: "The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp. The roads of Kentucky . . . were early made necessary by the hauling of hemp. For the sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered; lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made and lost.... With the Civil War began the decline, lasting still." The invention of the cotton gin and of other cotton and wool machinery, and competition from cheap imported hemp, were major factors in this decline in United States hemp cultivation. The decline in commercial production did not, however, mean that marijuana became scarce. As late as 1937, the American commercial crop was still estimated at 10,000 acres, much of it in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kentucky. Four million pounds of marijuana seed a year were being used in bird feed. During World War II commercial cultivation was greatly expanded, at the behest of the United States Department of Agriculture, to meet the shortage of imported hemp for rope. Even decades after commercial cultivation has been discontinued, hemp can often be found growing luxuriantly as a weed in aba...
