Life was tough in the late 1830s. Ithaca's prosperity, for example, took a sharp nosedive. Reckless speculation in commodities, securities and land prompted the Panic of 1837 nationwide. Debtors defaulted on loans, businesses failed, banks closed, construction projects stopped and employers laid off workers -- one of them was the young Ezra Cornell, who lost his job when Colonel Beebe sold his milling concerns in 1839 and 1840.

To earn a living, Cornell tried setting up a grocery store and built houses on land he had bought earlier. He turned to sheep and hog raising and agricultural experimentation and bought a pureblooded Shorthorn Durham bull to breed. His growing interest in agriculture prompted him to write letters to the Ithaca Chronicle and the Ithaca Journal about agriculture and to call for reviving a county agricultural society in 1840. He was named marshal of the 1841 Tompkins County Fair and one of the judges at the New York State Fair in Syracuse.

In 1842, Cornell purchased the patent for a new plow for both side-hill and level-land use, which was designed in Ithaca. He hoped to sell the patent rights to machinists or merchants who would manufacture and sell the plows locally. Though he was not particularly successful, he got to travel though Maine and Georgia -- often on foot -- and wrote home about the land and people he encountered, commenting on slavery, the plantation system and the general backwardness of Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.

An example is his observations is this excerpt from an Aug. 18, 1844, letter Cornell wrote to his wife:

"And is there aught but happyness, you will inquire in a land whose prases are sung by so many? Ah! Would to God that it were so. Hark! Methinks I hear at this moment the shreaks of human misery. Yes it is the slave dealer who has just sold yonder wretched being and is tearing her from her offspring, to deliver her to the inhuman purchaser to be taken to a strange land where home and children are no more seen for ever. Yes,---this "Sunny South" this land of praise, is cursed with human slavery. The Soul of man is made an article of merchandize by his fellow man and can such a land be happy? No! Happyness does not dwell in any land that is scard by the blighting curse of Slavery. [sic]"

Adapted by Susan S. Lang from the Web site "Invention and Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-Century Life."