See quot. 1838. Also PINE BARRENS.
1784. For 180 miles beyond these waters is a mountainous barren which can never be inhabited & will of course form a safe separation between us & any other State.—Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, ‘Writings’ (1894), iii. 421. (N.E.D.)
1784. This land lies open to the barrens, where there are many hundred acres without timber, and thick set with blue grass.—Advt., Maryland Journal, Aug. 17.
1799. Cotton lands in N. Carolina, advertised as “well wooded throughout; free from scrubby barrens.”—The Aurora (Phila.), Nov. 12.
1805. The animals called skunks are extremely plenty and tame in the barrens of Kentucky.—Matthew Lyon to William Duane, Mass. Spy, June 26.
1816. Nothing grows upon the barrens but bushes and scrub-oaks.—Letter from Ohio, Mass. Spy, Jan. 10.
1823. They burn all the logs and trees rolled together in immense heaps, and prefer the wood-land to the barrens, the latter being thinly timbered with dwarfish trees and shrubs.—W. Faux, ‘Memorable Days in America,’ pp. 207–8 (Lond.).
1823. I would not give one of my quarter-sections for all the neighbourhood of the barrens.—Id., p. 320.
1838. Wolves, ’coons and other wild ‘varments,’ which once roamed the ‘cane-brakes’ and ‘barrens’ of this neutral land, as if scorning to be shot by a race of men.—B. Drake, ‘Tales and Sketches,’ p. 75 (Cincinnati).
1838. The region … was that, of very extensive application in the West, styled “Barrens,” by no means implying unproductiveness of soil, but a species of surface of heterogeneous character, uniting prairie with timber or forest, and usually a description of land as fertile, healthy, and well-watered as may be found.—E. Flagg, ‘The Far West,’ i. 191 (N.Y.).
