In the spring the wheat was very thin and worm-eaten. I dressed the clover well, and mowed near two tons at two crops, and sowed the land with wheat. was a barley stubble, with a good plant of clover. From " Letters and Papers on Agriculture, Planning, &c.: Selected from the Correspondence-Book of the Society Instituted in Bath, for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, within the Counties of Somerset, Wilts, Glocester, and Dorset, an the City and County of Bristol," in The London Review of English and Foreign Literature (April 1780): Here in chronological order, are the earliest matches for "spring cleaning" from a Google Books search of works published before 1860.
The historical record suggests that "spring cleaning" was a familiar farming expression-though perhaps not a set phrase-in Great Britain by the late 1700s, and that it was an established term for seasonal housecleaning in parts of the United States by the 1840s. I suspect that the origin of "spring cleaning" is agricultural and has to do with clearing fields of the previous year's stubble prior to sowing a new crop.
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