Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][ocr errors][subsumed]

THE TECHNICAL WORLD MAGAZINE

VOL. XV

AUGUST, 1911

NO. 6

S

REJUVENATING THE EAST

By

AGNES C. LAUT

PITE of the cry "back-to-theland," the last census shows that the trend is still from farm to factory, from country to town. In one section of New York State alone more than 400,000 people have abandoned the country for city life. Perhaps, that word "abandoned" is a misleader. The farms are still owned, but their owners are trying in vain to sell them; just as the farms were deserted in the first place because the owners tried in vain to make a living from them.

If you gathered up all the untenanted farms of the United States and laid them in an oblong block, they would cover an area twice the size of Massachusetts, four times the size of Connecticut, fifteen times bigger than Rhode Island, half as large as the State of Ohio; or if you stretched them out on a straight line ten miles broad, they would cover from Maine to Florida-16,000 square milesliterally a world more tenantless than when Christopher Columbus discovered America; for when Columbus came, at least Indians were getting a living from this wilderness of waste land.

What is the matter? Is it a case of wanted-a-new-discoverer-of-Down-East? Look at the facts; then look at them again! Where does the most of that

abandoned farm area lie? Within a hundred mile radius of the biggest cities in America. The two largest areas of unworked farms are in the southeast and in New England-within commuting distance of the biggest markets in the world. The city and commuting population of New York is estimated at 6,800,000; and one-third of the abandoned farms in America lie within a hundred mile radius of that market.

"You can today buy hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Indiana, and Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee and Pennsylvania for $10 an acre, which twenty-five years ago brought prices of $100 and $75 an acre," declared a soil expert of the Mississippi Valley. In one section of New York-from Pennsylvania northward-there is said to be a section seventy miles wide where you can practically buy a farm for nothing. That is you pay a bargain counter price for the buildings, and get the land free.

What is the matter? Where is our Christopher Columbus to explore a way through this sea of waste?

When you come to examine the average yearly incomes in these abandoned farm areas, the thing is still more hopeless. The average yearly income in the abandoned farm area of the South is not $75 a year-a figure that would put a

[graphic][ocr errors][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors]

peon of Mexico, or a shepherd of Egypt, or a serf of Russia to the blush. The average yearly income of the farmer in the abandoned farm areas of New York and New England runs from $300 to $400 a year-less than half an Italian ditch digger earns, about the same amount as a little girl in one of the sweatshop shirt factories can earn.

Again, what is the matter? Are we land-sick, or man-sick, or gone to punkyheadedness from dry-rot in our methods? This does not mean that there are not thousands of splendid modern paying farms Down East. There are; but they are so far outnumbered by the degenerate farm that the averages are reduced to these miserable figures.

It costs $150 an acre to clear fruit lands in Washington; and when those lands are set out in fruit, they earn ten per cent. on a valuation of $500 an acre -earn it easily. I know one fruit ranch that yielded 200 per cent. on a valuation of $500 an acre. You can buy fruit land in the East and Middle West for noth

ing, with fine buildings thrown in at about ten cents on the dollar, with old orchards only waiting the pruning shears and spray wagon to do their bestest, and

take a breath and look at it-the owners can't sell those lands at any price. What is the matter?

You look wise and talk vaguely about "the labor question." Prices for produce have increased only twenty-five per cent., and the middleman gets most of that; while the cost of labor has increased onehundred-and-fifty per cent. Very true; but if that is not so much piffle, why does it not apply to the West as well as to the East? You have to pay $2 a day for a good orchard man or wheat harvester in the West; and love or money cannot keep him longer than six months; for he is determined to own his own land and hire his own labor. In the East, you can get an orchard man or harvester for $25, at most $40 a month; and I give you my word of honor from a variety of experiences, his enterprising spirit will never rise to the heights of owning his

[graphic]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[merged small][ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

nat

old

hears

and

OWD

bout duce

ent,

chat:

one

rue:

11 as

day

har

oney

ths;

land

for

give

y of

will

his

ELECTRIC RAILWAY BUILT BY THE ORCHARDISTS OF GRAND VALLEY, COLORADO. TO
CARRY THEIR PRODUCE TO THE SHIPPING POINT.

own land and labor. The labor question
is a difficulty impartial as the dews of
heaven. It falls alike East and West;
only in the West, you pay higher for the
difficulty.

You say the soil of these Eastern areas
is exhausted; but that is as vague an
explanation as the talk about labor. The
greatest soil expert in the world-Sir
John Lawe of England-declares that
when you come to analyze the chemical
constituents of soil, the difference in
farming areas is not so much in chemical
composition as condition of tilth-or how
the soil is kept; and that brings you down.
to the rock-bottom of your explanations
-methods. You talk of the great wheat
yield from the plains of the West; but do
you know that the special wheat sections
of Massachusetts and New York can
raise wheat crops that make the thirty
bushel yields of the West look small? I
say-can raise, not do raise. That is-a
few men raise them like a specialist, who
got up in the fifties and sixties per acre
in Massachusetts last

year

The rest

[ocr errors]

don't; and again your explanation re-
solves itself not into soil, but the man
and his methods. Or take the apple soils!
Apples don't want humus. They want
sandy loam and upland and light and
drainage and air. Haven't the hilly
plateaus of New England such uplands
Yes-but
good as Colorado's mesas?

the orchards have too often been planted
down in the chill of the valley; or else
like Topsy have "just grow'd." though
Eastern apples can boast a brilliant col-
oring and fine flavor not possible in
warm irrigated areas. Why hasn't New
England, then, such fabulous apple rec-
ords as Washington and Oregon and
Colorado? Because orchard farming has
soil
your
not been the custom; and there
explanation is, again, back to the rock
bottom fact of man and methods.

When you come to discuss market, the
advantages are all with the East. The
market is practically at the back door of
Yet
this whoie abandoned farm area.
the West is beating out the East in farm
values and profits

431

[merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][graphic][merged small]

be money enough for labor and profit; and there you are again back to methods.

I admit when you come to compare Eastern and Western country schools, there is good ground for the complaint that the Eastern school has been educating away from the farm to the city. The high school is purely a feeder for the universities; and the country schoolthe least said about the country school, the better. Within an hour's drive of where I sit writing, within commuting distance from New York, are cross-road back-line schools that would be a disgrace to a sod hen house. I can think of a dozen in this county that you would never take for anything but a shut up hog house or the closed cabin of a wood. cutter. "Squabble Hole," one is called. "Sin Patch" another; and I think of a third not far from the city of Poughkeepsie that I had driven past for six years before I guessed it could be a school-crowded between the bush and the weed grown road, solid board shutters always closed, a dirty floor littered with old paper, shut off from sunlight

never saw

anything remotely equal to the absolute badness of the backroad schools of the Eastern States. Again, the school argument brings you back not to the fault of the land

but to the fault of the methods.

William Alien White once wakened a state by asking: "What's the matter with Kansas?" We need a William Allen White with a trumpet loud as Gabriel's to waken the Rip Van Winkles of Down East with a similar slogan.

If any one wants proof that something very deadly vital is the matter, he has only to begin farm hunting on the spot in the East. Two years ago, I entered on that joyous crusade of back to the land by inserting an advertisement in a big daily, and following up the leaders that seemed to promise anything. I think the answers came at the rate of about eighty a day. It took a month to sort out the impossibles-the stone piles on top of mountains where you could sit drinking in scenery at $30,000 a gulp; ideal sites for "them millionaires" of which the bred-out New Englander sits dreaming till he stagnates of dry rot with the effortless patience of a tombstone and the big hopes of an Arizona mining promoter looking for a sucker.

« PreviousContinue »