Where To Farm
When my father was over sixty years old, and had lived some twenty years
in Erie County, Pennsylvania, he said to me: "I have several times
removed, and always toward the West; I shall never remove again; but,
were I to do so, it would be toward the East. Experience has taught me
that the advantages of every section are counterbalanced by
disadvantages, and that, where any crop is easily produced, there it
sells low, a
d sometimes cannot be sold at all. I shall live and die
right here; but, were I to remove again, it would not be toward the
West."
This is but one side of a truth, and I give it for whatever it may be
worth. Had my father plunged into the primitive forest in his
twenty-fifth rather than his forty-fifth year, he would doubtless have
become more reconciled to pioneer life than he ever did. I would advise
no one over forty years of age to undertake, with scanty means, to dig a
farm out of the dense forest, where great trees must be cut down and cut
up, rolled into log-heaps, and hurried to ashes where they grew. Where
half the timber can be sold for enough to pay the cost of cutting, the
case is different; but I know right well that digging a farm out of the
high woods is, to any but a man of wealth, a slow, hard task. Making one
out of naked prairie, five to ten miles from timber, is less difficult,
but not much. He who can locate where he has good timber on one side and
rich prairie on the other is fortunate, and may hope, if his health be
spared, to surround himself with every needed comfort within ten years.
Still, the pioneer's life is a rugged one, especially for women and
children; and I should advise any man who is worth $2,000 and has a
family, to buy out an "improvement" (which, in most cases, badly needs
improving) on the outskirt of civilization, rather than plunge into the
pathless forest or push out upon the unbroken prairie. I rejoice that
our Public Lands are free to actual settlers; I believe that many are
thereby enabled to make for themselves homes who otherwise would have
nothing to leave their children; yet I much prefer a home within the
boundaries of civilization to one clearly beyond them. There is a class
of drinking, hunting, frolicking, rarely working, frontiersmen, who seem
to have been created on purpose to erect log cabins and break paths in
advance of a different class of settlers, who regularly come in to buy
them out and start them along after a few years. I should here prefer to
follow rather than lead. If Co-operation shall ever be successfully
applied to the improvement of wild lands, I trust it may be otherwise.
He who has a farm already, and is content with it, has no reason to ask,
"Whither shall I go?" and he may rest assured that thoroughly good
farming will pay as well in New England as in Kansas or in Minnesota. I
advise no man who has a good farm anywhere, and is able to keep it, to
sell and migrate. I know men who make money by growing food within
twenty miles of this city quite as fast as they could in the West. If
you have money to buy and work it, and know how to make the most of it,
I believe you may find land really as cheap, all things considered, in
Vermont as in Wisconsin or Arkansas.
And yet I believe in migration--believe that there are thousands in the
Eastern and the Middle States who would improve their circumstances and
prospects by migrating to the cheaper lands and broader opportunities of
the West and South. For, in the first place, most men are by migration
rendered more energetic and aspiring; thrown among strangers, they feel
the necessity of exertion as they never felt it before. Needing almost
everything, and obliged to rely wholly on themselves, they work in their
new homes as they never did in their old; and the consequences are soon
visible all around them.
"A stern chase is a long chase," say the sailors; and he who buys a farm
mainly on credit, intending to pay for it out of its proceeds, finds
interest, taxes, sickness, bad seasons, hail, frost, drouth, tornadoes,
floods, &c., &c., deranging his calculations and impeding his progress,
until he is often impelled to give up in despair. There are men who can
surmount every obstacle and defy discouragement--these need no advice;
but there are thousands who, having little means and large families, can
grow into a good farm more easily and far more surely than they can pay
for it; and these may wisely seek homes where population is yet sparse
and land is consequently cheap. Doubtless, some migrate who might better
have forborne; yet the instinct which draws our race toward sunset is
nevertheless a true one. The East will not be depopulated; but the West
will grow more rapidly in the course of the next twenty years than ever
in the past. The Railroads which have brought Kansas and Minnesota
within three days, and California within a week of us, have rendered
this inevitable.
But the South also invites immigration as she never did till now. Her
lands are still very cheap; she is better timbered, in the average, than
the West; her climate attracts; her unopened mines and unused
water-power call loudly for enterprise, labor and skill. It is absurd to
insist that her soil is exhausted when not one-third of it has ever yet
been plowed. I do not advise solitary migration to the South, because
she needs schools, mills, roads, bridges, churches, &c., &c., which the
solitary immigrant can neither provide nor well do without: and I have
no assurance that he, if obliged to work out for present bread, would
find those ready to employ and willing to pay him; but let a hundred
Northern farmers and mechanics worth $1,000 to $3,000 each combine to
select (through chosen agents) and buy ten or twenty thousand acres in
some Southern State, embracing hill and vale, timber and tillage,
water-power and minerals, and divide it equitably among themselves,
after laying it out with roads, a park, a village-plat, sites for
churches, schools, &c., and I am confident that they can thus make
pleasant homes more cheaply and speedily there than almost anywhere
else.
Good farming land, improved or unimproved, is this day cheaper in the
United States, all things considered, than in any other country--cheaper
than it can long remain. So many are intent on short cuts to riches that
the soil is generally neglected, and may be bought amazingly cheap in
parts of Connecticut as well as in Iowa or Nebraska. When I was last in
Illinois, I rode for some hours beside a gray-coated farmer of some
sixty years, who told me this: "I came here thirty years ago, and took
up, at $1-1/4 per acre, a good tract of land, mainly in timber. I am now
selling off the timber at $100 per acre, reserving the land." That seems
to me a good operation--not so quick as a corner in the stock-market,
but far safer. And, while I would advise no man to incur debt, I say
most earnestly to all who have means, "Look out the place where you
would prefer to live and die; take time to suit yourself thoroughly;
choose it with reference to your means, your calling, your expectations,
and, if you can pay for it, buy it. Do not imagine that land is cheap
in the West or the South only; it is to be found cheap in every State
by those who are able to own and who know how to use it."
I earnestly trust that the obvious advantages of settling in colonies
are to be widely and rapidly improved by our people, nearly as follows:
One thousand heads of families unite to form a colony, contribute $100
to $500 each to defray the cost of seeking out and securing a suitable
location, and send out two or three of the most capable and trustworthy
of their number to find and purchase it; and now let their lands be
surveyed and divided into village or city lots at or near the center,
larger allotments (for mechanics' and merchants' homes) surrounding that
center, and far larger (for farms) outside of these; and let each
member, on or soon after his arrival, select a village-lot, out-lot,
farm, or one of each if he chooses and can pay for them. Let ample
reservations of the best sites for churches, school-houses, a town hall,
public park, etc., be made in laying out the village, and let each
purchaser of a lot or farm be required to plant shade-trees along the
highways which skirt or traverse it. If irrigation by common effort be
deemed necessary, let provision be made for that. Run up a large, roomy
structure for a family hotel or boarding-house; and now invite each
stockholder to come on, select his land, pay for it, and get up some
sort of a dwelling, leaving his family to follow when this shall have
been rendered habitable; but, if they insist on coming on with him and
taking their chances, so be it.