site logo

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.



More

;