lO AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



meeting of the State Board of Trade much Hke a Pomona 

 Grange meeting. The president reminded them, even the sec- 

 ond time, that they were supposed to pay some attention to the 

 subject of new industries, but they kept right on talking about 

 fertiUzers and crops just Hke any other set of farmers. And 

 when interested, these keen business men are no mean students 

 of the problems of agriculture. The recent great Corn and 

 Fruit Show in the city of Portland showed not only an interest 

 in the subject in the general promotion of business, but an 

 intense interest among business men in the occupation itself, 

 in making up the large hst of special prizes contributed prac- 

 tically by members of our Board of Trade. We found in 

 working for these prizes so many men who seemed to have a 

 great interest in farming that getting the prizes was one of the 

 easiest things you ever saw. 



You have met to promote a great branch of agriculture. 

 Your exhibition will stimulate interest and your program, with 

 addresses by specialists, wiH lead to better and more profitable 

 methods. I hope you will also induce those who know how to 

 do things to branch out and extend their operations in order 

 to break away from the 7x9 efforts. All branches of farming 

 should have the Aroostook spirit, throughout the State. When 

 the Aroostook man got the right method he gave up the idea 

 of a potato patch and planted a field. Years ago a prominent 

 man in one of Maine's cotton mills when a new building was 

 finished, said : "This corporation has laid its last brick. We 

 have room enough." But that corporation has been laying 

 bricks ever since and is still at it. Expansion is as necessary 

 to the growth of business as to the growth of trees. I wish 

 that the broad gauge view of extensive operations by right 

 methods might spread all over Maine, whether in orcharding 

 or whatever crops may be grown to the best advantage. 



When I was a boy I remember seeing some men tear down 

 an old house, to erect another on the spot. The house w^as old, 

 weather-beaten and delapidated. Tt seemed to me as though its 

 building must have been way back in the early settlement of 

 the town. But an old man took me to a near-by pasture on the 

 same farm and pointed out a grass-grown hollow surrounded 

 by apple trees, and said that was where the pioneer's dwelling 

 stood, and that the house I then saw demolished was the second 

 that had been worn out on that farm. Last year I visited that 



