404 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



In this connection it is well to consider that the census of 1S74 shows that 

 Saginaw county is ahead of all the old counties in population except Wayne 

 county — ahead of Oakland, or Washtenaw, or Jackson, or Lenawee ; ahead of 

 all the new counties, except Kent, and is the third county in the State in pop- 

 lation. The population in 1874 of Saginaw county proves to be 48,409, in 

 1870,39,098, showing an increase of 9,311 in four years. 



We have already stated the fact that the salt interest of the Saginaw is 

 believed to be a successful, permanent, and established interest and resource. 

 There seems to be no exhaustion or failure in the supply. In 1860 the product 

 was 4,000 barrels ; in 1870, ten years after, it was 046,516 barrels ; in 1873, it was 

 810,495 barrels. No section of the State, in the Lower Peninsula, can show 

 any such resource. This is permanent, we say. We treat the lumber interest 

 as ephemeral, to exist, perhaps, from twenty-five to fifty years. There is 

 another interest that is just starting in the Saginaw Valley, that is bound to 

 be permanent: we refer to the agricultural interests, including, of course, the 

 horticultural. This is in its infancy, and to encourage it, to instruct it, to 

 quicken and stimulate it, were among the objects of holding the State Agri- 

 cultural Fair in this great Saginaw Valley. 



A State fair should be something beside a slioio ; it should be a school of 

 technology; an Agricultural College; a text-book of mechanics, manufactures, 

 and agriculture. It should teach by its models and by its examples. New 

 counties want these as well as the old. The old have them, the new want 

 them. 



Respecting the agriculture of this Saginaw Valley, we are again indebted to 

 Mr. Bates for a ^qw remarks, and they are as follows : 



OUR FARMING INTERESTS. 



" As late as 1860 the general impression in regard to the Saginaw Valley, 

 shared in by many prominent residents as well as by a large majority of those 

 outsiders, who happened to know from observation or experience anything 

 concerning this new region of country, was that while its timber was unques- 

 tionably valuable, — at that date this resource was not estimated at one-tenth 

 of its actual value, — by reason of its interminable swamps and marshes, the 

 sterility that ordinarily attaches to land in pine districts, — kuown at that time 

 to the casual observer as ' pine barrens,' — the liability to frosts, the lack of 

 drainage and the unusual obstacles to be met with in clearing the forests and 

 making the soil available for cultivation, it could by no possibility ever become 

 eyen a moderately productive farming district. There Avere grave doubts at 

 that time in the minds of many fair-minded, excellent citizens, gentlemen 

 thoroughly identified with the interests of the valley, whether Gratiot county, 

 which has become already as it were a garden, and Tuscola county, many por- 

 tions of which are to-day as rich and productive as the best agricultural dis- 

 tricts in the west, were not too frosty and unreliable as to climate to warrant 

 the broad extent of farming improvements that had already been vigorously 

 inaugurated in these counties, and concerning ' the shore,' the counties of 

 Bay, Midland, and Isabella, there was by no means ' faith like unto a grain of 

 mustard seed' in this direction. 



"This doubt, and the persistent misrepresentation in regard to Saginaw 

 Valley, as a land of swamps, frosts and sterility, made previous to 1860, has 

 seemed to keep the farming interest, never too prone to prosper in a lumber 

 country, far behind what it should be at this time, and the loss in accumula- 

 tions by reason of this delay may be counted by millions of dollars ; but with 



