I The BuLLETisr, 9 



Country Roads. 

 In addition to our superb railroad and water transportation facilities, 

 there was launched some years ago a general movement for better coun- 

 try roads in IsTorth Carolina. That movement is still going on with 

 daily increasing momentum. As a result, there is hardly a county in 

 the State which has not built, or is contemplating the building, of good 

 macadam or sand-clay roads leading from the county-seat, or principal 

 town of the county, into the remotest agricultural districts. These 

 main lines of good roads have secondary roads leading into them which 

 are also graded and made good. In a word, both the railroad and dirt- 

 road facilities in North Carolina are, in many counties, simply unsur- 

 passed by any state in the south and hardly equaled by any state in 

 the Union. The farmers of North Carolina have been behind this good 

 roads movement ever since its inception, thus showing the progressive 

 spirit which at present pervades the agricultural classes of this State, 



TELEPHONES. . 



In addition to our superb transportation facilities, rural telephones 

 are found everywhere, thus putting the farmer in immediate communi- 

 cation with the markets in his locality and with those of distant locali- 

 ties at a cost ranging from 75 cents to $1 per month. 



EDUCATION. 



Education — agricultural education — lies at the foundation of good 

 and successful farming. The ignorant man can no longer "farm if he 

 cannot do anything else." The needs of the increasing population and 

 the demands of refined tastes require that not only a greater acreage 

 production, but a finer quality of product, must be put upon the market, 

 and this can be done only by intelligent farming. Poor lands cannot 

 make high average acre-yields and rich lands cannot produce fine quality 

 when manipulated by unskilled hands. Regardless of the yield per acre, 

 there is no land so poor as that of the ignorant farmer, and none so 

 rich as that of the man who knows how to manage his soils. 



Gold mines and phosphate beds are but barren wastes to the man 

 who knows nothing of what is beneath the surface, while they are rich 

 treasures to the man of trained mind and skilled hand. Less than forty 

 years ago "Old Red Mountain" in Alabama was given "to boot" in a 

 horse swap. Since then the vast deposits of iron stored away in those 

 hills have built Birmingham and rolled millions upon millions of dollars 

 into the coffers of the ironmasters. Why did not the original ov/ner 

 get a fortune out of this rich deposit of metal? And so it has been 

 with the owners of many poor North Carolina farms. Hundreds of "old 

 worn-out farms" have been sold or given "to boot," as it were, by the 

 erstwhile owners who, failing to properly understand the local condi- 

 tions and the possibilities of their acres, could not even support them- 

 selves and their families. The buyers, knowing the intrinsic value and 



