LANDOLOGY 23 



the hardships of the early pioneer. No schools were established 

 and they built their churches in the wilderness. The cities and 

 markets were distant. 



The man who comes here has all of their prospects and none 

 of their disadvantages. Great railroads run by him; large cities 

 and unlimited markets are right at his door. Schools and churches 

 surround him; good neighbors are near by. He starts with cheap, 

 virgin, uncleared land in the midst of a settled community. 



There is no other way for a man to get rich on a farm. 



To buy high-priced land one needs to get rich beforehand, and 

 a man cannot do that by farm labor, nor by renting, nor by working 

 for others. 



It is always the advance in land that gives the well-to-do 

 farmer his competence ; and no one can doubt that here the advance 

 is bound to be the greatest and quickest. 



BOUGHT RIGHT AND SOLD RIGHT. When a wholesaler 



buys a product which 



is to be resold to consumers, he is in duty bound to buy it at such 

 a price that he can resell it to the consumer for a reasonable sum. 

 The Skidmore Land Company bought these lands years ago from 

 the lumber companies when those companies found it absolutely 

 necessary to have additional capital to continue their lumber busi- 

 ness. Land was very cheap at that time in tracts of two and three 

 hundred thousand acres, but even under such circumstances the 

 Skidmore Land Company bought these lands at what was generally 

 considered a sacrifice price. The result is that today land is selling 

 here at from $10 to $35 per acre which will produce acre for acre 

 just as much or more than land selling in Illinois or Iowa at from 

 $150 to $250 per acre. Land in other parts of Wisconsin no closer 

 to the best markets of America, and with scarcely half the' produc- 

 ing capacity, bring $150 to $200 per acre. 



In a few years all the land here will be just as well settled and 

 improved as the lands of southern Wisconsin. It will be worth 

 just as much as the neighboring land, and that means from $40 to 

 $80 per acre more than you pay for it. All that it lacks today is 

 the clearing. A large part of this has been done for you in that 

 the timber has been cut, and on most of these tracts the stumps 

 have rotted for from eight to fifteen years 4 We did not put these 

 lands on the market until the stumps had rotted sufficiently to begin 

 clearing operations. 



The clearing cost will vary on different tracts of land, but for 

 the most part it will not cost more than from five to fifteen dollars 

 per acre, running somewhat above that figure on some of our best 

 lands. On much of this land a man who does his own clearing can 

 make excellent wages out of what he gets for the down timber, 



