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Selecting the Farm 37 



into favorable location. The larger currents of 

 world events, the smaller American currents, 

 affect land values. Within fifty years the wheat 

 region in America has shifted from the Middle 

 States to the Western, centering about Illinois, 

 and again northward, across Minnesota, into 

 Canada and British America. The potato belt 

 has removed from the latitude of Boston and 

 Chicago to that of northern Maine; the cotton 

 belt, from the Sea Islands of the Carolinas to the 

 coast of Texas. Truck-farming is more profitable 

 in Florida than on Long Island. Nature, that 

 IS, climate, makes this possible. Transportation 

 solves the problem. Every market town in Amer- 

 ica is now close to the fruit-lands of California, 

 the cotton fields of Texas, the truck-farms of 

 Florida, the vineyards of Chautauqua and the 

 Lake Erie Valley, the potato fields of Maine, the 

 berry fields of New Jersey, the tobacco fields of 

 Virginia and the Carolinas. Though we commonly 

 think in terms of our political geography, our real 

 geography is economic, — a geography of lines of 

 trade and travel, of railroads and steamship lines. 

 The real distances in America are best learned in 

 the market place. 



Lines of trade and travel, general and local, 

 determine the value of location, and by such lines 

 must be understood the available ones. A through 

 railroad may traverse a farm, yet the farm itself 

 may be practically many miles from a railroad. It 

 is the most accessible farm land that is most 



