THR ALABAMA OPPORTUNITY. 89 



together as co-related facts. Then they are to be considered in 

 the Hght of the fact that altogether the soil is the fine farm 

 land that characterizes the Wiregrass, and although no County 

 of South or South East Alabama is better equipped with rail- 

 roads than is Covington, fine farm lands can be bought for 

 from $5 to $12 an acre. As a whole I found lands in no South 

 or Southeast Alabama County so moderate in price. What a 

 fine field for development, therefore, does the big County 

 hold! 



It is pierced by two branches of the Central of Georgia. It 

 is cut from end to end by the Louisville and Nashville. The 

 land is the clay and sand so suitable for farming, so fruitful 

 and so sure of fine crops. And thousands and thousands of 

 acres to be had for from $5 to $12 an acre. These conditions 

 in themselves are assurances of the truth of the claim of the 

 Covingion County people that just as the county doubled it^ 

 population in the past ten }ears even so would it double its 

 population in the next ten years. 



WIDE FIELD FOR PROGRESS. 



The cheap lands, the railroad facilities, the fertile soil, the 

 climate, which is that of South Alabama — and that is to say it 

 is as fine as any climate in the world — are impressive in their 

 possibilities of the country's future. So wide a field is this 

 county for progress one fancies that civilization could never 

 become crowded. So fine is the soil that one wonders why 

 other Southeast Alabama counties are so thickly settled, and the 

 wonder grows that in other counties land like those in Coving- 

 ton sell for $20 and $25 an acre. 



A national movement of immigration is setting towards the 

 South. The movement is too obvious, too manifest, to be un- 

 noted. It needed not the telegraphic dispatch so widely pub- 

 lished the other day that 487 white immigrants left Chicago on 

 one train to come to one Alabama county to convince the ob- 

 serving man of the existence of this movement. From the 

 Northwest people are moving from the snow and ice fields to 

 the sunny and cordial pine lands of Alabama. The tide of 

 European immigration is turning, slowly, but nevertheless 

 turning, from the North and the Northwest to the land of sun- 

 shine and Gulf breezes. The best that is in the movement 



