38 THE TEXAS RICE BOOK. 



THE RICE CROP. 



Beaumont, the hustling capital city of Jefferson County, 

 with a population of 12,000, is now and for a great many year* 

 past has been the recognized lumber center of the Southwest. 

 Till two years ago its whole business depended upon the lumber 

 trade. Railroads came to it because of this trade. New mills 

 sprung up in the grand virgin long leaf pine forests near it, and 

 Beaumont became the great distributing depot of their piney pro- 

 ducts, as well as commissary supply store for a territory extend- 

 ing over 150 miles north into the East Texas forests. The agri- 

 cultural products of the surrounding counties of Jefferson, 

 Chambers, Orange and Hardin were practically nothing until 

 about two or three years ago. In imitation of their Louisiana 

 neighbors across the Sabine, these Southeast Texas farmers be- 

 gan to plant rice. 



Although so new a Texas industry its success was so re- 

 markable and the rapid increase in acreage and output of rice so 

 astonishing as to gain the immediate attention of most readers 

 of The News, through whose columns they have learned all ma- 

 terial facts concerning it. For the benefit of more careless read- 

 ers the salient facts of the rice industry in Southeast Texas may 

 be given. About 55,000 acres were cultivated in rice in 1900, 

 There are 125 'miles of irrigating canals, and twenty-four irrigat- 

 ing deep wells. These irrigating plants have cost an aggregate 

 of $850,000. The total Texas crop of 1900 was over half a mil- 

 lion bushels. Its total value was more than one and a half mil- 

 lion dollars. And last, but by no means least in its significance, 

 at Beaumont have been built three large rice mills, at an aggre- 

 gate cost of over $200,000, whose total daily output of finest 

 grade milled rice is 350,000 pounds. One is ready to believe the 

 statement that Beaumont has doubled its population in the past 

 two years, and the prophecy that it will probably double itself 

 again in the next two. 



As to the effects of the storm in these eastern counties, an 

 interview with Mr. George J. McManus, formerly of Galveston 

 but now at Beaumont, elicited the following : 



"I was at Minneapolis at the time of the big storm. Read 

 of it in morning papers of the 9th of September, and started 

 within an hour for Galveston. Reached Beaumont evening of 

 nth, to learn that I was not needed at Galveston; could do noth- 

 ing there and would better not go. From the Minneapolis, Kan- 

 sas City and St. Louis papers I had been led to believe there was 

 not a house or tree standing in East Texas, to say nothing of 

 such a puny plant as rice. From the I2th till the i8th of Sep- 

 tember I interviewed every rice planter I saw, and visited more 

 than twenty plantations. I have been familiar all my life pre- 

 viously to the past five years with the cultivation of wheat, oats, 

 barley and rye. I knew that any one of those crops after such a 

 wind storm would have been flat upon the ground, and the loss 



