Rational Standard Squab Book. 
CHAPTER I. 
SQUABS PAY. 
Experience of a Customer who Started in January, 1902, Erected a Plant 
Worth $3,000 and Made Money Almost from the Start—Settlements 
of Squab Breeders in Iowa, California, New Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania—Large Incomes Made from Pigeons—Squab Plants Kuown to 
‘be Making Money—The Hard Working Farmer and the Easy Work- 
ing Squab Raiser—No Occupation for a Drone—No Exaggeration. 
“Will it pay me to raise squabs?” is the first question which the be- 
ginner asks. We take the case of a man who bought a Manual in January, 
1902. His boys had kept a few pigeons but had never handled them in a 
commercial way, nor tried to make any money with them. The reading 
of the book gave him the first real light on the squab industry. Possibly 
he was more ready to believe because he knew from his own personal ex- 
perience that a squab grows to market size in four weeks and is then 
readily marketable. Anyway, he started at once to build a squab house 
according to the directions given. The ground was too hard for him to 
get a pickaxe into, so he laid the foundation timbers on bricks, rushed 
the work ahead with the help of good carpenters and sent on his order for 
breeding stock. In the course of a few weeks he ordered a second lot of 
breeders, followed by a third and a fourth, and he kept adding new build- 
ings. When spring came and the ground softened, he jacked up his first 
squab house, took out the bricks at the four corners and put in cedar 
posts. By the middle of July he had five handsome squab houses and fly- 
ing pens, all built by skilled labor in the best possible style at a cost of at 
least $300 apiece. With his buildings and their fittings and his birds, his 
plant now (August, 1902) stands for an expenditure of between $2,000 and 
$3,000. His next move, this fall, will be to buy a farm where he can have 
more room, and which will be auxiliary to his present plant. 
This gentleman lives in a locality where he had to put up nice-looking 
buildings, or the neighbors would have complained. He spent probably 
three times more money on his buildings than the average beginner would 
spend. He is a superintendent of a large manufacturing plant, a man of 
push and energy, and he has four young boys in his family who have 
helped with the wife and grandfather to make the venture successful. It 
has been a paying venture almost from the very start. Everything that 
we wrote about squabs as money makers came true in his case. One of 
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