FORTY-SECOND ANNUAL CONVENTION 139 



I suggested to the business men there, and I don't want 

 to make the assertion too broad, that we get together, invite 

 the farmers to a meeting, have the business men of the town 

 ask them to become members of the Commercial Club and be 

 a business man with the farmer with equal feeling and on equal 

 footing, and at the first meeting the invitations were sent out 

 by the secretary, the meeting was held in the basement of the; 

 Christian Church, there were over four hundred sat down to the 

 table, a large majority of them were farmers. We had good 

 speakers there and some of the farmers responded, and later 

 we had another meeting like that and there was a good attend- 

 ance and there is a general good feeling between Centralia 

 business men and the farmers in the vicinity of Centralia, and as 

 a banker I want to say that I observe one thing, I sell less draffs 

 to Montgomery Ward & Company and Sears, Roebuck & Com- 

 pany than I did three years ago. Today every business man- 

 in Centralia is a booster for the farmer, and every farmer, as 

 far as I know, is a booster for every business man in Centralia, 

 and there is a general good feeling there. 



Out of this grew the idea that to develop these farms to 

 the best advantage, the dairy industry should be encouraged 

 and the proposition was made to the farmers owning their' 

 farms, who were fairly successful, that the banks would loan' 

 them the money at six per cent on long time to buy good cows.' 

 The cows must be of good dairy types and dairy families and- 

 we bought Guernsey cattle, not that they are any better than the 

 Holstein, or Jersey, but because they were already there and 

 our idea was to develop that community along one line of breed- 

 ing of the dairy type, and we have been pushing the Guernsey 

 cattle. 



An Association was organized, officers elected, and grew 

 into a North, South, East and West groups, and it was recv-' 

 ommended that stock be issued and that bulls be bought for 

 each of these groups from different families so that they might' 

 be changed and save additional expense. Three of them have 

 been purchased of as good families as we could buy, not adher- 

 ing entirely to the type but to the producing qualities. 



