October, 1912 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



109 



quent operations. I found multitudes of truckers 

 who were raising large families on five acres of 

 ground, while others, owning only thirty acres, had 

 become rich. 



Practical Views — Safety of Investment in 

 Land 



THERE was not a particle of romance in my 

 aspiration for a farm, neither had I formed a 

 single visionary theory which was there to be tested. 

 My notions were all sober and prosaic. I had strug- 

 gled all my life for dollars, because abundance of 

 them produces pecuniary comfort; and the change to 

 country life was to be, in reality, a mere continua- 

 tion of the struggle, but lightened by the assurance 

 that if the dollars thus to be acquired were fewer in 

 number, the certainty of earning enough of them 

 was likely to be greater. Crops might fail under 

 skies at one time too water}', at another too brassy 

 but no such disaster could equal those to which 

 commercial pursuits are uninterruptedly exposed. 

 For nearly twenty years I had been hampered with 

 having notes of my own or of other parties to pay; 

 but of all the farmers I had visited only one had 

 ever given a note, and he had made a vow never to 

 give another. My wife was shrewd enough to 

 observe and remark on this fact at the time, it was 

 so different from my own experience. She ad- 

 mitted there must be some satisfaction in carrying 

 on a business which did not require the giving of 

 notes. 



Looking at the matter of removal to the country 

 in a practical light, I found that in the city I was 

 paying three hundred dollars per annum rent for a 

 dwelling-house. It was the interest of five thousand 

 dollars; yet it afforded but a shelter for my family. 

 I might continue to pay that rent for fifty years, 

 without, at the end of that time, having acquired 

 the ownership of either a stone upon the chimney, 

 or a shingle in the roof. If the house rose in value 

 the rise would be to the owner's benefit, not to mine. 

 It would really be injurious to me — as the rise would 

 lead him to demand an increase of his rent. But 

 put the value of the house into a farm, or even the 

 half of it — the farm would have a dwelling-house 

 upon it, in which my family would find as good a 

 shelter, while the land, if cultivated as industriously 

 as I had always cultivated business, would belie the 

 flood of evidence I had been studying for many years 

 if it failed to yield to my efforts the returns which 

 it was manifestly returning to others. We would 

 live contentedly on a thousand dollars a year, and 

 here we should have no landlord to pay. My wife, 

 in pinching times, has financiered us through the 

 year on several hundred less. I confess to having 

 lived as' well on the diminished rations as I wanted 

 to. Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incred- 

 ible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue 

 in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner- 

 table can be made without sirloin steaks or cran- 

 berry tarts. 



Thus, let it be remembered, my views and aspir- 

 ations had no tinge of extravagance. My rule was 

 moderation. The tortures of a city struggle with- 

 out capital had sobered me down to being con- 

 tented with a bare competency. I might fail in 

 some particulars at the outset, from ignorance; but 

 I was in the prime of life, strong, active, industrious, 

 and tractable, and what I did not know I could soon 

 learn from others, for farmers have no secrets. 

 Then I had seen too much of the uncertainty of 

 banks and stocks, and ledger accounts, and promis- 

 sory notes, to be willing to invest anything in either 

 as a permanency. At best they are fluctuating and 

 uncertain, up to-day and down to-morrow. My 

 great preference had always been for land. 



In looking around among my wide circle of city 

 acquaintances, especially among the older families, 

 I could not fail to notice that most of them had 

 grown rich by the ownership of land. More than 

 once had I seen the values of all city property 

 improved and unimproved, apparently disappear; 

 lots without purchasers, and houses without ten- 

 ants, the community so poor and panic-stricken that 

 real estate became the merest drug. Yesterday the 

 collapse was caused by the destruction of the 

 National Bank; to-day it is the Tariff. Sheriffs 

 played havoc with houses and lands incumbered by 

 mortgages, and lawyers fattened on the rich harvest 

 of fees inaugurated by a Bankrupt Law. But those 



who, undismayed by the wreck around them, 

 courageously held on to land, came through in 

 safety. The storm having run its course and 

 exhausted its wrath, gave place to skies commer- 

 cially serene, and real estate swung back with an 

 irrepressible momentum to its former value, only to 

 keep on advancing to one even greater. 



I became convinced that safety lay in the owner- 

 ship of land. In all my inquiries both before leav- 

 ing the city, as well as since, I rarely heard of a 

 farmer becoming insolvent. When I did, and was 

 careful to ascertain the cause, it turned out that he 

 had either begun in debt, and was thus hampered 

 at the beginning, or had made bad bargains in 

 speculations outside of his calling, or wasted his 

 means in riotous living, or had in some way utterly 

 neglected his business. If not made rich by heavy 

 crops, I could find none who had been made poor by 

 bad ones. 



The reader may look back over every monetary 

 convulsion he may be able to remember, and he will 

 find that in all of them the agricultural community 

 came through with less disaster than any other 

 interest. Wheat grows and com ripens though all 

 the banks in the world may break, for seed time and 

 harvest is one of the divine promises to man, never 

 to be broken, because of its divine origin. They 

 grew and ripened before banks were invented, and 

 will continue to do so when banks and railroad bonds 

 shall have become obsolete. 



Moreover, the earthly fund for whose acquisition 

 we are all striving, we naturally desire to make a 

 permanent one. As we have worked for it, so we 

 trust that it will work for us and our children. Its 

 value, whatever that may be, depends on its per- 

 petuity — the continuance of its existence. A man 

 seeks to earn what will support and serve not only 

 himself, but his posterity. He would naturally 

 desire to have the estate descend to children and 

 grandchildren. This is one great object of his toil. 

 What, then, is the safest fund in which to invest, in 

 this country? What is the only fund which the 

 experience of the last fifty years has shown, with 

 very few exceptions, would be absolutely safe as a 

 provision for heirs? How many men, within that 

 period, assuming to act as trustees for estates, have 

 kept the trust fund invested in stocks, and when 

 distributing the principal among the heirs, have 

 found that most of it had vanished! Under cor- 

 porate insolvency it had melted into air. No pru- 

 dent man', accepting such a trust, and guaranteeing 

 its integrity, would invest the fund in stocks. 



Our country is filled with pecuniary wrecks from 

 causes like this. Thousands trust themselves dur- 

 ing their lifetime, to manage this description of 

 property', confident of their caution and sagacity. 

 With close watching and good luck, they may be 

 equal to the task; but the question still occurs as to 

 the probable duration of such a fund in families. 

 What is its safety when invested in the current 

 stocks of the country? There are no statistics 

 showing the probable continuance of estates in land 

 in families, and of estates composed of personal 

 property, such as stocks. But every bank cashier 

 will testify to one remarkable fact — than an heir 

 no sooner inherits stock in the bank than the first 

 thing he generally does is to sell and transfer it, and 

 that such sale is most frequently the first notice 

 given of the holder's death. 



Those, therefore, who acquire personal property, 

 acquire only what will last about a generation, 

 longer or snorter. Such property is quickly con- 

 verted into money — it perishes and is gone. But 

 land is hedged round with numerous guards which 

 protect it from hasty spoliation. It is not so easily 

 transferred; it is not so secretly transferred; the law 

 enjoins deliberate formalities before it can be 

 alienated, and often the consent of various parties is 

 necessary. 



Resolved to go — Escape from Business 

 Choosing a Location 



THE last thirty years have been prolific of great 

 pecuniary convulsions. I passed through sev- 

 eral of them, striving and struggling, and oppressed 

 beyond all power of description, flow many more 

 the co mm unity was to encounter I did not know; 

 but I conceived it the part of prudence to place 

 myself beyond the circle of their influence before I 

 also had been prostrated. 



In spite of the losses thus encountered, I had been 

 saving something annually for several years, when 

 the stricture of 1854 came on, premonitory of the 

 tremendous crash of 1S57. Most unfortunately for 

 my comfort, that stricture seemed to fall with 

 peculiar severity on a class of dealers largely in- 

 debted to me. Most of them became embarrassed,, 

 and failed to pay me. My old experiences of raising 

 money revived, and to some extent I was compelled 

 to go through the humiliations of similar periods. 

 But the stricture was of brief duration, and I closed 

 the year in far better condition than I had antici- 

 pated. 



But the trials of that incipient crisis determined 

 me to abandon the city. I found that by realizing 

 all I then possessed, I could command means enough 

 to purchase ten to twenty acres, and I had grown 

 nervous and apprehensive of the future. While 

 possessed of a little, I resolved to make that little 

 sure by investing it in land. I had worked for the 

 landlord long enough. 



I had long determined in my mind what sort of 

 farming was likely to prove profitable enough to 

 keep us with comfort, and that was the raising of 

 small fruits for the city markets. My attention had 

 always been particularly directed to the berries. 

 Some strawberries I had raised in my city garden 

 with prodigious success. My friends, when they 

 heard of my project, expressed fears that the market 

 would soon be glutted, not exactly by the crops 

 which I was to raise, but they could not exactly 

 answer how. They confessed that they were ex- 

 tremely fond of berries, and that at no time in the 

 season could they afford to eat enough — a confession 

 which seemed to explode all apprehension of the 

 market being overstocked. 



But my wife and myself had both examined the 

 hucksters who called at the door with small fruits, 

 as to the monstrous prices they demanded, and had 

 begged them, if ever a glut occurred, that they 

 would call and let us know. But none had ever 

 called with such information. It was the same 

 thing with those who occupied stalls in the various 

 city markets. They rarely had a surplus left 

 unsold, and their prices were always high. A glut 

 of fruit was a thing almost unknown to them.. 

 It was a safe presumption that the market would 

 not be depressed by the quantity that I might 

 raise. 



But here let me say something by way of paren- 

 thesis touching this common idea of the danger of 

 overstocking the fruit market of the great cities. 

 It is a curious fact that this idea is entertained only 

 by those who are not fruit growers. The latter 

 never harbored it. Their whole experience runs 

 the other way; they know it to be a gross absurdity. 

 Yet, somehow, the question of a glut has always 

 been debated. 



Twenty years or so ago the nurserymen were 

 advised to close up their sales and abandon the 

 business, as they would soon have no customers for 

 trees — everybody was supplied. But trees have 

 continued to be planted from that day to this, and 

 where hundreds were sold twenty years ago, thou- 

 sands are disposed of now. Old-fashioned nurser- 

 ies have been trebled in size, while countless new 

 ones have been planted. The nursery business has 

 grown to a magnitude truly gigantic, because the 

 market for fruit has been annually growing larger, 

 and no business enlarges itself unless it is proved to 

 be profitable. 



The market cannot be glutted with good fruit. 

 The multiplication of mouths to consume it is far 

 more rapid that the increase of any supply that 

 growers can effect. Within ten years the masses 

 have had a slight taste of choice fruits, and but little 

 more. Indulgence has only served to whet their 

 appetites. The more of them there is offered in the 

 market, the more will there be consumed. Every 

 huckster in her shamble, every vender of peanuts 

 in the street, will testify to this. The modern art 

 of semi-cookery for fruit, and of preserving it in 

 cans and jars, has made sale for enormous quanti- 

 ties of those choicer kinds which return the highest 

 profit to the grower. It is in the grain market that 

 panic often rages, but never in the fruit market. 

 If it ever enters the latter, the struggle is to obtain 

 the fruit, not to get rid of it. 



The proper choice of a location was now to be 

 the great question of my future success. 

 (Tff be continued) 



