4 
: 
SETTLEMENT AND COLONIZATION IN GREAT LAKES STATES 59 
If a company stands behind any plan, it must expect to accept the 
complaints that follow. It is because of these difficulties that the 
companies ‘are disposed to create separate institutions wherever pos- 
sible for handling much of the service work for the settlers. It is 
not strange, therefore, that many land companies favor the old- 
fashioned policy of selling land on straight 5 or 10 year contracts 
with no provision for additional credit. Such a policy is fraught 
with much less grief for the company. The fact is, ‘a paternalistic 
policy works out successfully only if there is a strong personal touch 
between the prime movers in the enterprise and the settlers. It will 
not even do to have the president of the company away too much of 
the time. Where this personal touch has been neglected, the policy 
has not worked well. Ill feeling has almost always been engendered 
as a result and companies have frequently fallen back upon a strictly 
business policy. 
PRICES OF LAND AND COSTS OF SELLING 
The price at which wild land of cultivable grade was being sold in 
1920 varied from $15 to $50 per acre, in the districts visited by the 
field investigators, depending upon location and quality (fig. 12). 
__ The bulk of it was sold at $25 to $35 per acre. These prices do not 
include the improvements that were sometimes furnished with the 
land. The price depended upon what the company had to pay for it, 
upon the company’s selling costs, upon the cost of the coloniza- 
tion service rendered, and upon the company’s margin of profits 
(Table 25). 
Five or ten years ago, much good land could be bought in large 
_ tracts for $5 to $7 per acre and even less. At the time this survey 
_ was made wholesale prices for wild land were as high as $12 an acre. 
After the companies had added the costs of their services and sold it 
for $25 to $35 per acre, most of the landowners in the same general 
territory considered that their land was worth the same price. In 
fact, one of the bad resuits of intensive colonization is the tendency 
to increase the general level of land valuation outside of the coloniza- 
tion projects, a level not justified by the special services rendered by 
the companies themselves to settlers within their projects. 
TABLE 25.—Comparison of prices for wild lands on 15 projects, index numbers 
being based on average price for the year 
Index of Per cent indeet Per cent 
no 
: tail * retai 
Project = neul- Project : noncul- 
prices : prices . 
oftand tivable atiand tivable 
iat SRLS, ee ee 101 11 || 8] [> Soy ea SR RN ea es ee 114 9.6 
Ree at et Sate Ue 70 8D ee Es ee ee 119 7.4 
Tg ee OS aE 99 SS ON pekee ee Ske Se Be es ee: 92 22.0 
De pote Ps a ee a el 106 HOC MD <1 Ce See I Se ee erat 85 10. 6 
We ea ageee 4S eB Wee ae 123 EL Gh | Pee ee SERRE, | AER ee 76 iW Ag 
RW Faeeee ses te Fe 105 iy GB |S. al BY den ae SES WS ee oe eee 101 10.7 
ilies 2 Ua re 81 2.0 Ve a oe ee ea 96 19.8 
Wo NACo eae RTE ae ey eer 78 2.4 
Selling costs varied from $1 per acre to $10, and even $15 in the 
ease of companies not very successful in making sales. Companies 
with modest sales organizations were selling at a cost of $5 per acre 
eae ——e———EE—E—EeEeee —— 
