‘ PERS CEL CRELE CE LO PE Ce Ce = ——- 
SETTLEMENT AND COLONIZATION IN GREAT LAKES STATES 93 
XV. A company which had practically completed the selling of its block of 
land some years ago. The land was sold at the low prices then prevailing and 
many of the settlers completed their payments before moving on to their hold- 
ings. Many of the contracts provided for small installment payments. The 
usual period of the contract was five years. The outstanding feature of this 
company’s policy was liberal credit in place of advances of buildings and live- 
stock. However, the company supervised the settlers closely in spending these 
borrowed funds, and aided them in many other ways. ‘The settlers are all 
foreign born and of one nationality and religion. The land is heavy red clay. 
PROBLEMS AND METHODS OF LAND SETTLEMENT 
No two of the companies studied were alike as to conditions af- 
fecting settlement and methods followed. It is therefore worth while 
to study their problems and methods in detail. 
CHOICE OF AREA 
Choice of an area is a problem only for agents and dealers. The 
owner of a tract of cut-over land has no choice except to put his land 
on the market or continue to hold it. Some of them are deciding 
one way and some another. 
There are three things to consider under choice of area: Quality 
of the land, its layout, and the size of the tract. Table 10 presents 
the principal facts under these heads for each of the 15 projects. 
The area of land in these projects varied from 10,000 to 150,000 
acres. Some of the interests connected with these 15 projects owned 
or controlled additional tracts elsewhere. A small tract does not 
warrant the building up of a large sales and service organization. If 
the tract is very small, say less than 5,000 acres, it is a one-man affair 
unless it is a part of a general agency or dealer business. Con- 
sequently, the selling program will be mild, and the supervision can 
be only of an occasional and sporadic character. Even a 10,000-acre 
tract is small for a colonization enterprise, unless the project is one of 
several so that the selling and other overhead costs can be divided be- 
tween them. It will be observed that the intensive colonization en- 
terprises, such as projects IX, X, XI, and XIII, all chose areas of 
20,000 acres or over. The companies handling projects IX and XI 
consider the particular projects studied as only one in a series and 
have built up organizations on this assumption. 
If the land must be acquired before it is sold, it is practically 
necessary that the tract be held in a few hands; for it needs to be 
fairly compact and it is difficult to get a large number of landholders 
to agree to sell all at one time and at a reasonable figure. It is 
because this can not usually be done when the ownership is well 
scattered that the agent-dealer type of business has developed in 
northern Minnesota. 
The further significance of the layout of the tract is as follows: 
A considerable part of the margins obtained by land companies 
arises from the increase in the price of wild land as the area fills 
with settlers, as buildings are erected, and as the land is cleared 
back from the road. If the interspersed holdings are not developed: 
-at the same time, they dilute the effect of the company’s development 
work, and besides the owners of these holdings receive some of the 
increments in price that have been earned by the company. If roads 
have to be built, this is especially true. No company studied was 
