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American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man.”— Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 112 For the Week Ending December 8, 1923 Number 23 
“Back-to-the-Landers” and Land Sharks 
“Stop, Look, Listen” and Avoid Disillusion and Heartbreaks 
I T is not often that I feel myself to be a “man 
with a message” constrained to stand and 
cry aloud as did old Jonah in the crowded 
streets of Nineveh. But observations ex¬ 
tending over several years with the addition of 
some very recent and vivid experiences have 
made me wish that I might give an earnest word 
of counsel and warning to every city-bred man 
who, usually mistakenly and intent on burning 
his bridges behind him, is planning to go to the 
land. 
Quite a good many years ago—even before the 
Great War—some misguided enthusiast made 
a catching phrase that became 
almost a slogan “ Back to the 
Land.” I think that in his 
thought and in the thought of 
many others it had the fine 
spirit of a new Crusade—a 
sort of solemn duty to the 
Nation and the hour. But the 
movement was economically 
unsound and if it had never 
been acted upon it would 
have saved much of disap¬ 
pointment and loss and disil¬ 
lusion and heartbreak. Every 
year from our cities there go 
to the farms a considerable 
number of enthusiastic ideal¬ 
ists—people who really love 
or think they love country 
life and who see farming 
through a sort of golden mist 
of romance and every year 
there returns to the city 
again a pathetic procession of 
folks disillusionized in spirit 
and broken in fortune. For¬ 
tunate are they if they have 
lost nothing more than some 
money and two or three years 
of wasted efforts. 
Last week I appraised six farms for the Federal 
Land Bank and two of them were occupied by 
“ Back-to-the-Landers ”—poor, helpless, ignorant, 
babes in the woods who made a fearful, almost 
tragic mistake in leaving behind them connections 
which afforded them a secure place in the world 
and then (I speak strongly perhaps) in a moment 
of folly, faring gayly forth into a life of which 
they knew nothing and in which men succeed only 
by virtue of adaptability coupled with training, 
skill and experience. 
These cases are only two of at least a dozen 
with which I have had intimate knowledge and 
contact. I propose to tell the simple and abso¬ 
lutely exact story of one of these. The other con¬ 
cerns a woman and I shall not spread her story 
before the world even under the full protection of 
concealing all details that would enable any one 
save her to recognize it. 
The scene was laid in an eastern county of the 
Hill Country of New York. I have found that if 
you want to get exact, dependable directions for 
reaching a remote and hidden farm there is no 
one to consult equal to the rural mail carrier. 
So I dropped into the post office of a good sized 
By JARED VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
railroad village. It was early forenoon and several 
carriers were busy sorting and preparing their 
route mail. I asked for the carrier of Route 2 and 
a Bright, keen-eyed young man responded. When 
I gave the name of the farm I sought he grinned 
cheerfully and replied with both a statement and 
a question in one breath. “Well you've got some 
climb. Have you got a Ford?” I confessed that 
while I didn’t have a Ford I had a car that would 
go anywhere that rubber tires could find foothold. 
He picked up a scrap of paper and carefully 
charted my course, mapping it in detail with all 
turns and crossings including the bridges I should 
cross. These running directions reminded me of 
the man who, being of an investigational turn of 
mind, decided to follow a great city avenue to the 
end. The avenue presently became a broad State 
highway that changed into a country road that 
merged into a by-lane which became a cart track 
leading into a cow path that finally was lost in 
a squirrel track which ran up a tree. Thus finally 
he came to the end of his quest. I had almost this 
experience. For a mile or two I bowled along over 
a faultless concrete road, then turned up a dirt 
road and through a decaying village and then I 
turned the machine straight up the long steep 
mountain road gullied and rutted in spite of the 
numerous “ Thank-you-marms ” built across it. 
Once or twice I stopped to view and admire the 
criss-cross billows of the Hill Country spread out 
beneath me. Once, puzzled to know if the turn 
to which I had come represented merely a wood 
road or the public highway, I went a quarter of 
a mile across the fields to inquire. A mile or two 
further on I came out upon the high rolling pla¬ 
teau a sort of moor-land, only the word “moor” 
does not yet seem to have found a common place 
in our American speech. All this locality is old 
agricultural land—part of the holdings of Kiliaen 
van Rensselaer, the Patroon, who in 1637 founded 
a far flung barony 48 miles long and half as wide 
comprising the larger part of the counties of 
Albany, Columbia and Rensselaer. Men have 
been living on these lands for very many years. 
There is plenty of material for romance in the 
tales of the anti-rent war which took place almost 
a century ago. Bygone generations of men 
labored faithfully and well on these ancient farms 
and out of the abundant stone that cumbered the 
ground, piled up wonderful 
lines of massive stone walls. 
I hope that some day some 
one in worthy fashion will 
write the epic story of these 
walls. Today many of the 
old farm houses are tenant¬ 
less and the unpainted barns 
are falling in and the un¬ 
touched fields are covering 
their nakedness with a growth 
of goldenrod and hardhaek 
and over it all brood the 
memories of a brave, hardy 
agricultural folk who here 
once lived out their lives 
in herculean labor and in 
obscurity and yet in hope and 
content. It was a raw, bleak 
October day with a high wind, 
an overcast gray sky and now 
and then a spitting snow 
flake and the whole gloomy 
landscape pressed down my 
spirit with a sense of the 
brevity and futility of human 
effort. 
A little further on, true to 
the map of the rural mail 
carrier, 1 found the farm. 
The house was fairly good—good enough to serve 
the needs of a better farm. Across the road were 
two ancient, weather beaten dilapidated barns 
and just below (it must be very beautiful under 
blue, midsummer skies) was a lake of forty acres 
fringed by woodland and abandoned fields, and 
m the front yard unloading “top-wood” from 
a wagon was the proprietor. 
His story was very simple and quickly told. He 
was 53 years old. His home had been New York 
City. He was by profession a skilled carpenter 
with a very special field, being employed by one of 
the big greenhouse construction companies to 
erect the greenhouses which they sold and he was 
accustomed to being sent all over the eastern half 
of the country. Perhaps his folly is the more 
inexplicable because he had enjoyed very unusual 
opportunities for travel and observation. He had 
long been touched with the back-to-the-land fever 
and two years ago returning from a trip to 
Detroit he read in—God save the mark—he read in 
the New York Evening World the advertisement 
of this farm. So he stopped off to see it. He did 
not note the high hills or the poor mountain 
{Continued on page 390.) 
“ The avenue became a broad state highway that changed into a country road, that merged into a by-lane, 
which became a cart track, leading into a cow-path, that finally was lost in a squirrel track which ran up a tree.” 
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