Read Ebook: Three Acres and Liberty by Hall Bolton

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Life belongs in the garden. Do you remember--the first chapters of Genesis show us our babyhood in a garden--the garden that all babyhood remembers, and the last chapter of the Apocalypse leaves us with the vision of the garden in the Holy City, on either side of the river, where the trees yield their fruits every month and bear leaves of universal healing. Just so will it be in our holy cities of the future--the garden will be right there "in the midst."

PRESENT CONDITIONS

Up to the Civil War and for some years after, our people were almost wholly agricultural. National activity contented itself with settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.

The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to cotton. In the North, New England had developed some few centers of industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great Southern staple. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished but feebly and in few localities.

Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been laboriously built up by long years of honest working. The free lands of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages, forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly thus being checked, individual equality was possible.

The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.

Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles. Primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content with coarse food and coarser living.

Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861. Then came the storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of passion called the Civil War. There was a total upset of business. Such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the riches of nature. After four years our people awoke, as from a nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever. In the South, the Confederates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricultural despotism exercised for generations by their slaveholding families. In the East, the first families of the Revolution, secure in their preeminence, assumed again the manufacturing-banking-social prestige. The far West was still almost unknown, and remained in possession of the buffalo and the Indian. Settlers poured, in increasing numbers on to the unappropriated lands still left in the states of the central West, and the center of political power shifted rapidly to this fertile region.

Already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal, and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of supply. From the nature of their work the men who built railways first became aware of the riches of nature, and aided by an enormous public sympathy with their efforts, monopolized all the natural opportunities of value. Coupled with industrial development was the gradual appropriation of the land. The time soon arrived when the late comers either stayed in the manufacturing centers at the railways terminals or were pushed farther and farther away from the centers. As the landowning families multiplied, the young men were confined to the same choice. Forced off the land, the tendency has been to crowd the brainiest blood of America into the cities. In addition, the competition of the new Western lands, brought into use by railway development, has exiled the youth of New England, who found in their rocky acres no incentive to toil. They, too, joined the ever-increasing flow to the cities, and entered into the savage competition of our great towns.

In our time the pendulum has swung to its extreme. At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to reverse the aimless tide of human sufferers, which under stress continues to flow city-ward, and to send it to repeople the silent places whence it came. The fight will not be easily won. Changes in the national land policy are imperative. To give one generation privileges which enslave all who succeed it, is intolerable and will not be permanently endured.

It is easy to determine upon a policy in the quiet of the study; different is the problem of applying a comprehensive scheme to repeople the idle land. In the first place, where is the idle land? In all parts of our country it exists in abundance. Almost every state in the Union has lands which either have never been alienated, or which have reverted to the state through nonpayment of taxes. In the East, particularly, the competition of Western lands, aided by discriminating freight rates, now so notorious, has resulted in the abandonment to the mortgagee of vast areas in New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, and to some extent in New Jersey. These are now largely resold.

Declining fertility and exorbitant and oppressive transportation charges have helped to keep these lands out of use, and some still lie idle and neglected, to excite the wonder of the social and economic student. To use the abandoned lands of the East, equal rates on agricultural products is a basic necessity.

The first step, now well under way, is railroad control by the Government. Equal access to transportation is as essential as equal access to land, for transportation is indeed an attribute of land.

Extending the inquiry westward, the coal and oil areas of Pennsylvania and Ohio are all controlled by a few hands. The original fertility of the farming areas of these states, together with the fact that they have been producing for only about a century, has enabled them to hold their own until recently, but now only the best located tracts are in maximum production, and this can be maintained only by the most advanced agricultural science. In spite of greater advantages, the crowded cities and deserted country districts are beginning to repeat in the fertile alluvial valleys of the interior, the tragic story of the East.

In the Mississippi valley, conditions seem better. Values of farming lands are increasing rapidly; the farms are rich and growing richer; food products are cheap and abundant; certain staples are produced in enormous quantities and sent to feed the cities of the East and the industrial population of Europe. The railroads transport these products nearly one thousand miles for the same prices as they charge in the East for transporting them one hundred miles. Wealth, activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of the railway funnel, leaving vast areas of unused and unusable land between the terminals. Access to markets determines value. That is why the favored lands of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, one to two thousand miles from market, have risen in value to as high as three hundred dollars per acre, and the lands of New England, New York, and New Jersey go begging at twenty to sixty dollars per acre, unless they lie within the artificial prosperity of the cities.

Farther west in the irrigated regions of Colorado and Utah, restricted areas are held for special fruit crops, at prices ranging from three hundred to two thousand dollars and up, per acre. But here, again, monopoly, now a monopoly of natural opportunity, is a factor in creating prices; on this, however, the vast irrigation projects of the government, bringing into use larger and larger areas of these favored lands, were expected to exercise a check. Up to 1918 little has been sold. Their reclamation cost too much.

The willingness of the Southern planters to sell their lands, and so to release them for intensive cultivation, has partly turned the tide of immigration from the Eastern ports to the South, and the market garden system is reaching increasing areas. The development of factories to make cotton fabrics and to utilize the formerly wasted cotton seed by turning it into meal for cattle and other animals, as well as into the various food products, such as cotton-seed oil, cottolene, etc., has stimulated the use of the waste land around these budding factory centers, thus tending to encourage intensive use of small, well-located tracts.

With a climate much milder and more equable than that of the Northern states, with a potential fertility of soil, equally great under proper management, the South is making greater strides than any other part of the country.

The foregoing shows that in every section opportunities of getting the people to the land exist. Where a man should go is determined by a variety of things. If he be a newly arrived immigrant used to land work in Southern Europe, he would find his best chance in the South; if a German or Russian, or from any of the Northern European countries, he would find the beet-sugar sections of Michigan Colorado, or California more to his liking; if American born, without much knowledge of out-door work, and feeling the need of social life, the cheap farms of New York, New Jersey, and New England would probably be most attractive.

Many persons write me that I say it is necessary to get good land near population or with cheap and assured transportation facilities--and that it must not cost more than it is worth for gardening. "I find," they say, "that such acres are held as 'lots' at wildly speculative prices" and they ask "Where can I find such land?" But this is a book on agricultural use of land. Why land costs too much and where the remedy lies are other questions, dealt with in my "Things as They Are."

However, probably the best chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by cheap autos--and in the South.

What can be undertaken with good prospects of success will be outlined in the following chapters.

HOW TO BUY THE FARM

Before the purchase of the land for a home in the country, some consideration ought to be given to probable increase in land values. Even if you are primarily interested in your early sales of produce, you will not object to reaping an additional profit from the presence of other people.

Inasmuch as density of population determines land values, it follows that vacant land near a large city at 0 per acre may be cheaper than similar land at a distance would be at per acre. If you buy real estate, you become a silent partner who does nothing, but takes most of the profits of the business of others.

Some persons see so clearly that money is often easily gotten by investing in land, that sometimes they make mistakes, in trying to get in. It is as easy to be a lamb in the real estate market as it is in the stock market.

Foresight, judgment, and experience or luck are essential to success in real estate dealing, but help, at least in keeping out of danger, may be had by following a few simple rules, if one can command a little capital, borrowed or owned.

The following points, suggested by a professional land shark, will certainly be of interest and possibly of profit to the intending buyer. I believe myself that they contain the whole philosophy of land speculation.

For a sure profit buy low-priced land, keeping as near the "raw material" as possible; high-priced property is risky and expensive to carry. An acre which costs one or two hundred dollars, or ten dollars per lot, will cost but six to twelve dollars per year to carry and half a dollar for taxes, and if a stable does come next you, why, you can sell your land for a blacksmith shop.

Besides this, a ten-dollar lot, if restricted for residence or available for business, often advances to 0 in a year; one good house which some one else built near it may raise its value that much.

If possible, buy at auction and of reputable people who are not boomers, or at least buy at forced sale; that is how real estate is sold when it must be sold. Choose lots level with the curb and on high ground, lest the expense of grading and sewering eat up your profit.

Keep in mind that in buying land for speculation one really buys the opportunity to tax other people, by taking part of their earnings in the shape of rent or price. Do not then be deluded by boom schemes in inaccessible or desolate places; choose rather that land which in the natural course of events others must have in order to work or to live.

Home buying in small communities is safer than in the outskirts of a large city, because public improvements are much less costly. If you put 0 in a 00 home and carry the balance on mortgage, an assessment of 00 for streets or sewers, which helps the vacant lots, will probably put you out of business. Whether for use or speculation, buy in an established neighborhood or where the circumstances and neighbors are such that restrictions or expenditures will make its character sure. The increase in your land value depends first upon the presence, then upon the efforts, of others; it is by their labor you hope to profit.

Therefore, buy property on leading thoroughfares; except in a very small section devoted to the residence of millionaires, the price of residence property has a limit; even there the merest accident or the whim of fashion may destroy the value, but there is no telling what figure business property may reach.

Do not build unless you have to. It is rare that a building pays five per cent net on the value of the land and the cost of the house. "Who buys a house already wrought, gets many a brick and nail for naught." If, however, you can get a piece of ground in a growing neighborhood and live on it till you can sell at an advance, that is the safest, and surest of investments. It delivers you from the power of the landlord.

Lastly--in real estate--don't bite off more than you can chew.

Most of these rules apply to the purchase of suburban land. In farm buying, keep as close to your market as you can. See that railway facilities are all right; get land likely to be needed for other purposes. The best way to begin is by securing all information possible from state agricultural departments. Write to the industrial agents of important railroads traversing the section in which you want to locate. They have detailed information regarding land, markets, social conditions, etc.; get from the United States Agricultural Department a map showing the soil survey of the section of your choice. It must be borne in mind that personal aid is not to be expected from State Agricultural Departments, Bureaus of Immigration, railway companies, or any public agency.

From the big farm agencies run for profit you can get lists of thousands of properties for sale. Some State Agricultural Departments cooperate with real estate men in their own states, by referring inquiries for farms to them. Some states issue from time to time lists of "abandoned farms," but these change so constantly that they help but little except in the way of suggestion.

When you start farm-hunting take along a good map. Then you will know a few things on your own account. Verify railroad maps and "facts," as they are often biased. Don't waste your time wandering around a strange locality by yourself. The local real estate man knows more about his community than you can learn in five years. In trying to find out things for yourself you will waste in aimless journeys, undertaken in ignorance of real conditions, more time and money than a real estate man's commission amounts to.

The only way to form a correct idea of the production of any given section is to examine a particular farm in detail. Within well-recognized limits, all the farms thereabouts will be found of similar character. Before spending money to look at land, learn all you can by correspondence. Whether it is more profitable in the long run to buy that good plot of land in a high state of cultivation with good buildings on it, at a high price, than to buy this exhausted piece of land with poor buildings or none at all, is a question for the individual to decide. It depends on your energy, grit, age, and how much money you have. It is much easier to take advantage of what the other fellow has done, than it is to build from the stump. You must bear in mind, however, that well kept land in a high state of cultivation seldom goes begging in the market. On the whole, if you have the capital to do it, you can make the biggest wages by buying rough or neglected land, and hewing it into shape.

If you have a knowledge of soils, you may be able to find land that will grow something that no one supposes it will grow. This will be particularly useful in the case of land thought to be valueless. The lands about Miles, Michigan, were considered sterile until some one found out that they would grow mint, a valuable crop, which made the land salable at high prices.

Get hold of a desirable bit of the earth. All that men wear or eat or use; everything--shelter, food, tools, and toys comes from the land by labor. Even the capital used to make more of those things is taken from the land. The employer and the capitalist are, at bottom, only men who control the land or its products, who own rights of way, mining rights, or the fee of valuable lands. Thousands have "made" money by finding unexpected products in their land or of their lands, oil, coal, mineral, plants; thousands more because their land was needed by some one else, and they were paid to get out of the way.

To speculate on these chances is risky business; to keep land that enables you to make good pay while you wait, is profitable.

VACANT CITY LOT CULTIVATION

In this book, necessarily, we have to take much upon the reports of others, checking them by our own judgment and experience. The startling accounts of what has been done and is being done on plots of about a quarter acre to each family, however, can be easily re-verified by any one who will go or write to Philadelphia, or examine any present experiment or model gardens. These show what can be done even by unskilled labor, with hardly any capital, on small plots where the soil was poor, but which are well situated.

The directors say: "The first Vacant Lot Cultivation Associations were organized when relief agencies were vainly striving to provide adequate assistance for the host of unemployed. The cultivation of vacant city lots by the unemployed had already been tried successfully in other cities. The first year we provided gardens, seeds, tools, and instruction only, for about one hundred families on twenty-seven acres of ground. At a total cost to contributors of about 00, our gardeners produced ,000 worth of crops."

The applicant is allowed a garden on the sole condition that he cultivate it well through the season, and that he do not trespass upon his neighbors. He must respect their right to what their labor produces. A failure to observe these rules forfeits his privilege.

During twenty years, more than eight thousand families have been assisted, many old people who could no longer keep up the rapid pace of our industrial life, cripples whose physical condition held them back in the race for work, persons who on account of sickness or other misfortunes have been thrown out of the competition in modern business, and unfortunate beings who, though clear in mind and strong in muscle, have been forced to the ranks of the unemployed--these have all had an opportunity opened to them: opportunity to enjoy all of the fruits from nature's great storehouse which their own labor and skill might secure.

The war has forced France, Italy, and England similarly to utilize natural opportunities for subsistence in their enormous tracts of unproductive lands. In Mexico all proprietors will be required to designate what they propose to cultivate and the remainder will either be allotted temporarily for agricultural purposes to those desiring them or it will be cultivated under government management. There is no remedy like that for poverty.

The first man who applied for a vacant lot garden came to the Philadelphia office after the announcement in the papers, so weak and emaciated that the doctor was afraid the poor fellow would be unable to get out of his office without assistance. He was a widower with three girls and a boy, the oldest girl about seventeen.

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