"I met Mr. Straight one day. He said: 'Terry, things are not going very well in the office since you left. I wish you would come back. You are not doing much over on that farm that I can see. You are having a hard time. I will gladly give you $1,200 a year if you will come back into our office.' It was a great temptation. Think what it meant. To move back to town and have $100 a month. But I said, 'No, Mr. Straight; I can't do it.' I don't deserve any credit for it, friends: but I wasn't built that way. I can't back out. When I undertake anything I have got to go through. I would have been willing enough to leave that farm, if I had made a success of it, after I made a success of it, as I thought then; but I wasn't willing to give up, whipped—to acknowledge that I had undertaken that job and had to back out and go back to town to make a living.
"Some little incident sometimes will change the whole character of a man's life. I remember, when we were in very hard conditions, we were sitting under an apple tree in our door yard one evening. It is there yet. Two men from town went by. One of them said to the other, 'What is Terry going to do?' The other said, 'If Terry sticks to it he will make something out of that old farm.' Just as quick as a flash, friends, I said, 'Terry will stick to it.'
"You see what condition we were in. I began to put all these matters together. I had been taught how to. In college I had been trained to study and think, of course,—not to work with my hands. When I got onto the work at first I worked myself almost to death with my hands, and had no time to think or study; but gradually old methods came around again and I began to think and study. I said: 'Here, more hay to the acre, better hay, increased fertility by growing that clover, increased fertility by working that soil so much.' I didn't know why, but there was the fact. 'Now, isn't it possible to put these matters together and so work them out as to build up the fertility of this farm and make it blossom like the rose?'
"I began to work it out. What was the first step? I sold eight or nine cows to get a little money to start, thus cutting off practically our whole source of income. There was no other way I could get any money. We had to do some draining. A part of the land we could not do anything with until it was tile-drained. It took money to buy tile. I had to have a little help about the digging, although I like to boast that I laid every tile on my farm with my own hands. I buried every one and know it will stay there. They were all sound and hard and good. In all these years not one has ever failed, not one drain or tile. I worked day after day, in the rain, wet to the skin, because it had to be done. It was the foundation of our success.
"As I was coming here yesterday, and passed so much of your flat land, in need of drainage, I thought, drainage is the foundation of success for lots of these people, down here in southern Illinois. You can't do much until you have the water out of the land. Then you have a chance to do something with tillage and manure-saving and clover. But you throw away your efforts when you try to do this work on land that is in need of drainage.
"As fast as possible we fixed up this land. Of course, it took years. We hadn't money, and there were many things that had to be done,—changing fields, getting out stumps, doing drainage,—it all took time. I had my plans made and was working as fast as I could.
"Two things I did, to keep life in our bodies until we got ready to make some money. One was to cut off every bit of timber on the farm. Our neighbors laughed at us and prophesied rain and all that. There were two things in my mind. We had to have money to live on, and I managed to get quite a little of it in that way. In the next place we didn't have much of a farm, and I wanted the land for tillage. We can buy wood of the neighbors to-day, cheaper than we sold ours, so we never lost anything.
"Another way we got some money, as we went along, that helped us, was raising forage crops. I did not attempt to put in crops that required much hand labor. I raised Hungarian, and everything I could to be fed to cows. In our dairying section, with feed often scarce in the fall, farmers often had more stock than they could winter. We could pick up cows cheaply on credit and hold them. I could winter them for people, and the manure we used as a top dressing, to make the clover grow. Starting with a little piece of land, we spread out more and more, and got more and more enriched, and more and more growing clover, and by and by we got all the cultivated land growing it. Then we were ready for business.
"I am afraid to tell you Illinois farmers, with your great big farms, how large our farm was. We bought one hundred and twenty-five acres. We sold off all but fifty-five. That didn't help us, for the man who bought it was so poor he didn't pay us for over thirty years. Then the land went up in price and he was able to sell it for a good price and we got our money. Fifty-five acres were selected, the best we could for our purpose. Twenty acres were so situated as to have no value. Thirty-five acres were fairly good, tillable land, the best we could pick out. I began a system of rotation, after we got the land ready for it, of clover, potatoes, and wheat. My idea was to have the clover gather fertility to grow potatoes and wheat. I was going to make use of the tillage to help out all I could, and sold the potatoes and wheat, and then had clover again, and so on around the circle. Everybody said, of course I would fail. I didn't know but I would. It was the only chance and I had to take it.
"Of course it took quite a while to get this thing going. The first three or four years didn't amount to much. After six or eight years we were surprised at the result. We were getting more than we hoped for. In a dozen years the whole country was surprised. I remember when a reporter was sent from Albany, New York, to see what we were doing, and reported in the "Country Gentlemen." We had visitors by the score from various states, it made such a stir. They couldn't believe it was possible for a man to take land as poor as that, and make it produce so well. We had some they could see that had not been touched. As I told you, in eleven years we were out of debt. After about ten or eleven years we were laying up a thousand dollars a year, above all living and running expenses, from this land, raising potatoes and wheat. It doesn't seem possible to you, large farmers, but you can't get around the facts. In 1883 we laid up $1,700 from the land. But this was a little extra.