And what of those lands to-day, and what are the inducements they offer to the Northern farmer seeking a home in the South? Meeting a very intelligent and reliable farmer, Mr. W. M. Sammon, who had moved from Dalton, Ill., to Lauderdale country, near Florence, some seven years ago, I interviewed him on this subject, reminding him that Trotwood’s was a medium which would rather under-estimate than over-color the picture; that a people did not take much stock in highly-colored pictures of glorious Edens, finding them to be untrue and as such hurting all concerned. “That is true,” said Mr. Sammon, “and well said. Many hundreds of Northern people are misled by such statements and become disgusted when the real facts are enough to captivate any one wishing to make a home here. To begin with, I sold my land in Illinois at three times what just as good, if not better, land cost me here, with three more months in the year for working it. I found the land just as level as in Illinois, and hence I could use the same tools I had there for corn, wheat, oats and alfalfa. I find red clover grows here just as well as in Illinois, and other grasses we cannot grow there, such, for instance, as Bermuda, which will grow anywhere here and make the finest summer pasture in the world, standing sun and drought when other grasses would die. The land does not produce as much corn per acre as does Illinois. Corn in the South, owing to the longer climate, goes much to stalk and fewer stalks can be planted in the hill, but mine produces from twenty-five to forty bushels on the upland and as high as sixty in richer lowlands. But this is to a great extent offset by the difference in price, selling here all the time at sixty to seventy cents, whereas in the North we do well to get forty cents per bushel. All kinds of live stock I find do better here, for they are not troubled with flies, and hence we have no nets to plough under, nor screens for the house. One of the greatest problems to the farmer in Illinois is help. Last fall a friend of mine came here and told me he had to help his wife wash the clothes every week. I paid $25 and board for my farm help up there, but here I get good help at $8 to $10 and board. As for water, there is no comparison. Up there it was ponds and cisterns, but here is a country of springs. I never saw anything like it. Creeks, too, with beds full of gravel, which make the finest roads in the world. It is the best watered and healthiest country I ever saw. The water here is plentiful and easy of access.
“The greatest crop I have found here to build up the land is peas—the Southern pea. It is equal to clover as a nitrogen producing crop, enriching the land, and as a money-maker it beats anything in the North. I sow peas in my corn every third row and run round it a few times. It is laid by with the corn. I can make ten dollars worth of pork per acre in peas and leave the land better than it was. I can raise all stock cheaper here, even turkeys, on account of the peas and grasshoppers. There are nine months of pasture, year in and year out. The land is not as rich as in Illinois, but I make more, owing to peas. My clover there, I could hardly give away, it selling at $2 to $4 per ton, but here I find ready sale for my pea hay at $12 to $15 per ton, and raise more per acre than clover. Wheat needs some fertilizers here, as the belt is far south, but it produces fairly well. I find good money in raising mules. Pastures are so cheap that they practically cost nothing. I buy western mares, good workers, very cheap, and raise a mule worth $150 that is not housed at all and runs in the pasture or on cane all the year.
“The climate is mild and pleasant. People have a mistaken idea as to the heat. It is not as hot here as there, for the heat is steady, even temperature, and a good breeze in the summer.
“I think I know when I have a good thing, and I am sorry I have not lived here all my life. I have made more money and enjoyed better health, and the people are kind, neighborly and hospitable. They are not after the dollar alone.”
This is the talk of a straightforward, practical farmer, who knows what he is talking about, and what he says the reader of Trotwood’s may rely upon.
Florence is at the head of the famous Mussel Shoals, the opening of which has cost Uncle Sam the sum of seven million dollars.
Where Hood’s army crossed the Tennessee River at Florence, Ala., November, 1864.
Uncle Sam never does anything on a small scale, and here, at headquarters, on the banks of the clear, silver river, where seven millions of dollars have been appropriated to unlock 660 miles of navigable water and 1,000 miles of tributary streams, all of which had been locked in the beginning of things and its key hidden to all save the unconquerable spirit of American enterprise, here everything was in keeping with the magnitude of the undertaking and the build and mold of things. It is a paradise in the woods, an Arcadia in primeval forests. It is strength and beauty—a touch of modern art on a background of the antique, a background of rock and beetling cliff, in a setting of sternest and ruggedest realism. Modern houses for offices on the brow of a rock, whose crinkled lips smile a grim and perpetual smile, as if enjoying the joke that a few thousand years will make in the change of man’s baubles above it. Handsome government buildings on a level plateau, surrounded with silence and eternal hills, which half-mockingly look down, as if to say, “Did we not see it ten thousand years ago, when another civilization did the same?” Steel aqueducts, leading captive waters across Shoal creek—a tube of steel binding the waist of this barbarian of the woods, that civilization might walk over his breast—water flowing across water, and that below grumbling with spiteful whirl and jealousy at the usurpation above. A rare picture of the present and the past, of strength and weakness, of beauty and grandeur, but above all the never-changing setting of eternal hills, and through it all the sigh of perpetual silence unbroken by this ripple of living laughter which scarcely touches the skirts of its dream.