A small boy came in going to mill, driving two little steers hitched to a cart with wheels as primitive as the ancient Britons used, sawn from the sound pine logs. He is immediately surrounded by the jolly drummers, while their picture is taken for Trotwood’s. The big, two-wheeled log carts used for hauling the big pine logs, are everywhere. Four, five, six and even twelve yoke of oxen are seen in the woods or on the roads, with tall, rawboned, sinewy fellows driving them with a long whip able to reach to the farthest yoke. He whirls it around his head and it cracks with a noise that would make it a great thing for a small boy on the fourth of July.
Only it takes a man to crack it, and I noticed that it never fell on his patient team—only the terrible exploding crack popped in the air above their ears, and I rather thought the yoke seemed as proud of it as their driver, for after every crack I noticed he added soothingly and softly: “Haw there, Buck!” and Buck hawed calmly, as if he was not at all afraid, nor even in a hurry, and they all went forward together with the steady pull of perfect understanding between the man and his team.
I induced one of them, a lithe, fine looking fellow, to stop his team in front of a car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all. And as I looked at him I knew that in all his life nothing he had ever eaten had ever disagreed with him, and that he had eaten everything that came his way.
O for his legs and back and these pineland quail, and my own love for hunting!
This pine belt of Alabama (I think while geology was fresh with me that it was called a tertiary formation, it came far after the carboniferous period around the Birmingham district) is one of the finest opportunities in the world for the homeseeker. The price of the lands is simply a song with a pine-top attachment. Two dollars per acre, wild, and the improved lands ten to fifteen. They are sandy, with a good clay foundation, and capable of holding what they get, and of great improvement. When I went through them last they were a wilderness untouched, save where large corporations had gobbled them up in vast tracts for almost nothing and held them for the long-leafed yellow pines upon them. After the sawmill came the cotton and corn. And of late has it been learned that in this belt alone lie possibilities of all kinds of fruits and vegetables, undreamed of four or five years ago. It is safe to say that in the belt alone, extending from the seaboard clear across the South, through Texas, even, and Oklahoma, lies the future’s great early fruit and vegetable area of the continent.
A load of Klondyke berries ready for the car.
The industry has scarcely begun here yet, and that only along the line of the railroad, and yet from Castleberry the L. & N. railroad is shipping from five to ten car-loads of strawberries alone per day.
The American people are now rich—richer than any nation ever was before. They are learning how to eat and to live comfortably, and to spend their money for delicacies. They hunt Southern climates in winter and winter climates in summer. Once, when they were poor, they were satisfied with things in their season. In the memory of the young man of to-day he who used ice or had ice cream in summer was classed as the profligate Solomon spoke of, and was destined to die in rags. As for having strawberries in February and March, tomatoes at Christmas, asparagus the year round, cabbages, lettuce—many of the vegetables so common that even the poor may indulge now and then out of season—it was undreamed of. Think of what it will be a century from now. Think of it and all this great, balmy, bright-watered, sky-domed, clay-founded, health-breeding, beautiful, blossoming land, greater in extent than a half dozen Eastern States, lying sweet and cool under the dark green of shadowing pine, untouched by ax or plow, that may be bought up for two dollars, and needs only a little brains and energy to flush crimson in peach or berry or green in vegetables.
And will it pay? I will give just one instance, not the unusual incident, but the common one. I had walked around taking in the pretty picture at Castleberry, the cottages among the pines, the great gaps cut out solidly in the woods, forming fields alive with pickers, veritable pictures of life in paints of red and green, and enclosed in frames of deep emerald. I crossed the yellow, bright waters of a creek, stepping from log to log. I saw a dozen kinds of birds that had not yet reached Tennessee in their northern flight. Wild vines and flowers bloomed everywhere. I walked two miles along from Castleberry to Marble, another coming town of berries and fruits, enjoying it all as I did as a boy, when I wandered among these trees of poetry in a land of poems.