Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 177, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1910 — NO MORE PLANTATIONS. [ARTICLE]

NO MORE PLANTATIONS.

Panalnir of an Institution In Which the South Had Great PridedIn the antebellum days the pride of the gentleman planter—there were few farmers In those days—was In the vastness of his acreage. Those estates were not farms, they were “plantations;” they were by the “gentry” and they made the agricultural south of those days. It was a common thing to find one planter's possessions which would require a goodly part of a day to cover on horseback. Many of us to-day recall scenes of the old family plantation, look back upon the time when life in the country seemed more given to entertainment, to hospitality, to the joys of living, than to the pursuits of farming as an enterprise. Market conditions and the fluctuation of- prices did not enter into the scheme of life then as they do now; it was enough to know that There was a crop, a big crop, growing and it would not have to be marketed before it was harvested. In those days plantation lift drifted along under the motto “Sufficient unto the day are the pleasures thereof” and the planters enjoyed life. But, like other things which go to naJce up the present age, agriculture

"V... ' « ' fji. i ■ ”♦ and its conditions have changed—the old plantation Is passing, the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle says. They were a characteristic of South Carolina, and largely, too, of Georgia, nut there are very few of them left. fn Georgia, Burke County, Washington County, Green County and many others were known for their large country estates —plantations—in the days “before the war,” but now they have dropped out of mind; they do not occupy the place of the day they once did, because they themselves exist no longer. This is a day of farms, small farms, and where one planter pursued his agricultural methods, conducted his operations then, there are now half a dozen busy farm ers men who have not time to farm the numerous aerqs the “planter” prided himself on possessing. These memories of bygone days and the realization of what a changecj and busy world has followed are freshened by the announcement in an item from Cordele, Ga., that one of the oldest, one of thewnost notable of the old southern plantations will shortly, too, be only a memory—the “Egypt of the confederacy” is to pass out. The old Hugenin plantation, around which there hinges volumes of written and unwritten antebellum and war-time history, is to-be cut up into small farms. The “plantation” of one man Is to be turned into 120 farms. The Cordele news item, an interesting one, says: “It was learned here yesterday that the owners of the Hugenin plantation consisting of 12,000 stores of valuable? farm lands, located about eight miles from Cordele, just across the Flint river in Sumter County, is to be divided into small farms of hundred-acre lots for the purpose of selling them to north Georgia farmers. This is the oldest and the largest plantation in the State, having been occupied by Capt. Hugenin during the war, and it embraced a part of the large territory in this section known as the ‘Egypt of the confederacy.’ Many of the supplies used by the Southern soldiers were raised by the slaves belonging to Capt. Hugenin on this plantation.”