Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1913 — BRAZIL IS LAND OF COFFEE [ARTICLE]

BRAZIL IS LAND OF COFFEE

More Than Half of All That Is Consumed In the World Is Grown There. The custom of coffee drinking Is relatively of rather recent development among peoples of Europe and their descendants in America, says H. W. Van Dyke, in "Through South America.” For some reason, for a long time after it'made its way west from Arabia and Turkey, it was under the ban of the church. Maybe this was because of its Mohammedan origin. It was not until 1652 that the first house that made a specialty of serving coffee was opened in London, and about the same time it was introduced in France. Frotn then on it has spread until the amount now consumed the world over Is simply enormous, especially in the United States,

where we take somewhere near half of all that Is grown. At first it came only from northern Africa, Arabia and Turkey; then the Dutch began experimenting and succeeded in cultivating It In Java, and the French in the West Indies. For a while these were the principal sources of supply. The story goes that In 1760 a Portuguese, Joao Alberto Castello Branco, planted a tree in Rio, and from that small start, thanks to its peculiarly favorble soil and climate, Brazil soon outstripped the others and took the lead. - -

On the uplands of Sao Paulo more than half of all the coffee consumed in the world is grown. There are between 15,000 and 20,000 cafezals, or plantations, employing hundreds of thousands of laborers. Some of the plantations are so vast that they grow millions of trees. Here it is that most of the immigrants flock.