Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 193, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1915 — Writes of Southland Which He Visited Last Week. [ARTICLE]

Writes of Southland Which He Visited Last Week.

I have just returned from Scottsboro, Ala., where I have been looking at a telephone system and want to say a word through the columns of your paper to the people who have an idea that the south is a poor country. I have never been in a country so surprising in every way as northeastern Alabama. I went expecting to find poor sand knobs and long haired men, but instead found thousands of acres of corn out of the way of all danger and I am sure will yield from 30 to 60 bushels per acre; thousands of acres of cotton that will produce from a half to one and onehalf tons per acre; fruit of all kinds, and a fine a lot of people as I have ever found anywhere; educated and refined; sociable and generous to a fault. I rode all over the country K was given as good entertainment as I ever received anywhere in my life, and when I offered to Dav any bills they laughed at me and said: “That aint the way we do down here.” I spent almost a week down there at the ertreme cost of one dollar and that under protest.

As o prices of land, they are just where we were thirty years ago. Good land growing 50 bushels of corn can be bought for SSO. This is good farming land. Just as good land farmed by natives with 25 to 30 bushel can be bought for from sls to S3O per acre. The same lands here would Tiring from $75 to SIOO. The climate is mild, never a case of sunstroke or sleet known. Fine water and good roads. The people are beginning to open their eyes and in a few years the man who goes there now with a little money will in a few years be multiplying it by ten or twenty. I have been west, southwest and know much about it but give me the south five to one to live in, to invest in, and to form associations in. I am surely struck on Alabama. —A. L. Clark. Commissioner Welch, of Carpenter township, was over today. He reports having coifipleted thrashing and having an average of 32% bushels of wheat. only had 10 acres, however, but wishes the entire farm had been in wheat. He sold at $1 per bushel. The best yield he had heard of was in Newton county, near Goodland, where one farmer had an average wheat yield of 42 bushels.