Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1898 — German Colonizing a Failure. [ARTICLE]

German Colonizing a Failure.

Prince Bismarck’s plan to Germanize Prussian Poland by buying up Polish estates and settling Germans on them has proved a failure. The Prussian chambers nine years ago established a fund of 100,000,000 marks for this purpose. The Polish nobles sold their heavily mortgaged estates to the Government readily, but, Instead of emigrating, bought with the money other estates in the country from Germans and gathered around them Polish laborers. The only result of the experiments has been to benefit the Polish land owners of Posen.

The receivers of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad have tnrned their attention to the .improvement of the grades on the Third division, from Cumberland to Grafton, or rather that portion which lies between Altamont, the top es the 17-mile grade, and Terra Alta, where the Cranberry grade begins to descend. The line passes through Deer Park-amP Oakland and crosses what is known ns the "Glades” of the Alleghany Mountains. The grades are short and choppy, some of them being SO to 85 feet to the mile. One of the first pieces of work to be done is now in progress at No. 58 cut, where the grade is being reduced from 81 feet to 42Vi feet per mile, with equations for curvature. It is expected that the cutting down of this grade will enable the receivers to increase the train load from 1,000 tons to 1,300 tons on east-bound trains. One mile of the roadway will be lowered, and it is expected that the work will be completed by the middle of October.