Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1874 — Manufacturing in the West. [ARTICLE]

Manufacturing in the West.

How to get more for the productions of the Western farm, will be answered surely and practically by building up manufactories in the West, and not so certainly other, wise. Every bushel of our surplus productions which are shipped to consumers in the East or to the seaboard for exportation, costs the Western producer a heavy tax for transportation. Suppose by buildings up’mannfacturing in the West by which we create a community of con suftiers, we are enable to sell a large part of our surplus at home; thus we save not only transportation on this, but on the manufactured articles we use, which at present we ship from the East. W hat we need to do is to manufacture to supply our own necessities, and feed the operatives in the mills and shops. We have the raw material in the greatest abundance for manufacturing, and we produce a great surplus to feed with. We want to take a more practical, common sense view of our troubles than we have, and that done we shall find that the fault lies more at our own doors than we had suspected. Every town in the West, suitably situated for some kind of manufacturing) should hold out every reasonable inducement for the location of the mills and shops of the operatives. If in every such town an additional thousand industrious consumers could thus be located, it would make a home market for many thousand, dollars’ worth of farm productions. We want to learn this lesson in the West as speedily as possible, for herein is a practical solution of the questions and troubles which beset us.— lndiana Farmer.