The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-12-18

WOuuefIully pfOuuCllNe, anu pSSANGS growing vegetables for the family 1t supplies him with onions, celery, strawberries and other things that he takes to market and exchanges for rum and molasses and such minor articles as he and his family need. His success shows that no land in Connecticut need be abandoned If men can be found Will ing to work as the early settlers ot this county worked and live as they lived. But some one may tell me or easily titled land, easily accessible ana apparently once productive that mas | long been unused and Is now grown up | to brush. l grant it. The very Tact that 1t was so easily titled and so easy | to get at worked it's ruin. Taking crop after crop from any land and returning nothing will in time render it fit only | for abandonment. Such land may De restored by fertilizing, but the cost Is too great for competition with cheap new western land. When Uncle Sam gets through giving us all a farm such | land is liable to again be cleared up, and if left long enough to Itself nature will to some extent restore its fertility. Aside from the rough land unsuitable for farming at the wages a farmer or to-day can earn, and the land that has been despoiled by covetous owners, there are undoubtedly many thousand acres of excellent pasture land in Con- necticut practically abandoned.
 When a Connecticut farmer could loan his money to western competi- tor at eight or ten per cent. 1t was great temptation to let the brush grow on his own farm and take his interest rather than hire help to cut his brush. THIS WAS A MISTAKE.
 When Connecticut passed law all lowing the registration of notes and bonds at low rate of taxation, the farmers of a Litchfield county town sent to the state treasurer's office something like sixty thousand dollars worth of evidences of western indebt- edness. Had that money been used in cutting hard hack. improving high ways and maintaining the value of the real estate of the town there might not have been so great an apparent profit, but the town would have been more than sixty thousand dollars richer now, If two manufacturers were to start in l the same village at the same time and one loaned his profits to the other to keep up and enlarge his plant while the lender allowed his buildings and ma chinery to rot out and wear out 1t would take but few years to make one a prosperous manufacturer while the other could take what was due him and abandon his plant. Very many | Connecticut farmers have for years past been doing all together too much in the way of booming the business of others. Said friend, who had read that I was to talk to you of the desert ed farms of New England The sub iect is a good one, for there are scores of deserted farm houses and cellars where farm houses once stood, go where you will in Connecticut
 This is quite true, but it does not follow that we are poorer
 FARMS INCREASE IN VALUE.
 Let me give you an example. In my boyhood days there stood near a by way that I travel over in going to an outlying farm. what would be known as a farm house. The owner had a lit tie farm, kept horse and COW, possi- bly, two cows some times, and made and mended boots and shoes. The old shoemaker died years ago and shoe making as an individual industry died about the same time. The farm house is gone also, only the site remains, and the little farm is deserted. I have of fered double what the house, barn and farm brought the last time 1t was sold ] about thirty years ago, for the land alone, but the owner, employed in 8 nearby city, thinks he may come back
 to the country to live sometime anG prefers to let it grow up to brush in the
 meantime. Again it must be remem
 bered that it required more people tC
 raise the same crop on the same lant
 years ago than now. Moving ma
 chimes, horse rakes and cultivators takt the place of men, but do not require
 farm houses. The man that sits on { moving machine to-day gets double the pay that the old scythe swinger got
 but he and a pair of horses can do a: much in a day as the dwellers in half z
 dozen of the houses that are gone, be cause not needed under present condi tions. When you allow for the farn houses once plenty all over New Eng land, occupied by shoemakers, wheel : Wrights, tailors and people engaged il other industries that are now concen trated in our cities and boroughs, anC for those occupied by people, who, liv ing as farm help lived fifty years ago could plant a rocky hillside with corr on shares, or work for fifty cents day you will account for all the old sites And when you find farm house fit t' live in or a farm upon which a living as we now live, can be made, deserted ; it is because the owners profit or pleas ure takes him away from it and he doe not choose to sell
 Tt is the misfortune of Connection
 that, through mismanagement, man. 1 hundred acres of her soil have beel
 made unproductive, but it is not he ,, l misfortune that her citizens can liv
 more comfortably than of yore and ar ! not compelled to wrestle with her rock! l hillsdes and worn out fields.
 l MUCH CAN BE RECLAIMED.
 While a vast amount of the aban !. doned land of Connecticut can, withou :, doubt. proftably remain abandoned . there is much that the frugal, industri 1 i,,,