The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-02-12
LAND AS IT IS FOUND
 IN WIREGRASS REGION
Soil of Famous Section Is, Generally Speaking, Of Clay and Sand, and Rich in Productive
 Fertility.

section has in 1t many farmers who have cash to pay fo" what they get and who have cotton to sell when the price suits them. Especially Is this true. In a half d~y's drive through the country one can hardly pass farm house in the yard of which. there is not a row of cotton bales, some times as few as two and sometimes as numerous as forty. Of course. it is frequently the case that money is borrowed on the cotton. that some merchant or some broker is more or less interested in the store of cotton. Nor is the idea to be had that every farmer in the territory about Enter prise is absolutely free from debt.
 new thought on the financial con- dition of the section was brought out by Vice-President Byrd of the Enter prise Banking Company who moved into Enterprise from Ozark last Au- gust.
 This is of course a new country about here." said MT. Byrd, -and being a new county the prosperity of the farmers Is remarkable. You see most of them come in with but very little. Some of them had enough to make a small payment on their place. Others did not have that much. They, there fore. had to build from the ground up They had to buy their land, clear 1t up, establish homes and pay for it all All this had to be done in the past seven years. In fact, the average time the farmer of this territory has been here is four years. That they have done so we'll in so short time Is de- cidedly to their credit. That a good many of them owe some money IS not to their discredit. Our bank is car rying a good deal of cotton in money loaned to farmers. We have a num- Der of customers on our books who are holding from 20 to 25 bales. Naturally the older settlers who have been in the longest are in the best condition, but the entire section Is much better off than ever before. An indication of this is in the fact that lands are held right now at the highest figures ever known in Coffee County. A few days ago a sale was made of forty acres of land at S25 an acre. Our farms are much smaller than those of other sections. The averagfis farm here is a two-mule farm, a farm having per- haps sixty acres in 1t. It is g hog and hominy country here. The farm CTS are given to raising syrup, pota- toes, corn, meat and other things need ed at home"
 Enterprise has grown large enough to support two prosperous banks, the Enterprise Banking Company and the First National Bank.
 In speaking of the physical aspect of the country about Enterprise, A. S. Edwards, enc of the older farmers, said; T tell you. 1t is the finest farm ing section of the State. And the country Is so thiekly settled that you could hardly appreciate 1t without see- ing 1t. The immediate territory about Enterprise is as thickly settled as Jefferson County, There is another phase of the agricultural condition of this section that should not be overlooked and that Is the rapid way in which new farming territory Is be- ing opened. You see we have several saw mills in Coffee County, One ot them, the Henderson Boyd Lumber | Company. is one of the largest in Ala bama. As these saw mills cut down the pine forests new settlers follow them and put the land into cultivation And this new land, like the older land is susceptible to any kind of improve mept and there is no limit to what fl can make"
 There are two or three show places about Enterprise. The most famous of them is Arlington" the country home of Captain John Rawls. late of Vir- ginia, and South Carolina. It is a beautiful home on an excellent farm large and commodious house with every convenience and every attention The people of Enterprise say that it is one of the very finest country homes In all South Alabama.
 Then there is the model farm of Sam Smith. who has gone largely into the stock business. MT. Smiths speciality is the raising of registered Berkshire hogs. The hogs he raises are too val uable to be sold as pork in the local market or in any other market They are reared and sold for breeding pur-