The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-08-19
P|CKENS COUNTY RAISES REAL CORN Bill Sikes Finds Finest Crop
 in the State HOW IT WAS, DONE The Successful Raising of Corn Means That Pickens Is to Be
 Banner County for Hog
 Raising
HOW IT WAS, DONE

IdIIIlcIS Sll anu NOHdtI lOW SuCn 6OON things could come out of Nazareth. even believe that Doty, the one-time twinkler of the Andalusia Star, would agree with me that his beloved Coving- ton county did not have any edge on Pickens when it came to producing some thing that was good for both man and beast.
 This corn Is growing on the farm of man who is also lumberman and there by hangs this tale. The National Stock yards of St. Louis have great accumula- tions of fertilizers that have been more or less waste. The agricultural depart ment of the Mobile and Ohio walked up one day and discovered that if MT. Hai- den Miller would make a low rate on this offal from the stock yards they could inn prove impoverished soils in the south, and at the same time get some revenue from the inbound shipments of the fertil- izers and the outbound shipments of the crops that the fertilizers would produce in greater volume. The next thing the agricultural department had to do was to find the farmer to take shot at something new.
 III tldNCllil6 alOQho llSS ACdIQ Ol e combination farmer and lumberman in the person of MT. Bell of the lumber com pany which bears his name, and they got together on the proposition and worked out the scheme that is bearing such fruit. In all my travels over the state I have never seen anything to equal this crop of several hundred acres, and I verify believe that an average yield of 80 bushels or more per acre may be harvested provided there is no interrup- ton to present reasonable weather. This man Bell is somewhat of a wonder himself. Years ago it seems he started out in small way in the Jumper indus try and now he has made his pile and can take life easy. Like my friend, E.. F. Allison of Bellamy, his head has not been turned, and his first thought is ap. parently not how many dollars he can make, but what he can do to improve the condition of his cut-over lands, and how he can make life happier for the em- ployes who make his prosperity possible Having in mind his farm and it's i'm provement, put him to studying the fer tilizer movement, and then came the
  thing came to him easy: Ship the cars in loaded with fertilizer, ship the same car back loaded with lumber, keep the car moving all the time. The freight | rate on the cars of fertilizer averaged | about $40, but this was small price to pay for cars when they were as scarce as hens teeth He kept the lumber roll ing and unloaded lot of cars while the top price was to be had, and as the say ing goes, he made money "a gwine and CT comin."
 Over here the colored brother listened to the siren song of the labor agent and he went north where he could shake a tree, let the dollars fall, and then rake them up. Oh! it was beautiful picture that the labor agent painted and many colored man "emigrated." For a time it seemed that but little labor would be left along the line of the A. T. N. Scores of them moved out, just as scores of them ar emoving back.
 It is said that one night about the time of the East St. Louis riots the telephone bell of'a prominent manufac- turer rang at a lumber mill along the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern, and when it was answered it was found to
 
 | the other end of the line which it ap- pears was near East St. Louis, said: Boss am dis you? This air Jim speak ing ,and he wants ter git home powerful bad. Boss wire me one ticket to cover me and all my chilluns." The "boss,' being one of those southerners who had been raised by black nanny, heard the call. sent the money and now one more negro family has been added to the .Io,. +l.1% l.. the Eldorado that proved to be like Dead sea fruit.
 The whole section Is feeling the return nlove vement, and conditions of the labor Is much improved. Work is plentiful, and it appears that there is more ap- preciaton of the importance of the ne- gro in the industrial scheme of southern things.
 saw Russell Houston of the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern the other day and he was so happy he could hardly contain himself He had received no- tice of an allotment of more than 10O0 cars for his line. and he was busy calling the Superintendent of transpor- tation to arrange for the handling of them, and how to get them out and loaded with. the millions of feet of lum- Der piled along the line
 There will come time when Houston will be more concerned with cars to move grain than he is now with lum- Der for the example of MT. Bell is bound to be followed and out of the agricultural inertia produced by the boil weevil there will come. as it is rapidly coming now, new or6er of things in which grain will prove the most important thing with hogs, cattle and all the other stuff that goes to nake a prosperous country.
 As I rode over the country today wondered If 1t would be possible to pro- duce wheat in and around Carrollton, and if so what wonderful yields might come from farms like MT. Bells. Of one thing I am sure: The country can make good hogs as Doty ever saw in Andalusia. Some of these fine days the business men of Tuscaloosa may look less to banking and more to pro- noting business that will make them money to burn. When they reach that point we will see a packing houses in Tuscaloosa and our breakfast tables will be graced with breakfast bacon and ham grown within 75 miles of oup doors
 And then there will be more corn mills grinding out meal that MT. Hoover may yet teach our Yankee cousins to eat. For the man who does not know how to eat cornbread or new ground turnips there Is feeling of deep sympathy in the heart of BILL SYKES.