Evening star., 1934-02-26


n ED threads of war. massacre,
- revolution, treason, disgrace
N and ruin run through the
i y sordid story of land specula-
tion in the Tennessee Valley.
The land gambler of today-in some
cases apparently a worthy successor
of the men who put innocent villages
to the sword in order to provoke a
war by which they could secure Shaky
land titles by right of conquest-is
getting Scant courtesy from the hands
of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The engineers are not laying the foun-
are trampling on land speculation
wherever it shows its head. What
ever the type of economic set-up
which eventually comes out of the
set-up. it will be a system based on
! real values. There will be no room
for the gambler. Nowhere is any de-
velopment planned which can have
more than a slow and orderly effect
ON land values
But the organization Inherited a
difficult situation. The imagination
of the American public had been in
trigued by the immense power re-
sources at Muscle Shoals and the pos
sibilities of industrial development
There were wild stories of a great
metropolis which would cover the red
cotton fields of this part of Northern
Alabama in few years. 1t was to
be the site of new Pittsburgh, a new
Detroit. Here was ordinary farm
land which. in a few years, would be
covered with factories and sky
scrapers.
Costly to Many Widows.
The result would be rather amusing,
if it did not represent the insurance
policies of widows and orphans. For
Is or 80 miles around Muscle Shoals
there are barren cotton fields cut up
into 20-foot lots with street markers
nailed on posts. There are Roosevelt
avenues" Wilson boulevards," "Persh-
ing promenades," etc, etc, running
through meadows knee-deep in mud
and forests in which not stick of
timber has been cut
In some cases the development has
been a little more elaborate. with
paved streets and street lights, but no
houses or inhabitants. The Chamber
of Commerce Building of Muscle
Shoals City" standing alone in a cot
ton field. is the city" Forty miles
from Florence, inaccessible except by
foot or horseback. is a tract recently
cut over by a lumber company and
conservatively valued at about 81 an
acre. 1t has been cut up into 20
foot lots, provided with its "Roose :
welt avenue" advertised as the pro-
spective site of an exclusive colored
suburb of the great metropolis of the
future, and sold to colored people at
$50 lot. There are no improvements
whatsoever - nothing but cut-over
timber land. Lots at a prospective
exclusive Summer resort" on the
shores of Wilson lake, formed by the
water of the Tennessee backed up
from the Muscle Shoals dam, are Of
fered for sale.
Schemes Were Clever.
Some of the prices reputed to have
been obtained for the cotton field lots
are almost unbelievable. The sales
propaganda has been conducted with
great cleverness. A century ago, it is
urged, one could have bought an acre
in the heart of the present city of
Chicago for so cents. Think what
il would be worth today. Here is 'ust
such an opportunity. An employe of
the Tennessee Valley Authority whose
special job has been to investigate and
expose this sort of real estate specu-
lation recently received a letter from
relative in Northern city who had
bcen listening to the siren song of a