the problem.
It is creditable to the white man that he has bred any work into him at
all. However, he has ideas on the subject yet, and one of them is that,
since his freedom, it is contrary to some amendment of his Constitution
to work Saturday afternoons, even in fields carpeted with berry leaves,
studded with crimson clusters of reflected sunset, cooled with healthful
pine breezes and saturated with the perfume the gods loved most and the
soft balminess of the eternal spring in the sky.
That sounds like heaven, but it is not the heaven the negro wants. That’s
the white man’s heaven, and the white man would just be fool enough to
work right on till dark, making that extra two dollars and saving it
and all the rest of his week’s wages by keeping away from the dives of
near-by towns.
But the white man is a vain and foolish creature to the negro.
He has aspirations and he lives for the morrow. The negro has none—the
pure-blooded negro never had an aspiration in his life—and he lives not
even for the day but for the night following it, when his work ends and
he may be a nigger among his kind.
The white man works to accumulate; the negro to spend. And Saturday
afternoon and night is a bully time to spend what he has made the rest
of the week. There is only one better time, and that’s the next day, if
there is a foot-washing or a funeral.
That’s enough for the negro. His problem is nearly solved, for the tide
of immigration that has been flowing westward is being turned southward.
And when it turns there will be no negro question. Like everybody else he
will take his place in the order of things where his nature fits. He will
be then one muscle in the South’s great arm of labor, but he will never
be the biceps.
I found the people primitive, but honest and kind. They have lived around
here all their lives, and this thing is a revelation to them. It is more
money than they ever heard of before. Why, people actually carry bags of
silver around with them to pay off pickers. Heretofore the land had been
most anybody’s for the asking, but now they can make more money on one
acre properly tended to berries than they had before on a whole farm.
[Illustration: Berry field and pickers, Marble, Alabama.]
[Illustration: A group of berry pickers.]
A small boy came in going to mill, driving two little steers hitched to
a cart with wheels as primitive as the ancient Britons used, sawn from
the sound pine logs. He is immediately surrounded by the jolly drummers,
while their picture is taken for Trotwood’s. The big, two-wheeled log
carts used for hauling the big pine logs, are everywhere. Four, five,
six and even twelve yoke of oxen are seen in the woods or on the roads,
with tall, rawboned, sinewy fellows driving them with a long whip able to
reach to the farthest yoke. He whirls it around his head and it cracks
with a noise that would make it a great thing for a small boy on the
fourth of July.
Only it takes a man to crack it, and I noticed that it never fell on his
patient team—only the terrible exploding crack popped in the air above
their ears, and I rather thought the yoke seemed as proud of it as their
driver, for after every crack I noticed he added soothingly and softly:
“Haw there, Buck!” and Buck hawed calmly, as if he was not at all afraid,
nor even in a hurry, and they all went forward together with the steady
pull of perfect understanding between the man and his team.
I induced one of them, a lithe, fine looking fellow, to stop his team in
front of a car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all. And as I
looked at him I knew that in all his life nothing he had ever eaten had
ever disagreed with him, and that he had eaten everything that came his
way.
O for his legs and back and these pineland quail, and my own love for
hunting!
This pine belt of Alabama (I think while geology was fresh with me that
it was called a tertiary formation, it came far after the carboniferous
period around the Birmingham district) is one of the finest opportunities
in the world for the homeseeker. The price of the lands is simply a song
with a pine-top attachment. Two dollars per acre, wild, and the improved
lands ten to fifteen. They are sandy, with a good clay foundation, and
capable of holding what they get, and of great improvement. When I went
through them last they were a wilderness untouched, save where large
corporations had gobbled them up in vast tracts for almost nothing and
held them for the long-leafed yellow pines upon them. After the sawmill
came the cotton and corn. And of late has it been learned that in this
belt alone lie possibilities of all kinds of fruits and vegetables,
undreamed of four or five years ago. It is safe to say that in the belt
alone, extending from the seaboard clear across the South, through Texas,
even, and Oklahoma, lies the future’s great early fruit and vegetable
area of the continent.
[Illustration: A load of Klondyke berries ready for the car.]
The industry has scarcely begun here yet, and that only along the line of
the railroad, and yet from Castleberry the L. & N. railroad is shipping
from five to ten car-loads of strawberries alone per day.
The American people are now rich—richer than any nation ever was before.
They are learning how to eat and to live comfortably, and to spend their
money for delicacies. They hunt Southern climates in winter and winter
climates in summer. Once, when they were poor, they were satisfied with
things in their season. In the memory of the young man of to-day he who
used ice or had ice cream in summer was classed as the profligate Solomon
spoke of, and was destined to die in rags. As for having strawberries
in February and March, tomatoes at Christmas, asparagus the year round,
cabbages, lettuce—many of the vegetables so common that even the poor may
indulge now and then out of season—it was undreamed of. Think of what
it will be a century from now. Think of it and all this great, balmy,
bright-watered, sky-domed, clay-founded, health-breeding, beautiful,
blossoming land, greater in extent than a half dozen Eastern States,
lying sweet and cool under the dark green of shadowing pine, untouched
by ax or plow, that may be bought up for two dollars, and needs only a
little brains and energy to flush crimson in peach or berry or green in
vegetables.
And will it pay? I will give just one instance, not the unusual incident,
but the common one. I had walked around taking in the pretty picture at
Castleberry, the cottages among the pines, the great gaps cut out solidly
in the woods, forming fields alive with pickers, veritable pictures of
life in paints of red and green, and enclosed in frames of deep emerald.
I crossed the yellow, bright waters of a creek, stepping from log to
log. I saw a dozen kinds of birds that had not yet reached Tennessee
in their northern flight. Wild vines and flowers bloomed everywhere. I
walked two miles along from Castleberry to Marble, another coming town of
berries and fruits, enjoying it all as I did as a boy, when I wandered
among these trees of poetry in a land of poems.
[Illustration: BUYING BERRIES AT CASTLEBERRY, ALABAMA.
This photo shows fifteen berry buyers from as many different commission
houses. Over sixty houses have been represented at different times this
season at Castleberry.]
The very smell of them said “home.” The skies said “home,” the dying
pine needles, giving out their aroma beneath the foot, the way a little
stiff-tailed woodpecker shifted around a rotting pine stump. It meant
home and memories—memories that had slept embalmed.
Life—it has always hurt me. Was it given us for pain, that we might not
become as the fatted swine, who, having no hurt neither have any hope of
immortality?
To me it has been one great hurting and the times I have been joyous are
the times I have acted in self defense.
I unslung my little kodak and tried to take a razor-back in the edge of
the woods. I wanted a good picture of one—this hog of the Cracker South,
whose sinewy, lean, sweet bacon is sought for at fabulous prices by the
nobility of Europe. I approached him with confidence, thinking he would
recognize me as an old friend—nay, even, from my build, as one of his
kine. (A horrid pun, but a slippance.) But the razor-back is born in the
land of the darky, and the same great Designer who gave lightness to the
fingers of the darky gave speed to the heels of the razor-back.
And thus has he survived and still lives. I think he did not even stop to
look at my face. To this day he thinks I was black.
Around Marble there are 350 acres in strawberries and 100 or more in
Alberta peaches, and as I stepped into the clearing I met a native with
a good, honest face and carrying a bag of silver in his hands. We soon
became acquainted and he told me his name was John Barns and that he
was going to the field to pay off his pickers. It being Saturday noon.
I found him very straightforward and not inclined to exaggerate. He had
bought his farm of 240 acres Christmas, 1901, for $500. His daughter
married one W. W. Wright, who took a notion to plant strawberries—just
one acre. He set out the plants December, 1905, and though this had
been the poorest year in the history of the berry around Marble, the
late spring and frosts holding them back fully three weeks, and cutting
off the first crop entirely, Mr. Wright had cleared, after paying for
his plants, labor, fertilizers and picking, one hundred and twenty-five
dollars on that acre.
“Now, 1903 was our best year,” said Mr. Barns, and he pulled out a little
notebook he had. “Now, that year I planted my first berries, one and
one-quarter acres, and they netted me $521.27, to be exact.”
[Illustration:
“Under the dark of shadowy pines
Untouched by axe or plow.”]
We were joined, as we walked along, by another native, Mr. W. R.
Adkinson, who told me that in 1905 his neighbor, Mr. Elisha Downing,
cleared $2,050, net, on seven and one-half acres of berries. They both
agreed that this year was not so prosperous, and yet the railroad agent
told me they shipped fifteen carloads the Saturday before. They fetched
$2.50 to $3.50 per crate f. o. b. track at Castleberry. There were
several representatives of rival commission houses on the ground all
during the shipping season.
Although the section is comparatively new in the berry and fruit
business, I found it had spread all up and down the railroad, and from
a reliable party I found the area planted to be about 1,800 acres in
berries and 1,100 acres in Alberta peaches, extending from Bolling and
including Garland, Dunham, Owassa, Evergreen (a beautiful little town and
a great health resort), Sparta, Marble, Castleberry, Kirkland, Brewton
(another beautiful and thriving town), Flomaton, Century and Canal. An
hundred acres will be planted at Evergreen this year in cantaloupes,
while many cars of radishes were shipped from Greenville this year.
Eighteen hundred acres out of as many hundred thousand, and two or three
weeks of strawberries for the millions of people who have been waiting
all winter for them! This looks small and shows what may be done in the
future.
[Illustration: Mr. Adkinson and Mr. Barnes on their way to pay the berry
pickers.]
[Illustration: Before the berries came.]
At Marble I found a most interesting strawberry farm, and there I saw
the field dotted with pickers, a picturesque, poetic sight, especially
when dinner time arrived and the berries came in with the cream. The
berries we had for dinner were red and firm, with a fine flavor, and Mr.
Lister, who raised them, assured me that just thirty-five days before,
or on March 23, he had transplanted the vines. He called them, I think,
the Three W’s, though other berries which were cultivated for market were
Lady Thompson, Klondike and Excelsior.
I found Mr. Lister a great stickler for fertilizer, and though he said he
had not yet been able to carry out his plans fully, he recommended the
following as a sure process to attain the highest degree of success in
raising the berries: Five hundred pounds of acid phosphate and cottonseed
meal, equal parts, to begin with. Later, in October, side dress them
with 500 pounds equal parts acid phosphate, cottonseed meal and kainit.
Top dress in February with 400 pounds fertilizer, one-eighth per cent.
potash, seven per cent. acid phosphate and five per cent. nitrate soda.
After they are one year old about 500 pounds under them in fall, and so
applying about three dressings a year, every four months apart, of about
400 pounds, for feeding the plants and building the foundation for the
berries.
[Illustration: “I induced one of them ... to stop his team in front of a
car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all.”]
Mr. Lister thinks that the land may be bought cleared, fenced,
fertilized, planted and cultivated ready to pick for sixty dollars per
acre. The following are some of the companies I found engaged for a
hundred miles down the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. I was
unable to get all of them: Bolling Stock Company, Bolling, Ala., about
$20,000, eighty acres in berries, eighty in peaches and tomatoes in car
lots; Garland Company, Garland, Ala., forty acres; Dunham Stock Company,
Dunham, Ala., sixty acres, radishes in car lots; Brown Shepard Fruit Co.
and Gravella Fruit Co., Owassa, about 215 acres in berries and peaches;
Evergreen, Ala., about 100 in berries and 300 in peaches; Sparta, Ala.,
forty acres in berries; Marble, Ala., 350 acres in berries and 100 acres
in peaches, and so on, as enumerated above. In some places I have found
that they were planting the berries between the rows of peaches, and,
they tell me, with good results. Mr. W. D. Brown, of Gravella, told me of
eight acres of berries which netted their owner $1,800. I was impressed
by the fact that the entire business was in its infancy, so far as
gauging the possible demands of the future or in establishing the line
of fruit and berries for which the land was adapted. As time goes on
they will doubtless find that the land will be found suitable for both
cantaloupes and watermelons and fruits of all kinds, including figs and
grapes. In the matter of grapes alone, I happen to know that in a similar
section in Butler County, Ala., a light, sandy land, with good clay
subsoil, the finest of Scuppernong grape arbors flourished, some of them
covering a half-acre of ground, from which the best of home-made wines
are brewed.
Throughout all that section of the South, the land itself is good for
all farm purposes, differing, more or less, in different sections, but
all capable of holding the fertilizer used and returning good crops of
cotton, corn, oats, sugar cane, peas and other legumes. I doubt if better
cotton lands may be found in the South than in the pine flat section of
Alabama. On all of these lands wild grasses and clover grow in abundance,
and I find the cost of growing stock reduced to a minimum.
Strawberries and fruits are the poetry of it—the prose is there, too, and
awaits only the hand of the practical, steady, industrious man to make as
good a yield of good things all under the fairest skies and in a climate
as healthful and amid people as hospitable as may be found in all the
world.
The History of the Hals
PART X.—THE FIRST TOM HAL
By JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE
The first Tom Hal of which there is any record was a roan pacer about
fifteen hands high or a little over, with a black mane and tail,
very strong and well muscled, and of a great deal of style. He was a
clean-limbed, beautifully-turned little saddle horse (if tradition has
it right), remarkably fast at the pace and going all the saddle gaits,
especially the running walk or fox trot, so desirable then, as now, when
a business gait under the saddle was needed. This was about the year
1824-5; and he was ridden (so says tradition) by a Dr. Boswell, who
bought him in Philadelphia and rode him from that city to Lexington, Ky.,
his home. Boswell called him a Canadian, and declared he was the best
saddle horse he ever rode. He also said he was an iron horse, and later,
to prove it, he agreed for a wager to ride the horse from Leesburg, Ky.,
to Louisville, a distance of about seventy-five miles, and back, in the
same day. It was midsummer at that. He did it, but tradition says the
hard, hot ride came nearly ruining the horse, causing him to go blind. I
have often thought of this Dr. Boswell. A right gallant pill mixer and
letter-of-blood he must have been. I have never heard anyone describe
him, but I think I can: A good natured, horse-loving, poker-playing,
jolly cuss, a little fat, with a well padded seat, or else he had not
been so fond of a saddle and seventy-five miles a day. No skinny man
ever sticks to a saddle long. They prefer to walk, even in those days
when all the goods for the Western Settlement (as Kentucky and Tennessee
were called) were purchased in Philadelphia and hauled across the
mountains five hundred miles, or floated down the rivers a thousand. So
Boswell loved a horse, and loved to ride. He was not averse to sharp
horse-trading (as was customary in those days), nor did he fail to put up
a little wager now and then, as witness his bet that he could ride Tom
Hal from Leesburg to Louisville and back in a day.
Now, in studying Boswell and his horse, we must go back to the times in
which they lived. Philadelphia was the city which then rivaled New York,
and was the business market for nearly all the Western and Southwestern
States and Territories. In our story of the Hermitage we have seen that
General Jackson bought all the goods for his store, even as far as
Nashville, in Philadelphia. It was the great mart for the Western world.
And all men rode in those days. There were few roads, and rough ones, and
when the now famous Dr. Boswell (it is very likely he was a young fellow,
who finished his medical education at old Jefferson College) started
back to Kentucky, the cheapest and best way to get there was to buy a
Canadian pony, ride him through, and sell him in Kentucky. Anyway, that
is what he did.
A sad pity it was that the booted mixer of pills and calomel did not
leave some record behind as to just what the little roan was. A sad pity
he did not tell us in enduring lines why he called him Tom Hal, whom
he beat in a horse trade when he got him, whom he robbed when first he
mounted the original Tom Hal and rode him to Kentucky to fame.
For Boswell is famous—yea, as the other one was, for the other one is
known as the biographer of Johnson, and this one as the biographer of the
little Canadian pacing stud horse, the immortal Tom Hal, the pregenitor
of the tribe of Hals.
Glorious Boswell, we know not what was his life, nor how nor when his
taking off; nay, nor whom he took off—though we may be sure that in his
day and generation he did his share with his lancet, his blue-mass and
his calomel. Doubtless around the classic town of Lexington, perhaps
even from Leesburg to Louisville, he left in his track lamenting widows
and heart-broken orphans, whose sires first called in the horse-trading
Boswell, and whose widow next called in the undertaker. Many a night,
too, he rode the little pacer through the mud and sleet to the cabin of
some lusty pioneer who had partaken too freely of biled cabbages and
moonshine, and let a quart of blood from his guzzled body at the time
he needed it most, or put a hot rock on the stomach that already had
too much thereon. Often—often—the little pacer followed the trail of
the stork at a two-minute clip, until, doubtless, in the language of
Sentimental Tommy, he knew the difference between the wail of a “kid” and
the groan of a “deader.”
And the pride of it—the glory of it! Didn’t every barefoot boy know him?
“That’s Dr. Boswell an’ Tom Hal.”
“Didn’t the boys around the old fort store know him?
“Doc, thet’s a hell of a good little pony you’re ridin’.”
Didn’t all the old grannies know him: “Thar comes the Doctor, Sal,
a-ridin’ his little amblin’ stud. Lemme get some clean sheets on the
bed.”
Didn’t all the world know him—all the great, wide world, extending from
Leesburg to Louisville? For there was nothing beyond. You bet your life
they did. They all knew “Doc an’ his pacin’ stud.”
And Doc died and went the way of all the others he helped over the Styx,
and, saddest of all, he left us nothing that we know.
For knowledge at last is just nothing that we know.
Less even than Shakespeare. For we know positively three things of Shake:
He stole a deer in his youth, he married Anne Hathaway in his manhood,
and he died and left a will in his older age—left a will in which he
very cautiously told what was to be done with his best bed. But Tom Hal,
the equal of his kind—equal even to Billy Shake and Dr. Jonson—of Tom
Hal (he never had any best bed), and all we know is he was bought in
Philadelphia, was a little, clean-limbed, rubber-hard pacer, and had his
eyes ridden out of his head by a little wind-galled, blood-letting Doctor.
Great is Billy Shake! Great is Tommy Hal! Genius runs in parallel lines,
and after centuries of mixing recipes to produce it, mankind has given
it up and is willing to let it hit the earth now and then, untrammeled
by toe-weights, unreined, unchecked, unbitted and unspurred. Shakespeare
once wrote a description of a horse. You will find it in Venus and Adonis
(if you’re not an old maid or a preacher), and this verse is as great and
beautiful a description of Tom Hal, as he was and as he must have looked
then (barring his “fet-locks shag and long”), as the poem itself is the
most vivid and beautiful story of red-hot, immodest love:
“Look, when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well proportioned steed,
His art with Nature’s workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living would exceed:
“Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fet-locks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide—
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider, on so proud a back.”
But the horse of Shakespeare’s day was not the horse of Tom Hal’s day.
“Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,” doubtless
expressed the Norman blood that Shakespeare knew. To-day the round-hoofed
ones are plugs, the short-jointed ones are cart horses, and those with
fetlocks shag and long are close kin to the Mustang.
But the rest of it was Tom Hal:
“Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostrils wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong.”
Yes, all this was the first Tom Hal—and more.
* * * * *
Lexington, Ky., May 3.
Mr. John Trotwood Moore, Nashville, Tenn.
My Dear Sir: In one of your issues you say that “in 1816 Maria,
at Lexington, Ky., beat Robin Grey.” My maternal grandfather,
Benjamin Hieronymous, of Clarke County, Ky., was Robin Grey’s
original owner (owned his dam, of course), and slept all night
in the stall with her the night little Robin was foaled, March,
1804—such glowing visions inspired him of the coming prodigy.
Hence, if Maria beat Robin Grey in 1816, it was when Robin
was twelve years old. But there must be some mistake about
it. If reliance can be placed on tradition, it was the boast
of my grandfather to the day of his death, June, 1859, when
in his ninetieth year, that Robin Grey won every race, from
one-quarter to four miles, that he ever entered. In boyhood I
read the worn copy of a famous placard, of which this is the
substance: “Captain Cook’s celebrated ‘Whip’ challenges any
horse, mare or gelding to run any distance, from one-quarter to
four miles, barring Robin Grey.”