RESOLVED TO GO--ESCAPE FROM BUSINESS--CHOOSING A LOCATION.
The last thirty years have been prolific of great pecuniary convulsions.
I need not recapitulate them here, as too many of them are yet dark
spots on the memory of some who will read this. Their frequency, as well
as their recurrence at shorter intervals than at the beginning of the
century, are among their most remarkable features, baffling the
calculations of older heads, and confounding those of younger ones. As
the century advanced, these convulsions increased in number and
violence. The whole business horizon seemed full of coming storms, which
burst successively with desolating severity, not only on merchants and
manufacturers, but on others who had long before retired from business.
No one could foresee this state of things. I will not stop to argue
causes, but confine myself to facts which none will care to contradict.
These disasters made beggars of thousands in every branch of business,
and spread discouragement over every community. I passed through several
of them, striving and struggling, and oppressed beyond all power of
description. How many more the community was to encounter I did not
know; but I conceived it the part of prudence to place myself beyond
the circle of their influence before I also had been prostrated.
In spite of the losses thus encountered, I had been saving something
annually for several years, when the stricture of 1854 came on,
premonitory of the tremendous crash of 1857. Most unfortunately for my
comfort, that stricture seemed to fall with peculiar severity on a class
of dealers largely indebted to me. Many of them became embarrassed, and
failed to pay me at the time, while to this day some of them are still
my debtors. My old experiences of raising money revived, and to some
extent I was compelled to go through the humiliations of similar
periods. But the stricture was of brief duration, and I closed the year
in far better condition than I had anticipated.
But the trials of that incipient crisis determined me to abandon the
city. I found that by realizing all I then possessed, I could command
means enough to purchase ten to twenty acres, and I had grown nervous
and apprehensive of the future. While possessed of a little, I resolved
to make that little sure by investing it in land. I had worked for the
landlord long enough. My excellent wife was now entirely willing to make
the change, and our six children clapped their hands with joy when they
heard that “father was going to live in the country.”
I had long determined in my mind what sort of farming was likely to
prove profitable enough to keep us with comfort, and that was the
raising of small fruits for the city markets. My attention had always
been particularly directed to the berries. Some strawberries I had
raised in my city garden with prodigious success. My friends, when they
heard of my project, expressed fears that the market would soon be
glutted, not exactly by the crops which I was to raise, but they could
not exactly answer how. They confessed that they were extremely fond of
berries, and that at no time in the season could they afford to eat
enough; a confession which seemed to explode all apprehension of the
market being overstocked.
But my wife and myself had both examined the hucksters who called at the
door with small fruits, as to the monstrous prices they demanded, and
had begged them, if ever a glut occurred, that they would call and let
us know. But none had ever called with such information. It was the same
thing with those who occupied stalls in the various city markets. They
rarely had a surplus left unsold, and their prices were always high. A
glut of fruit was a thing almost unknown to them. It was a safe
presumption that the market would not be depressed by the quantity that
I might raise.
But here let me say something by way of parenthesis, touching this
common idea of the danger of overstocking the fruit-market of the great
cities. It is a curious fact that this idea is entertained only by those
who are not fruit-growers. The latter never harbored it. Their whole
experience runs the other way, they know it to be a gross absurdity. Yet
somehow, the question of a glut has always been debated. Twenty years
ago the nurserymen were advised to close up their sales and abandon the
business, as they would soon have no customers for trees--everybody was
supplied. But trees have continued to be planted from that day to this,
and where hundreds were sold twenty years ago, thousands are disposed of
now. Old-established nurseries have been trebled in size, while
countless new ones have been planted. The nursery business has grown to
a magnitude truly gigantic, because the market for fruit has been
annually growing larger, and no business enlarges itself unless it is
proved to be profitable.
The market cannot be glutted with good fruit. The multiplication of
mouths to consume it is far more rapid than the increase of any supply
that growers can effect. Within ten years the masses have had a slight
taste of choice fruits, and but little more. Indulgence has only served
to whet their appetites. The more of them there is offered in the
market, the more will there be consumed. Every huckster in her shamble,
every vender of peanuts in the street, will testify to this. The modern
art of semi-cookery for fruit, and of preserving it in cans and jars,
has made sale for enormous quantities of those choicer kinds which
return the highest profit to the grower. It is in the grain-market that
panic often rages, but never in the fruit-market. If it ever enters the
latter, the struggle is to obtain the fruit, not to get rid of it.
The proper choice of a location was now to be the great question of my
future success. I had determined on giving my attention to the raising
of the smaller fruits for the great markets of New York and
Philadelphia. I must therefore be somewhere on or near the railroad
between those cities, and as near as possible to a station. The soil of
Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, was too heavy for some of the lighter
fruits. New Jersey, with its admirable sandy loam light, warm, and of
surprisingly easy tillage, was proverbially adapted for the growth of
all market produce, whether fruit or vegetable, and was at the same time
a week or two earlier. Land was far cheaper, there was no State debt,
taxes were merely nominal, and an acre that could be bought for thirty
dollars could be made four times as productive as an acre of the best
wheat land in Pennsylvania. Such results are regularly realized by
hundreds of Jerseymen from year to year.
It was also of easy access from the city for manure-boats. Every town
within the range of my wants was well supplied with churches, schools,
and stores, together with an intelligent and moral population. I should
be surrounded by desirable neighbors, while an hour’s ride by steamboat
or railroad would place me, many times daily, among all my ancient
friends in the city. We should by no means become hermits. I knew the
country so well from my numerous visits among the fruit-growers, when in
search of information, as to anticipate but little difficulty in finding
the proper location.
By the mere accident of a slight revival in business in the early part
of 1855, a party came along who was thus induced to purchase my stock
and machinery. Luckily, he was able to pay down the whole amount in
cash. I received what I considered at the time an excellent price; but
when I came to settle up my accounts and pay what I owed, I found, to
my extreme disappointment, that but a little over two thousand dollars
remained.
This sum was the net gain of many years of most laborious toil. Was it
possible for farming to be a worse business than this? I had made ten
times as much, but my losses had been terrible. This, with my personal
credit, was all the surplus I had saved. I remember now, that when thus
discovering myself to be worth so little, I half regretted having given
up my business for what then appeared to me so inadequate a sum. When
selling, I was jubilant and thankful--when settled up, I was full of
regrets. I ought to have had more. So difficult is it for the human mind
to be satisfied with that which is really best.
But I little knew what the future was to bring forth, and how soon my
want of thankfulness was to be changed into the profoundest conviction
that I had providentially escaped from total ruin, and come out
comparatively rich. I had made myself snug upon my little farm when the
tornado of 1857 toppled my former establishment into utter ruin. My
successor was made a bankrupt, and his business was destroyed, leaving
him overwhelmed with debt. He had lost all, while I had saved all. Had I
not sold when I did, and secured what the sale yielded me, I too should
have been among the wrecks of that terrific visitation.
But I heard its warring in the quiet of my little farm-house, where it
brought me neither anxiety nor loss. My position was like that of one
sitting peacefully by his wintry fireside, gazing on the thick storm
without, and listening to the patter of the snow-flakes as the tempest
drove them angrily against the window-pane, while all within was calm
and genial. Instead of regrets for what I had failed to grasp, my heart
overflowed with thankfulness for the comparative abundance that remained
to me. My peace of mind was perfect. The unspeakable satisfaction was
felt of being out of business, out of debt, out of danger--not rich, but
possessed of enough. The thoughtful reader may well believe that
subsequent disturbances, rebellion, war, and even a more wide-spread
bankruptcy--from all which my humble position made me secure--have only
served to intensify my gratitude to that Divine Providence which so
mercifully shaped my ways.