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"This Tennessee mud sticks closer'n a $500 mortgage to a 40-acre tract," sighed Si, as he stopped beating and brushing his blouse and pantaloons. "Or, "'Aunt Jemima's plaster, "The more you try to pull it off the more it sticks the faster." hummed Shorty, with what breath he had left from his violent exercise.
In the spring of 1881 the farming land was surveyed into forty 40-acre blocks, these later subdivided. During the winter of 1881 was built a log schoolhouse, through private donations. The first teacher was Mrs. Anna Romney. The first church was a "bowery" of greasewood.
No one ever took up a farm in those days without a dray and a team, a year's rations, a few horses and milkers, pigs and fowls, and a little furniture. They didn't collar a 40-acre selection, as they do now spend all their money in getting the land and squat down as bare as robins a man with his wife and children all under a sheet of bark, nothing on their backs, and very little in their bellies.
Question: How many tons of average farm manure must be applied to a 40-acre field in order to provide as much nitrogen as would be added to the soil by plowing under 2-1/2 tons of clover per acre? Answer: 400 tons. Either method will furnish about as much nitrogen as would be taken from the soil by a 50-bushel crop of wheat, a 75-bushel crop of corn or a 100-bushel crop of oats per acre.
You'll be lucky to git as close to 'em as the other side of a 40-acre field." "But s'posin' a rebel runs at you with his bayonet," expostulated Harry Joslyn, "oughtn't you to know how to ward him off and settle him?" "The best way's to settle him jest as he comes over the hill, half-a-mile away, with an ounce o' cold lead put where he lives.
In this manner the Government protects our country against new diseases which might come to our shores on foreign plants and tree stock. Our forests of the New World were so abundant when the early settlers landed on the Atlantic Coast that it was almost impossible to find enough cleared land in one tract to make a 40-acre farm.
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