The South at Work: Observations from 1904

The Awakening of Texas in Agriculture

The Awakening of Texas in Agriculture One Good Result of the Boll Weevil’s Advent It Has Aroused the People to the Necessity of Scientific Farming— The State’s Eggs Will No Longer Be Put in One Basket—How The Agriculture Colleges and the Agricultural Department Are Studying the Insect and Attempting to Check Its Ravages—Texas’s Great Future [Special Correspondence of the Transcript] College Station,Texas, April 14. It is a little surprising that this should be my first visit to an agricultural college . There are several in the older States which I have planned to visit, but until I got off the train here the other day it must be confessed that I never saw the outside of such an institution. It was a little past noon, and the shade of a clump of trees about the little station-house looked pleasant. A score or more of students were awaiting the train.They were a tall, clean-cut lot, uniformed in dark blue flannel shirts, gray trousers, and campaign hats. Finding no one I knew among them, I was asking the way to the president ’s house when I caught sight of a comfortable surrey under the biggest Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, May 7, 1904. The Awakening of Texas in Agriculture 99 of the trees, occupied by an expectant small boy and a large, placid man, who was trying to look the reverse of expectant.As he succeeded without grinning, in keeping his eyes resolutely fixed on the horizon, I ignored him, greeted the small boy, climbed into the near seat, and made a few remarks about the weather, and the farmers, and greens, and turnips. As we entered the campus some equally contemptuous observations on derby hats and the effete East and people who sent meaningless telegrams were addressed to the horse.The approach to reminiscences of the time, a little disconcertingly long ago, when both monologuists were at college in the corner of the county farthest of all from Texas,was achieved through my unguarded tribute to the prairie flowers spread over the level parade ground.1 People say “out here” on the Texas prairies. My own feeling is “up here.” Once out of the coast belt, the land is rolling, and in the absence of trees to make a sky line, I always have a notion that the next wave-like green undulation of the earth—it may be ten miles away—is the edge of a plateau, beyond which lies a lower country. A strong gulf breeze is nearly always blowing from the southeast. The skies are nearly always blue and white. It is easy to fancy one’s self at sea. Nowhere else on land is it possible to be so spaciously out-of-doors. It did not take me long to find out that the college is admirably in touch with the industrial life of the State. Thousands of farmers are enrolled on its waiting lists, and every July a farmers’conference is held here.2 The cattlemen are equally interested. Not long ago, the director of the experiment station sent out a circular letter to the ranchmen asking if they were willing to trust him with a few representatives from their herds to be used in certain experiments .One of the offers he received was of three hundred head,to be handled as he might choose, and shipped to market when he should be done with them. The writer apologized for sending so few. Other experiment stations are maintained in sufficient numbers to insure a practical acquaintance with all the different conditions of agriculture to be found in the State. Lecturers from this central station are constantly going about from one farmers’ institute to another.3 How close other industrial movements are watched may be inferred from a substantial, new building, now half completed. It will be used solely for instruction in the management and machinery of cotton mills.4 As yet, Texas manufacturers only the merest fraction of a percentage of her principal crop, and it would be easy to mention certain disadvantages of this region for textile work as compared with the Carolinas. But Beaumont oil is, so far, a very cheap fuel, and I have heard considerable talk of the possible fitness of Mexicans for the work of the mills. One of the railroads, I know, is 100 The Awakening of Texas in...