Land lot

“ These were cut off, the land plowed, the roots picked up and converted into a fence, which separates the field from the adjoining waste, now not more rude and desolate than was the flourishing field six months ago The original price of this entire property was $5.00 per acre; the expense of preparing this particular lot for tillage was about $15.00 per acre, and I saw many acres which will yield a profit beyond all disbursement, that will make the land worth to him, as an investment, at least $200 per acre. ”

“ Many a farmer has sold his land, where it was somewhat remote from the town, for a merely nominal price, and gone to reside where he could send his children to school. It was impossible, as it was useless, to cultivate a mile square of land, where neither rail-car nor steamboat ever came to take away its produce. And as for stock-raising and wool-growing, it was not necessary to own large bodies of land, since there was vacant land enough, of the best kind for that purpose, in the foot-hills on either side of the valley. ”

“ Gored acres. No man's land.
Two other small details marking the open field system require only to be simply mentioned. Corners of the fields which, from their shape, could not be cut up into the usual acre or half-acre strips, were sometimes divided into tapering strips pointed at one end, and called 'gores,' or 'gored acres.' In other cases little odds and ends of unused land remained, which from time immemorial were called 'no man's land,' or 'any one's land,' or 'Jack's land,' as the case might be.
Hitchin, Purwell Field. ”

“ The bog land to be reclaimed requires drains three feet deep every six feet of land.
To trench up a little field into ridges six feet apart, to gather stones out of a little field sufficient to surround it with a four feet high stone fence, to grub out and burn whins, to make all the improvements with your own labor, and then to have your landlord come along with his valuator and say, "Your farm is worth double what you pay for it; I can get thirty shillings an acre for it," and to raise the rent to its full value, which you must pay or go out. ”

“ The land, running to several hundred acres, was comparatively worthless, mere jumbled stretch of sand and pines and heathery hills; too remote from any building centre to be easily sold, and of no avail for agricultural purposes. ”

“ Here and there rise ugly hills or ugly mountains, black or russet as the case may be. This country is parcelled out into farms larger than English parishes, varying, as they do, from six thousand to twenty thousand acres of land. ”

“ Raising Hedges and sinking ditches may indeed employ several hands for a year, or hardly so long, but when that is once over, the work is at an end.... Owners of inclosed Lands, if they have but a little corn to get in, are already forced to send several miles to open field parishes for Harvest men.”
Six open field farms, averaging 150 acres each, and the little holdings of twelve cottagers, would be let together, after enclosure, as one grazing farm, and the total rent thus be raised from £300 to £600. But whereas one acre of arable land would previously have produced 20 bushels at 3s. ”

“ It is a tract of land gained from the sea of about ten or twelve hundred acres, banked round in three divisions, and made arable, on which are built about twenty farmhouses, which form almost a new world. This land is the property of the government; a small sum is paid on entering, and a yearly ground-rent, and then it is the property of the purchaser for ever. ”

“ We gave the greatest land-grant ever given to an individual or a corporation in the history of the world—sixty millions of acres; when I say to Mr Hill, of course I mean the Northern Pacific. We gave outright a strip of land 2000 miles long, 20 miles wide in the States and 40 miles wide in the Territories! Worse than that: instead of giving it in a solid body, we gave every even section, so that in timber lands it carried an immense advantage over anybody else coming in from the outside. ”

“ Immediately on the shores of the great lake, the land is generally flat for two or three miles inland; and as the farms are there measured out in long, narrow strips, a mile and a quarter long, and a quarter of a mile wide, the back parts of the lots, which are reserved for firewood, are only visible at a distance. This narrow belt of the primeval forest, which runs along the rear of all the lots in the first line of settlements, or concession as it is here called, necessarily conceals the houses and clearings of the next concession, unless the land beyond rises into hills. ”

“ We put imaginary wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us was we had too much latitude. With half an acre of land at our disposal, we should have been circumscribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you have to be reasonably definite about where you are going to build; slide too far one way or the other, and you are committing trespass, and litigation ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick and to choose—sixty acres, with desirable sites scattered all over the tract. ”

“ A number of farm lots are selected by the company. On each of these lots there is designated a place for the farm buildings and the garden. A simple, inexpensive house and a barn are built by the company on a small clearing, usually facing the main road. At present the company has ceased to clear any land for agricultural use for the reason that if there is a piece of cleared land the new settler is apt to expend his main efforts on cultivation of this cleared land, neglecting the clearing of more land. ”

“ The owner has acquired by location and purchase, title to several thousand acres of land, that is all fenced and much of it highly cultivated. It consists of a strip of land one mile wide and ten miles long, which is doubly valuable because of its productiveness and as the key that controls a fine open range. ”

“ Before giving publicity to our plans, however, we purchased one hundred and seventy-four acres contiguous to that which we already owned, and laid out the entire property in regular streets, and lined them with trees, reserving a beautiful grove of six or eight acres, which we inclosed, and converted into a public park. We then commenced selling alternate lots, at the same price which the land cost us by the acre. Our sales were always made on the condition that a suitable dwelling-house, store, or manufactory should be erected upon the land, within one year from the date of purchase ”

“ I would estimate that an area of fully three million five hundred thousand acres is suitable for settlement as soon as surveyed and made accessible by roads, and an area of about eight million acres of swamp or land probably too wet at present for successful cultivation could be reclaimed at a moderate expenditure. ”

“ Then land which can be tilled early (warm or sandy land) , though it may contain a comparatively small amount of natural plant-food, will be more satisfactory than rich, cold land situated farther from the market. An acre of poor, sandy land near the market may be worth, to the gardener, three or four times as much as an acre of the more distant fertile upland. ”

“ If not drained, will it bring constant disappointment? Fences, lanes and the necessity for them, the amount and location of inferior land as pasture land, the kind of weeds about the farm, as [61] well as the amount, kind and location of timber, should be considered.
Fig. 4. Too many buildings for eighty acres of land.
Land devoted to market-gardening should be near the market town where the perishable products are to be sold. Vegetables should reach the market early in their season in a fresh and presentable condition and cheaply, if satisfactory profits are desired. ”

“ There are between 70,000,000 and 80,000,000 acres of swamp and overflowed lands in the United States of which about 60,000,000 acres can be reclaimed for agricultural purposes, and there are about 200,000,000 acres of cut-over or logged-off lands which are suitable for agricultural development. ”

“ Fifth, there is a tendency on the part of land salesmen to load up the immigrant with more land than he can use, or sometimes pay for. Eighty acres makes a good-sized farm for one family to develop and handle, and this is the size of tract recommended. ”

“ In many regions where poor and hilly lands prevail, the town or county could well afford to purchase forest land, expecting thereby to add to the value of the property and to make the forests a source of revenue. ”

“ But the regions about which one hears most, which are already fruit gardens and well sprinkled with rose-clad homes, command prices per acre which seem extravagant. Land, however, like a mine, gets its value from what it will produce; and it is to be noted that while the subsidence of the "boom" knocked the value out of twenty-feet city lots staked out in the wilderness, and out of insanely inflated city property, the land upon which crops are raised has steadily appreciated in value. ”

“ Perhaps the one feature that the young farmer is most likely to overlook in the selection of a farm is the relative proportion of tillable land. One farm of 200 acres, may, on account of stony land, wet land, comparatively unproductive woodland, or because of the arrangement of fences and roadways, contain only eighty acres of tillable land, while another may contain 160 acres. This is one reason why a 160-acre farm in the central West may be more valuable than a farm of the same size in the northeastern United States. ”

“ As no one shall own more than $100,000 worth of property all told, this 160 acres will have to be reduced as we get near to the centres of population. This will still give the owner of such convenient land an advantage over those living further out, who will always be willing to exchange should the first rather follow the coarser grades of farming to dairying or gardening.
Neither is there any reason why the owning of great sections of timber land by one or two men should be necessary to the running of sawmills and supplying the people with lumber. ”

“ Without the water the land is worthless, and without the land my water-right is practically worthless—to me. To control that 32,000 acres of desert I will have to put up the purchase price of $40,000 for the men I induce to file on the land, and after paying the filing fee of $5 and the initial payment of $20 on each of the fifty applications for the land, I'll be in luck if I'm not left stranded at the State Land Office. ”

“ This evil might easily be avoided by retaining the present bona fide price of the land per acre, qualified by an arrangement that one-half of the purchase money should be expended in the formation of roads from the land in question. This would be of immense assistance to the planters, especially in a populous planting neighborhood, where the purchases of land were large and numerous, in which case the aggregate sum would be sufficient to form a carriage road to the main highway, which might be kept in repair by a slight toll. ”

“ The case may not be so applicable to lands suitable for the cultivation of grain or vegetables, which are speedily raised, and require but small outlay, yet even these could not, from their cheapness, realize a profit whenever the land should become chargeable with a rent of ten dollars an acre. ”

“ One authority claims 95,000 acres as the extent of the Forest. The present writer would increase this estimate considerably. About two-thirds of the more central portion are crown lands, and as will be seen by the most superficial view (from the afore-mentioned express train for instance) much of the central woodland is interspersed with farms and arable land and a large extent of open heath, as are those outlying fringes in the Avon valley and elsewhere. ”

“ The Assembly owns a hundred acres of land, which have been laid out into parks, drives, avenues, and building lots. About twenty-five acres have already been improved, and quite a number of lots have been sold to individuals upon which to build cottages. ”

“ There is a great deal of land lying out of doors. Some land is in great demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is. You can't go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value which an acre has in the Wall Street district. ”

“ This fact makes it possible to apply the conception of the margin to the case of land with particularly illuminating results.
In the first place, however, it should be observed that the value of any piece of land does not depend solely on the intrinsic fertility of the soil. The fact that land is an immobile thing makes its situation a factor of great importance. In the case of urban land, situation is, of course, the only thing that counts. The value of a site in Bond Street or the City is entirely unaffected by its capacity or incapacity for potato-growing purposes. ”

“ When those owning tractors got through breaking for themselves they turned over sod for other settlers.
In every direction on the Brulé and all over the plains which had been settled, teams went up and down, making a black and green checkerboard of the prairie.
Ida Mary and I had Chris break and sow sixty acres of our land to flax. It cost $300, and we again stretched our credit to the breaking point to borrow the money. Try out fifteen or twenty acres first? Not we! If we had a good crop it would pay for the land. ”

“ At present agricultural farms may be selected of not more than 1280 acres, and the rent is fixed by the Land Board, not being less than threepence per acre per annum. A licence is issued to the selector, who must, within five years, fence in the land or make permanent improvements of a value equal to the cost of the fence, and must also live on the selection. ”