MISSISSIPPI AS A POOR MAN'S COUNTRY.
By Thomas H. Gansett
I have often wondered why more people do not move to Mississippi. As I think of its beauty, its delightful climate, and its natural advantages in the production of those things necessary to a livelihood; it certainly does seem to me to be an ideal poor man's country. What I mean by this is that a poor man, one who has little or no money, if he can get here, can live afterward. In the first place, all over these great piney woods of central and southern Mississippi there is almost no end of fuel. Everywhere, strewed over the ground, are pine knots and limbs. And so, if a man,494even a man with a family, and that of small children, was landed here, he could keep comfortably warmed almost anywhere by the blazing fires he could build with the free and unlimited fuel. This does not mean that the land is all overgrown with underbrush and thickets. It is not. The trees are tall, large, and stately, with wide distances between them, which are open, clear, and inviting. A man can have a house here for shelter in a very little time. Of easy access and free are groves of younger pines, from which can be cut poles or small logs easily handled and suitable, from which a durable little house may be erected. Clay can be had in abundance to make a chimney, and with a house of poles, roofed with split shingles, provided with a clay chimney in which is a large open fireplace filled with blazing pine knots and logs, a man has no mean place to shelter a wife and children while he goes out to work for wages, or to “put in” a piece of new ground. Water from the near “branch,” or clear cool spring, saves digging a well, and so the ball of humble prosperity can be set rolling. “Well, I see,” says one; “but whose land would I make all these improvements on?”—Your own, of course. In half a mile from where I now (April, 1901) sit writing, there are nine “forties” of government land to be had for the homesteading. Or if you buy, you can do as I did two or three weeks ago—get land for three dollars an acre. I bought a comfortable little house and ten acres of good land for thirty-five dollars. Or if you do not have the fourteen dollars to homestead a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre tract, or seven dollars for an eighty-acre tract, you can build almost anywhere and cultivate, for nothing, on other people's land until you can get a start; for the land is owned in lots consisting of hundreds of acres each, by people who never cultivate or expect to cultivate a hundredth part of what they own. To summarize: so far fuel and good water costs nothing, a house and building spot costs next to nothing, except the work of building. Then arises the question, What can I do to make a living from the start? Well, all over here is labor of some sort at living wages,—turpentine woods to work, lumber woods to work, teaming to do, saw milling, within distance, some farming, labor and trades to be followed in towns, etc. The wife and children, if any, can put in the gardens. A cow can run at large, and get fat. And altogether it is a country where a poor man, if he can get here, can make a living, and in a little while he will not have to suffer that dependence on the monied classes that the writer knows by experience one does in the Northern and Eastern States. But, friends and brethren, let us not entertain the idea that this is a land of gifts, a land of indolence, where funds can be found lying on the ground, or any such foolish and impracticable idea. This is a country not yet filled up. There are room and natural resources right at hand not yet monopolized. You can get standing room, and a chance to work. And with that, any one with a reasonable amount of work in him can in a little space of time have himself a little home and enough to eat. Come south, brethren. Come with a heart contented to be humble and poor; do not look for enormous estates or great incomes. Here you can have “whatsoever is right.” Here you can live the truth in the sight of many who never before have heard of it, but who will listen with open ears. It is decidedly a poor man's country. The climate is healthful. The summers are not hot; they are kept cool by daily breezes and abundant shade. The winters are open and mild generally. The soil is light and easily worked, and will produce a light crop unfertilized, and if fertilized, an abundant crop. Chickens do well; also stock of all kinds—cattle, sheep, goats, etc.—and get their own living. For further information address Thomas H. Gansett, Chinquapin, Pearl River Co., Miss.