Country Gentleman Editor Impressed With North Carolina Agriculture, Feb. 7, 1920

From the Charlotte Observer, as reprinted in the Hickory Daily Record, February 7, 1920

Fine Boost for North Carolina by Country Gentleman

William Harper Dean, editor of the Country Gentleman, has been making a tour of the country in an effort to acquaint the readers of that paper with existing agricultural conditions, and in the February number of his paper he makes note of what he has to say in the state of North Carolina and South Carolina. He gives an intelligent treatment of the condition of affairs in the Old North State, which he seems to have comprehensively covered from east to west, as indicated, with crops peculiar to each section of the state. He also provides for his readers a large picture of the Transylvania country club boys “starting off on an outing superintended by county agents.”

Mr. Dean saw wonders in the tobacco regions—“grows driving to market in five-passenger cars, the rears of which were loaded with tobacco—each load worth between $300 and $350.”

He was much impressed with the thrift of Catawba, the dairying and sweet potato county. Catawba, he found, leads the state in potato growing, the average yield being 200 bushels to the acre, and he made note of a 13-car load shipment that netted $4.50 a rate of three bushels. He gives the Hickory Chamber of Commerce an excellent “boost” as one “thoroughly awake to its opportunities and obligations in terms of the farming region.” The growth of the dairying industry in Catawba was another thing that interested Mr. Dean immensely, and this impression was emphasized as he went into the mountain regions, “where little dairying communities are hemmed in by towering ranges and sometimes removed a score of miles from railroad centers,” but “where on the hillsides are produced feed and grazing is unlimited abundance,” and where the dairy cattle “thrive even better than in the ore level areas,” and where, furthermore, the cheese factories have come to supply “the missing factor in the equation.” He thinks the soy bean is destined to become “an economic factor in the state.”

In the cotton region Mr. Dean found evidence of future prosperity, in the development of the cotton warehouse. He believes the system will “pay for itself in a jiffy.” He also finds the work of the North Carolina State Division of Markets worthy of complimentary note, and was not unmindful of the benefits that have come to the farmers out of the credit unions now in operation. But the biggest doing in the state and for the state, to his notion, is the development of hydro-electric power. He was advertent to the fact that North Carolina has been remarkably free of labor disturbances, chiefly because the percentage of Anglo-Saxon blood in her people is so high. “But a species of human vermin flattered by the title of radicals, in certain instances, made capital of illiteracy among the workers in some of the mill districts and sowed the seeds of discontent.” He is told, however, that the best citizens of the state are not worried over this, because education is going to undo it.

The Observer is included to regard the Tar Heel wanderings to the editor of this nationally-read paper a fortunate thing for the state chiefly for the fact that some intelligent truths about state and people are thus given publicity in a wholesome manner.