New lives for old

Things went well with us that second season. Much of the novelty of the undertaking had worn off but none of the enthusiasm and everyone settled down to hard, steady work. The prizes were still a big incentive and the hundred dollars in new bills which Holt continued to exhibit in Moulton’s store window was still as much a center of interest and excited curiosity as money in a museum. But there was more a feeling of security and confidence than the year before. Our past success was somewhat responsible for this, but the Pioneer Products Company was more so. There seemed to be a feeling now that we were on a solid business basis. The coöperation idea—the mere fact of organization—and the sight of stock certificates made our members feel more like real business men than ever before they had felt in their lives. And that was good for them. It steadied them and made them take their work more seriously.

That was a good season for crops. Our small stuff came along early and did well. By the last of June we were shipping lettuce and radishes and by the first week in July early peas. Of course hothouse stuff had been in the market long before this but Burlington was able to quote prices that furnished him a ready market. Not only were the prices right but the produce was right. There isn’t much doubt but what stuff grown in a normal way without being forced has certain qualities that you can’t get in hothouse products. The longer I farm the more respect I have for Nature as a business partner. She is always square and above board but she is also a stern mistress in the matter of justice. You can’t ever get something for nothing from her. She’ll beat you every time you try it. If you try to hurry her well and good, you can, but you’ll pay for your early stuff at cost of flavor. If you go in for flavor, well and good, but you’ll pay for that at the cost of size. Let her alone and she’ll balance things.

We shipped eight hundred dollars’ worth of produce the last week in June and through July our shipment amounted to three thousand dollars a week, jumping in August to five thousand dollars and over a week. Holt appointed an assistant to see that everything submitted was up to standard. This man had authority to discard anything offered, but any farmer who felt that he was being discriminated against could submit the refused article that night to Holt. It may be well to mention that not a man disputed the first judgment that summer. As members of the corporation they realized that it was as much to their interest as anyone’s to preserve our standard.

Our motor truck was a great success, reducing our transportation charges almost fifty per cent. Not only this, but as time went on we found that at the same cost it would have paid for itself in the matter of convenience alone. We reached the market earlier and were able to make, as we did later in the season, two and three trips a day, so always getting our stuff to the market fresh.

Early in September, when we began to get new potatoes and early apples, our sales jumped to six thousand dollars a week. Some of this we shipped by freight. Never before had anyone in our town, except Dardoni, ever marketed his early apples. A few bushels would be taken to the store but as a rule what couldn’t be made into pies or eaten by the small boys were allowed to rot on the ground. As for crab apples—and nearly every farm had at least one tree—what a few housewives did not put up in jelly met the same fate. I’ve seen bushels of plump red crabs rotting on the ground. But not this season. In the first place, Ruth all winter had urged the wives to put up more preserves and the result was marked. Farmers had to get up early to get ahead of their wives and gather any to send to town, but they found a ready market for all they could send. I reckoned as clear profit to the village every apple sent and the total amounted to a good many dollars.

For that matter you could reckon as clear profit about all the garden stuff we sent for it’s certain it represented money which until now had not been coming in. Potatoes and beans were all that had ever found their way to market until now. When I look back I wonder how these people ever lived on what they raised. In any real sense they didn’t and what was true of our town is true to-day of a hundred other towns in New England. You can find conditions of poverty right out under God’s blue sky that would make your hardened settlement worker shudder with horror.

Everything went well with us that second season as I said, and for that reason it isn’t particularly interesting to me. On the first of October we found that we had done a business of sixty-seven thousand eight hundred dollars. In round figures this left after deducting commission and expenses sixty thousand dollars. Out of this we declared a ten per cent. dividend to stockholders, which amounted to six thousand dollars. Three thousand more, or one dollar a share, we put aside into our reserve fund. This left fifty-one thousand dollars to be distributed on the basis of the amount of produce turned in. We had that year four hundred and twenty-one members which made our net profits figure up per capita a little over one hundred and twenty dollars.

Now it’s impossible for anyone to figure on whether that was a fair return for the amount of capital invested in our plant or not. In the first place that doesn’t by any means represent the value of our produce. You must take into account the amount consumed by our home market, the amount in hay and corn and potatoes and beans and what not which we kept on hand for winter consumption and a hundred other things. And besides—and this is something I want to emphasize over and over again—if you could figure the total it would all be beside the point. The fact which counted with us wasn’t whether or not we were getting full value from our plant as yet. We weren’t, and we knew it. The point was that we were getting something where before we got nothing. If we hadn’t shipped five thousand dollars’ worth of produce that second season we should have called our enterprise a success. We had waked up! We were trying! We were using our opportunities! Our old men were interested and our younger men enthusiastic and our women were alive.

In looking back—and I don’t have to look back very far—I realize more than ever that the Pioneer Products Company, which expresses the result of our labors in dollars and cents, is by no means as important even now as the Pioneer Club which expresses itself principally in pleasant memories. The Pioneer Products Company is making us secure with modest bank accounts, but it is the Pioneer Club which has made us Sam and Josh and Frank and Bill to one another, and our wives Sam’s wife and Josh’s wife and Frank’s wife and Bill’s wife. It’s the Pioneer Club that has made us glad we’re living even if it’s the P. P. C. that has made it possible for us to live. It’s the Pioneer Club that has made our town dear to us and has made us proud that we live here. It’s the Pioneer Club that is the heart of us through the long winter months, though we are busier then than we used to be. And it’s the Pioneer Club again that is keeping us sane and healthy in our prosperity.

We are becoming better pioneers every year, though there are people who think we are going back. We don’t care an awful lot about electric lights and cement sidewalks as some of our progressive neighbors do. We have the best streets within fifty miles of us and we are content to walk in them or in footpaths along the sides. We get along very well with kerosene lamps and on a pinch can use candles. We have good schools and in them are using some methods copied from our Southern neighbors. We try as far as possible to teach arithmetic and farming together, reading and farming together, geography and farming together. It’s just as good exercise we find for our young folks to figure out how much five bushels of potatoes at a dollar ten a bushel will amount to as it is for them to figure out how much five times one, decimal, one and a cipher is. It’s just as easy for them to learn to read by reading about flowers and simple gardening as it is about how the cat caught the rat. It’s just as interesting for them to learn the physical geography of the world, not as a separate study, but as part of their dry-as-bones boundary statistics.

We are encouraging athletics in the schools. We are backing the school teams with our attendance at their games and our applause. It’s a fact that the average country boy needs gymnasium work more than the average city boy. He needs the training, the drill and routine work.

We are teaching our girls to cook and sew. We are teaching them to cook and sew economically. Both our women and our girls were getting into the baker shop habit. When we started in we were buying city-made bread. Think of it, in the country of home-made bread, where we have both material and time! We don’t buy much baker stuff now.

We don’t buy as much patent medicine as we did. In the first place, there isn’t a store in town—not even the drug store—which carries it any more. A man wouldn’t dare. If you want any of the stuff you have to send to town for it, and while this is still being done no one lets anyone know he’s doing it. Those with the habit get it and swallow it the way they do their rum and most of them know pretty well that this is all it is.

A sad event, which was at the same time a mighty good thing for our town, was the death of Dr. Wentworth. “Doc” Wentworth as he was known to everybody, had been here forty years. He was a big-hearted, well-meaning type of family physician, but the amount of morphine he prescribed would have disgraced Chinatown. It was his one antidote for pain and he’d give it for a toothache. He gave it to man, woman and child. Half the children in town took paregoric from the time they were born until they were old enough to take straight morphine. It was wicked. I went to one of the big medical schools and had a talk with the Dean and recommended this village as a promising field for some good young physician. The result was that a young man settled among us of whom we have grown very fond. He is with us heart and soul in preventing disease instead of fostering it.

We don’t own as many automobiles as some of our neighbors, but we have some good horses—good work horses and good driving horses. I hope to see better stock every year. I’ve a two year old I wouldn’t swap to-day for the finest automobile ever manufactured. Our annual fair is developing more and more along the lines of the old-time fair. We are exhibiting more horses and cows and pigs and chickens because we have some now worth exhibiting. We have developed quite a business of selling off some of our surplus stock at this time. We find that the neighboring towns wait for this event to select their breeders.

To go back to the Pioneer Products Company for a moment I may say that our business has increased steadily every year. Some things we have dropped because we find no further need of them. For instance the company owns no more breeding stock. Our more prosperous members conduct that end of the business themselves. We have, however, bought a store house.

We are planning a new experiment. We found that a surprising lot of our trade was among my old Little Italy friends. They became permanent customers. As time has gone on we have also developed a regular clientele outside of these—people who know the Pioneer Products Company by name. Our scheme for next season is to put up a family hamper to be delivered regularly through the season. This will contain enough of the new vegetables to last a family a week. We divide our produce into firsts and seconds and deliver the firsts to those who can afford to pay a little more. The seconds will go mostly to Little Italy. The latter will be good vegetables—fresh and sound, differing from the firsts only in size. Burlington is to have charge of the distribution on his usual commission basis. He is our manager now, by the way, paying his salary out of his commission. This method will give us a steadier market.

Now about our experiment in raising our own meat. That, too, has been a fair success. The local butcher fought us for a little while but his fight was hopeless. Understand, there was no attempt to boycott him or anything of that sort, but we were most of us raising our own poultry and pork and besides that we weren’t eating as much meat as we did. Still there was some demand chiefly for beef. We made a proposition to the man; that we turn in to him what meats we produced for the local market and that he handle them on a basis of ten per cent. net profit. He thought it over for a little while and then accepted. He has made a good thing out of it and so have we.

I don’t want anyone to get the idea that our town is any Utopia. It isn’t. It is nothing but a steady, prosperous farming community where everybody is a hard worker. We aren’t doing half of what we might, but our satisfaction comes in knowing we are doing more than we did. As the years go by we hope to do more. There isn’t any reason I can see why as a town we shouldn’t be in the position of any well-conducted city business increasing our efficiency and with that our profits. Real estate has almost doubled here, and this hasn’t been a fictitious doubling. It is based on what land is worth to the investor who becomes one of us and uses his land intelligently. No one can buy land in our town, loaf on it and share our prosperity. We aren’t dividing any profits except among those of us who earn them.

People have come to our town and tried to locate the secret of our modest success in our land, in the coöperative idea, in our favorable position to the market, in just our bull luck. Most of these men and women haven’t sense enough to be worth bothering with. I haven’t much patience with those who look to find the solution of all our difficulties in some arbitrary system that doesn’t take the individual into account. But now and then comes along a man who is in earnest. Then I take him around and introduce him to Josh Chase. He sees a long-legged, thin-faced fellow with skin as bronze as a skipper’s. Then Josh takes the visitor over his ten acres of land with the pride of a king. He shows him a new barn and all his carefully cared for farming implements. He takes him into a modest story and a half white house and introduces him to Mrs. Josh and a couple of rosy-cheeked children. With half an eye the man can see that here is prosperity of the best kind.

“Well?” the man is apt to ask me.

“He isn’t afraid of the rain any more,” I say.

“Well?”

“That’s all. It means he isn’t afraid of work. He’s up at daybreak every morning in the year and his work isn’t done till dark. But you wouldn’t pick him out as a slave, would you? He doesn’t look like a poor downtrodden savage, does he? He’s a man with a hoe all right but is he making any bid for your sympathy?”

“That’s because your coöperative idea—”

“The company would have failed the second year if Josh had been dependent upon that idea and not the idea upon him. No, sir, that man came over in the Mayflower but he didn’t land till about five years ago. If you don’t believe it I’ll show you another man who came over a little earlier and who isn’t a member of our company because he doesn’t need even that help.”

Then I take him round and introduce him to Dardoni.

He meets the smiling black-haired Italian and sees the latter’s busy acres and meets another type of pioneer.

If, after this, the investigator is of a mind that prosperity is so common hereabout that anyone can succeed, then I introduce him to the awful example. That’s Hadley.

Poor old Hadley—even he confided in me the other day that if he felt real pert next spring he thought he’d put that patch back of his house into potatoes.

THE END