Newspaper: The Charlotte
Gazette, Smithville, VA., Thursday, February 28, 1895
Submitted By: Bea Adams King
Scuffletown's
Opportunity
MOSSINGFORD,
VA., Feb. 15, 1895
Editor
Charlotte Gazette:
Please
allow me, through your paper, to give the correspondent, who wrote so
enthusiastically about the small patches of corn along Twitty's creek, some
farming facts and figures to "chaw" on.
I
received a letter from my brother, Edwin D. Jones, Church Hill, Christian
county, Kentucky, a few days since, with a report of his last year's operation,
which will be given below. He left Dinwiddie county some five or six
years after the war with some $1,500 in money. The first year he worked
as "boss hand" on a farm, and the next year worked the farm on shares
with the owner. He has bought and paid for 816 acres of good land, worth
$40 per acre today, and sold from last year's operations on the farm 103
bushels clover seed, 24 head of fat cattle, 360 head of hogs, 4,700 bushels of
wheat, over 1,000 barrels of corn made. Sold over 60,000 pounds of
tobacco at 5c. average, besides butter, &c... &c.
(Note--
As a general thing they sell everything they make out there, as soon as
possible, so as to be ready to go in for the next crop head over heels, or
heels over head, it makes no difference which.)
They
work out there, and the richer they are the harder they work. If a man
goes to Christian county who is fond of whittling on pieces of soft pine about
public places within a very short while he will become so disgusted and
lonesome that he will pay some one to let him work for company. Thereby
hangs a tale. My brother was here a few years since and informed me at
that time that he had not failed to eat his breakfast by lamp light since he
landed in Kentucky, unless he was sick or on Sundays. Here the most of us
scheme to do as little as possible and there every man tries to beat his
neighbor working, and they frequently plant considerable quantities of tobacco
with plants taken out of the beds on the points of ease knives or small
paddles, to beat one another, or to save a season.
In
horn worm time all hands have had breakfast and are at the tobacco fields
before it is light enough to tell a worm from a tobacco stem, but as soon as it
is light enough there is murder right and left. The people are
independent, happy and religiously inclined. They have their gatherings
and frolics at times when they do not interfere with other business, and they
turn out in magnificent style and work in Kentucky, consequently they have
something to frolic on.
If
we, the people of Scuffletown, should display as much energy on the farms as we
do with our old guns and adperannuated, (?), attenuated and poverty stricken
cur dogs and poluters after other people's old "hairs," &c.,
there would be less wood stolen and fewer corn and smokehouses belonging to the
negroes in this section of the country broken open at night and contents
stolen. The idea seems to be this; we hunt all day on other people's
places and make our wood, meat, and bread by stealing between sunset and
sunrise which, like your "endless chain," makes an endless steal.
People
of Scuffletown ! let us all go to work with the same vim, energy and
determination that we hunt and steal with, and it will not be very long before
we will have a Christian county, Ky., in Scuffletown, Va. God save the
Commonwealth, and may He extend a special mercy to the women, varmints and
birds that will safely protect them in their helpless condition against the
insatiable hunters and their omnivorous cur dogs, &c. Amen.
T.M.
JONES.