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.