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The last thirty years have been prolific of great
pecuniary convulsions. I need not recapitulate them here, as too many of
them are yet dark spots on the memory of some who will read this. Their
frequency, as well as their recurrence at shorter intervals than at the
beginning of the century, are among their most remarkable features,
baffling the calculations of older heads, and confounding those of
younger ones. As the century advanced, these convulsions increased in
number and violence. The whole business horizon seemed full of coming
storms, which burst successively with desolating severity, not only on
merchants and manufacturers, but on others who had long before retired
from business. No one could foresee this state of things. I will not stop
to argue causes, but confine myself to facts which none will care to
contradict.
These disasters made beggars of thousands in every
branch of business, and spread discouragement over every community. I
passed through several of them, striving and struggling, and oppressed
beyond all power of description. How many more the community was to
encounter I did not know; but I conceived it the
part of prudence to place myself beyond the circle of their influence
before I also had been prostrated.
In spite of the losses thus encountered, I had been
saving something annually for several years, when the stricture of 1854
came on, premonitory of the tremendous crash of 1857. Most unfortunately
for my comfort, that stricture seemed to fall with peculiar severity on a
class of dealers largely indebted to me. Many of them became embarrassed,
and failed to pay me at the time, while to this day some of them are still
my debtors. My old experiences of raising money revived, and to some
extent I was compelled to go through the humiliations of similar periods.
But the stricture was of brief duration, and I closed the year in far
better condition than I had anticipated.
But the trials of that incipient crisis determined
me to abandon the city. I found that by realizing all I then possessed, I
could command means enough to purchase ten to twenty acres, and I had
grown nervous and apprehensive of the future. While possessed of a little,
I resolved to make that little sure by investing it in land. I had worked
for the landlord long enough. My excellent wife was now entirely willing
to make the change, and our six children clapped their hands with joy when
they heard that "father was going to live in the country."
I had long determined in my mind what sort of
farming was likely to prove profitable enough to keep us with comfort, and
that was the raising of small fruits for the
city markets. My attention had always been particularly directed to the
berries. Some strawberries I had raised in my city garden with prodigious
success. My friends, when they heard of my project, expressed fears that
the market would soon be glutted, not exactly by the crops which I was to
raise, but they could not exactly answer how. They confessed that they
were extremely fond of berries, and that at no time in the season could
they afford to eat enough; a confession which seemed to explode all
apprehension of the market being overstocked.
But my wife and myself had both examined the
hucksters who called at the door with small fruits, as to the monstrous
prices they demanded, and had begged them, if ever a glut occurred, that
they would call and let us know. But none had ever called with such
information. It was the same thing with those who occupied stalls in the
various city markets. They rarely had a surplus left unsold, and their
prices were always high. A glut of fruit was a thing almost unknown to
them. It was a safe presumption that the market would not be depressed by
the quantity that I might raise.
But here let me say something by way of
parenthesis, touching this common idea of the danger of overstocking the
fruit-market of the great cities. It is a curious fact that this idea is
entertained only by those who are not fruit-growers. The latter never
harbored it. Their whole experience runs the other way, they know it to be
a gross absurdity. Yet, somehow, the question of
a glut has always been debated. Twenty years ago the nurserymen were
advised to close up their sales and abandon the business, as they would
soon have no customers for trees—everybody was supplied. But trees have
continued to be planted from that day to this, and where hundreds were
sold twenty years ago, thousands are disposed of now. Old-established
nurseries have been trebled in size, while countless new ones have been
planted. The nursery business has grown to a magnitude truly gigantic,
because the market for fruit has been annually growing larger, and no
business enlarges itself unless it is proved to be profitable.
The market cannot be glutted with good fruit. The
multiplication of mouths to consume it is far more rapid than the increase
of any supply that growers can effect. Within ten years the masses have
had a slight taste of choice fruits, and but little more. Indulgence has
only served to whet their appetites. The more of them there is offered in
the market, the more will there be consumed. Every huckster in her
shamble, every vender of peanuts in the street, will testify to this. The
modern art of semi-cookery for fruit, and of preserving it in cans and
jars, has made sale for enormous quantities of those choicer kinds which
return the highest profit to the grower. It is in the grain-market that
panic often rages, but never in the fruit-market. If it ever enters the
latter, the struggle is to obtain the fruit, not to get rid of it.
The proper choice of a location was now to be the
great question of my future success. I had determined on giving my
attention to the raising of the smaller fruits for the great markets of
New York and Philadelphia. I must therefore be somewhere on or near the
railroad between those cities, and as near as possible to a station. The
soil of Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, was too heavy for some of the
lighter fruits. New Jersey, with its admirable sandy loam light, warm, and
of surprisingly easy tillage, was proverbially adapted for the growth of
all market produce, whether fruit or vegetable, and was at the same time a
week or two earlier. Land was far cheaper, there was no State debt, taxes
were merely nominal, and an acre that could be bought for thirty dollars
could be made four times as productive as an acre of the best wheat land
in Pennsylvania. Such results are regularly realized by hundreds of Jerseymen from year to year.
It was also of easy access from the city for
manure-boats. Every town within the range of my wants was well supplied
with churches, schools, and stores, together with an intelligent and moral
population. I should be surrounded by desirable neighbors, while an hour's
ride by steamboat or railroad would place me, many times daily, among all
my ancient friends in the city. We should by no means become hermits. I
knew the country so well from my numerous visits among the fruit-growers,
when in search of information, as to anticipate but little difficulty in
finding the proper location.
By the mere accident of a slight revival in
business in the early part of 1855, a party came along who was thus
induced to purchase my stock and machinery. Luckily, he was able to pay
down the whole amount in cash. I received what I considered at the time an
excellent price; but when I came to settle up my accounts and pay what I
owed, I found, to my extreme disappointment, that but a little over two
thousand dollars remained.
This sum was the net gain of many years of most
laborious toil. Was it possible for farming to be a worse business than
this? I had made ten times as much, but my losses had been terrible. This,
with my personal credit, was all the surplus I had saved. I remember now,
that when thus discovering myself to be worth so little, I half regretted
having given up my business for what then appeared to me so inadequate a
sum. When selling, I was jubilant and thankful—when settled up, I was full
of regrets. I ought to have had more. So difficult is it for the human
mind to be satisfied with that which is really best.
But I little knew what the future was to bring
forth, and how soon my want of thankfulness was to be changed into the
profoundest conviction that I had providentially escaped from total ruin,
and come out comparatively rich. I had made myself snug upon my little
farm when the tornado of 1857 toppled my former establishment into utter
ruin. My successor was made a bankrupt, and his business was destroyed,
leaving him overwhelmed with debt. He had lost
all, while I had saved all. Had I not sold when I did, and secured what
the sale yielded me I too should have been among the wrecks of that
terrific visitation.
But I heard its warning in the quiet of my little
farm-house, where it brought me neither anxiety nor loss. My position was
like that of one sitting peacefully by his wintry fireside, gazing on the
thick storm without, and listening to the patter of the snow-flakes as the
tempest drove them angrily against the window-pane, while all within was
calm and genial. Instead of regrets for what I had failed to grasp, my
heart overflowed with thankfulness for the comparative abundance that
remained to me. My peace of mind was perfect. The unspeakable satisfaction
was felt of being out of business, out of debt, out of danger—not rich,
but possessed of enough. The thoughtful reader may well believe that
subsequent disturbances, rebellion, war, and even a more wide-spread
bankruptcy—from all which my humble position made me secure—have only
served to intensify my gratitude to that Divine Providence which so
mercifully shaped my ways.
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