In the Strawberry Country

In the Strawberry CountryBy John Trotwood Moore

By John Trotwood Moore

Castleberry, Ala., April 28, 1906.

This is the center of the strawberry industry of Alabama. As your car passes through the pine lands, stretching along the lower half of the State, you catch a whiff, now and then, from a passing car-load of the queen of fruits. It extends practically from the thriving town of Greenville to Flomaton. It is a delightful odor—these strawberries—mingled with that of the pine, and the perfume of some wild flower gifted beyond its kind. It is a pretty sight to step off at this little pine-bowered village, which, a few years ago, was virgin pine lands, and see some five hundred berry pickers in one field of a hundred acres or more. The pickers are nearly all negroes, and about half of them women and children, and they make wages while the season lasts that should easily keep them the rest of the year.

That is, it would keep anybody but a negro—who never keeps.

At two cents a quart they earn from two to four and one-half dollars per day. They could earn more and save it all if they would work Saturday afternoons.

But a negro, like a mule, has some peculiar ideas engrafted into the network of his being, garnered from a long line of holiday-taking ancestors. “Like produces like or the likeness of an ancestor” is the unchanging rule of the physical world; and it must not be forgotten that for many thousands of years the negro took nothing but holidays and whatever else he found lying around that was good to eat.

And he wore nothing but a smile. This knowledge may help you in solving the problem.

It is creditable to the white man that he has bred any work into him at all. However, he has ideas on the subject yet, and one of them is that, since his freedom, it is contrary to some amendment of his Constitution to work Saturday afternoons, even in fields carpeted with berry leaves, studded with crimson clusters of reflected sunset, cooled with healthful pine breezes and saturated with the perfume the gods loved most and the soft balminess of the eternal spring in the sky.

That sounds like heaven, but it is not the heaven the negro wants. That’s the white man’s heaven, and the white man would just be fool enough to work right on till dark, making that extra two dollars and saving it and all the rest of his week’s wages by keeping away from the dives of near-by towns.

But the white man is a vain and foolish creature to the negro.

He has aspirations and he lives for the morrow. The negro has none—the pure-blooded negro never had an aspiration in his life—and he lives not even for the day but for the night following it, when his work ends and he may be a nigger among his kind.

The white man works to accumulate; the negro to spend. And Saturday afternoon and night is a bully time to spend what he has made the rest of the week. There is only one better time, and that’s the next day, if there is a foot-washing or a funeral.

That’s enough for the negro. His problem is nearly solved, for the tide of immigration that has been flowing westward is being turned southward. And when it turns there will be no negro question. Like everybody else he will take his place in the order of things where his nature fits. He will be then one muscle in the South’s great arm of labor, but he will never be the biceps.

I found the people primitive, but honest and kind. They have lived around here all their lives, and this thing is a revelation to them. It is more money than they ever heard of before. Why, people actually carry bags of silver around with them to pay off pickers. Heretofore the land had been most anybody’s for the asking, but now they can make more money on one acre properly tended to berries than they had before on a whole farm.

Berry field and pickers, Marble, Alabama.

A group of berry pickers.

A small boy came in going to mill, driving two little steers hitched to a cart with wheels as primitive as the ancient Britons used, sawn from the sound pine logs. He is immediately surrounded by the jolly drummers, while their picture is taken for Trotwood’s. The big, two-wheeled log carts used for hauling the big pine logs, are everywhere. Four, five, six and even twelve yoke of oxen are seen in the woods or on the roads, with tall, rawboned, sinewy fellows driving them with a long whip able to reach to the farthest yoke. He whirls it around his head and it cracks with a noise that would make it a great thing for a small boy on the fourth of July.

Only it takes a man to crack it, and I noticed that it never fell on his patient team—only the terrible exploding crack popped in the air above their ears, and I rather thought the yoke seemed as proud of it as their driver, for after every crack I noticed he added soothingly and softly: “Haw there, Buck!” and Buck hawed calmly, as if he was not at all afraid, nor even in a hurry, and they all went forward together with the steady pull of perfect understanding between the man and his team.

I induced one of them, a lithe, fine looking fellow, to stop his team in front of a car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all. And as I looked at him I knew that in all his life nothing he had ever eaten had ever disagreed with him, and that he had eaten everything that came his way.

O for his legs and back and these pineland quail, and my own love for hunting!

This pine belt of Alabama (I think while geology was fresh with me that it was called a tertiary formation, it came far after the carboniferous period around the Birmingham district) is one of the finest opportunities in the world for the homeseeker. The price of the lands is simply a song with a pine-top attachment. Two dollars per acre, wild, and the improved lands ten to fifteen. They are sandy, with a good clay foundation, and capable of holding what they get, and of great improvement. When I went through them last they were a wilderness untouched, save where large corporations had gobbled them up in vast tracts for almost nothing and held themfor the long-leafed yellow pines upon them. After the sawmill came the cotton and corn. And of late has it been learned that in this belt alone lie possibilities of all kinds of fruits and vegetables, undreamed of four or five years ago. It is safe to say that in the belt alone, extending from the seaboard clear across the South, through Texas, even, and Oklahoma, lies the future’s great early fruit and vegetable area of the continent.

A load of Klondyke berries ready for the car.

The industry has scarcely begun here yet, and that only along the line of the railroad, and yet from Castleberry the L. & N. railroad is shipping from five to ten car-loads of strawberries alone per day.

The American people are now rich—richer than any nation ever was before. They are learning how to eat and to live comfortably, and to spend their money for delicacies. They hunt Southern climates in winter and winter climates in summer. Once, when they were poor, they were satisfied with things in their season. In the memory of the young man of to-day he who used ice or had ice cream in summer was classed as the profligate Solomon spoke of, and was destined to die in rags. As for having strawberries in February and March, tomatoes at Christmas, asparagus the year round, cabbages, lettuce—many of the vegetables so common that even the poor may indulge now and then out of season—it was undreamed of. Think of what it will be a century from now. Think of it and all this great, balmy, bright-watered, sky-domed, clay-founded, health-breeding, beautiful, blossoming land, greater in extent than a half dozen Eastern States, lying sweet and cool under the dark green of shadowing pine, untouched by ax or plow, that may be bought up for two dollars, and needs only a little brains and energy to flush crimson in peach or berry or green in vegetables.

And will it pay? I will give just one instance, not the unusual incident, but the common one. I had walked around taking in the pretty picture at Castleberry, the cottages among the pines, the great gaps cut out solidly in the woods, forming fields alive with pickers, veritable pictures of life in paints of red and green, and enclosed in frames of deep emerald. I crossed the yellow, bright waters of a creek, stepping from log tolog. I saw a dozen kinds of birds that had not yet reached Tennessee in their northern flight. Wild vines and flowers bloomed everywhere. I walked two miles along from Castleberry to Marble, another coming town of berries and fruits, enjoying it all as I did as a boy, when I wandered among these trees of poetry in a land of poems.

BUYING BERRIES AT CASTLEBERRY, ALABAMA.This photo shows fifteen berry buyers from as many different commission houses. Over sixty houses have been represented at different times this season at Castleberry.

BUYING BERRIES AT CASTLEBERRY, ALABAMA.

This photo shows fifteen berry buyers from as many different commission houses. Over sixty houses have been represented at different times this season at Castleberry.

The very smell of them said “home.” The skies said “home,” the dying pine needles, giving out their aroma beneath the foot, the way a little stiff-tailed woodpecker shifted around a rotting pine stump. It meant home and memories—memories that had slept embalmed.

Life—it has always hurt me. Was it given us for pain, that we might not become as the fatted swine, who, having no hurt neither have any hope of immortality?

To me it has been one great hurting and the times I have been joyous are the times I have acted in self defense.

I unslung my little kodak and tried to take a razor-back in the edge of the woods. I wanted a good picture of one—this hog of the Cracker South, whose sinewy, lean, sweet bacon is sought for at fabulous prices by the nobility of Europe. I approached him with confidence, thinking he would recognize me as an old friend—nay, even, from my build, as one of his kine. (A horrid pun, but a slippance.) But the razor-back is born in the land of the darky, and the same great Designer who gave lightness to the fingers of the darky gave speed to the heels of the razor-back.

And thus has he survived and still lives. I think he did not even stop to look at my face. To this day he thinks I was black.

Around Marble there are 350 acres in strawberries and 100 or more in Alberta peaches, and as I stepped into the clearing I met a native with a good, honest face and carrying a bag of silver in his hands. We soon became acquainted and he told me his name was John Barns and that he was going to the field to pay off his pickers. It being Saturday noon. I found him very straightforward and not inclined to exaggerate. He had bought his farm of 240 acres Christmas, 1901, for $500. His daughter married one W. W. Wright, who took a notion to plant strawberries—just one acre. He set out the plants December, 1905, and though this had been the poorest year in the history of the berry around Marble, the late spring and frosts holding them back fully three weeks, and cutting off the first crop entirely, Mr. Wright hadcleared, after paying for his plants, labor, fertilizers and picking, one hundred and twenty-five dollars on that acre.

“Now, 1903 was our best year,” said Mr. Barns, and he pulled out a little notebook he had. “Now, that year I planted my first berries, one and one-quarter acres, and they netted me $521.27, to be exact.”

“Under the dark of shadowy pinesUntouched by axe or plow.”

“Under the dark of shadowy pines

Untouched by axe or plow.”

We were joined, as we walked along, by another native, Mr. W. R. Adkinson, who told me that in 1905 his neighbor, Mr. Elisha Downing, cleared $2,050, net, on seven and one-half acres of berries. They both agreed that this year was not so prosperous, and yet the railroad agent told me they shipped fifteen carloads the Saturday before. They fetched $2.50 to $3.50 per crate f. o. b. track at Castleberry. There were several representatives of rival commission houses on the ground all during the shipping season.

Although the section is comparatively new in the berry and fruit business, I found it had spread all up and down the railroad, and from a reliable party I found the area planted to be about 1,800 acres in berries and 1,100 acres in Alberta peaches, extending from Bolling and including Garland, Dunham, Owassa, Evergreen (a beautiful little town and a great health resort), Sparta, Marble, Castleberry, Kirkland, Brewton (another beautiful and thriving town), Flomaton,Century and Canal. An hundred acres will be planted at Evergreen this year in cantaloupes, while many cars of radishes were shipped from Greenville this year. Eighteen hundred acres out of as many hundred thousand, and two or three weeks of strawberries for the millions of people who have been waiting all winter for them! This looks small and shows what may be done in the future.

Mr. Adkinson and Mr. Barnes on their way to pay the berry pickers.

Before the berries came.

At Marble I found a most interesting strawberry farm, and there I saw the field dotted with pickers, a picturesque, poetic sight, especially when dinner time arrived and the berries came in with the cream. The berries we had for dinner were red and firm, with a fine flavor, and Mr. Lister, who raised them, assured me that just thirty-five days before, or on March 23, he had transplanted the vines. He called them, I think, the Three W’s, though other berries which were cultivated for market were Lady Thompson, Klondike and Excelsior.

I found Mr. Lister a great stickler for fertilizer, and though he said he had not yet been able to carry out his plans fully, he recommended the following as a sure process to attain the highest degree of success in raising the berries: Five hundred pounds of acid phosphate and cottonseed meal, equal parts, to begin with. Later, in October, side dress them with 500 pounds equal parts acid phosphate, cottonseed meal and kainit. Top dress in February with 400 pounds fertilizer, one-eighth per cent. potash, seven per cent. acid phosphate and five per cent. nitrate soda. After they are one year old about 500 pounds under them in fall, and so applying about three dressings a year, every four months apart, of about 400 pounds, for feeding the plants and building the foundation for the berries.

“I induced one of them ... to stop his team in front of a car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all.”

Mr. Lister thinks that the land may be bought cleared, fenced, fertilized, planted and cultivated ready to pick for sixty dollars per acre. The following are some of the companies I found engaged for a hundred miles down the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. I was unable to get all of them: Bolling Stock Company, Bolling, Ala., about $20,000, eighty acres in berries, eighty in peaches and tomatoes in car lots; Garland Company, Garland, Ala., forty acres; Dunham Stock Company, Dunham, Ala., sixty acres, radishes in car lots; Brown Shepard Fruit Co. and Gravella Fruit Co., Owassa, about 215 acres in berries and peaches; Evergreen, Ala., about 100 in berries and 300 in peaches; Sparta, Ala., forty acres in berries; Marble, Ala., 350 acres in berries and 100 acres in peaches, and so on, as enumerated above. In some places I have found that they were planting the berries between the rows of peaches, and, they tell me, with good results. Mr. W. D. Brown, of Gravella, told me of eight acres of berries which netted their owner $1,800. I was impressed by the fact that the entire business was in its infancy, so far as gauging the possible demands of the future or in establishing the line of fruit and berries for which the land was adapted. As time goes on they will doubtless find that the land will be found suitable for both cantaloupes and watermelons and fruits of all kinds, including figs and grapes. In the matter of grapes alone, I happen to know that in a similar section in Butler County, Ala., a light, sandy land, with good clay subsoil, the finest of Scuppernong grapearbors flourished, some of them covering a half-acre of ground, from which the best of home-made wines are brewed.

Throughout all that section of the South, the land itself is good for all farm purposes, differing, more or less, in different sections, but all capable of holding the fertilizer used and returning good crops of cotton, corn, oats, sugar cane, peas and other legumes. I doubt if better cotton lands may be found in the South than in the pine flat section of Alabama. On all of these lands wild grasses and clover grow in abundance, and I find the cost of growing stock reduced to a minimum.

Strawberries and fruits are the poetry of it—the prose is there, too, and awaits only the hand of the practical, steady, industrious man to make as good a yield of good things all under the fairest skies and in a climate as healthful and amid people as hospitable as may be found in all the world.

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