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Hibbard, Benjamin Horace, 1870-1955 / The history of agriculture in Dane County, Wisconsin
(1904)
Chapter III: Tobacco, pp. 155-175
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Page 171
1i1BBARD-IIISTOrY OF AGRICULTURE IN DANE COUNTY. 171 INFLUENCE OF TOBACCO CULTURE ON VALUE OF LAND. It is believed by many that the high price of land in Dane and neighboring counties is chiefly owing to the tobacco industry. There is an element of truth in this, but it is far from being all truth. Between i88o and 1885. the period when tobacco culture made its greatest gains, the price of land did make remarkable advances. On section 20, Christiana, a farm which sold near the beginning of this period for forty dollars an acre was later divided up into smaller lots, and with no improvements, some of the forties sold at a hundred dollars an acre. Numerous instances might be given from which, if taken alone, it would ap- pear that tobacco was responsible for about all the advance in land values for the past twenty years. But it may also be shown that worn out wheat farms in the southwestern part of the country sold as low as ten dollars in the '70's and came up to twenty, forty, and fifty, within the next twenty years when turned into dairy farms." Moreover, the average value of land in Windsor and Bristol is about equal to that of Albion and Christiana TJ yet the former towns have been insignificant in tobacco production. Again, it is instructive to notice the value of land at some distance away; four hundred miles directly west of Dane county, in the northwestern part of Iowa, ordinary farms are selling as high as seventy-five dollars per acre, and it is a half-day's ride on a train to the nearest patch of tobacco. If all these prices are even indi- rectlv the result of tobacco growing the western farmer has no cause to complain of the tobacco tariff. The fact of the matter is that a complexity of causes has resulted in the rise in price. As to the higher price given for choice tobacco land there can be no dispute, but where the land is not already in shape for planting, the premium paid for it is not great. It takes very little figuring to see that a man wishing to go into tobacco culture can afford to pay for the superior richness of the soil which repeated applications of manure afford. A twenty-acre farm with even modest improvements in the way of buildings, and with half, or more, of the land brought up to the highest point of fertility can "As an Instance of this a farm In the town of Vermont. Section 23. sold for eleven dollars per acre In 1873. and Is easily worthy fifty dollars now. 7"See chapter on Land Values. IS
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