"
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty
County is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it
has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest.
Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more
of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White
people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor
replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented
tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer
land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were
fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was
poor, and beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the
war. Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants
have seized it. The returns of the farmer are too small to
allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small
farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen
years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough
for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not
sell off a few acres.
Two children--a boy and a girl--are hoeing sturdily in the
fields on the farm where Corliss works.
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