nants or owners. The increase in the
number of Negroes owning or operating farms has been an important
factor in securing a better quality and variety of food. They have
diversified their crops and raised a larger amount of their own food
supplies, particularly meat and vegetables, and they have produced
more milk, butter, and eggs. It will be seen that Booker Washington's
voice when he reiterated over and over again, "The man who owns the
land will own much else besides," did not fall upon deaf ears.

When Booker Washington came to Macon County and founded Tuskegee
Institute, in 1881, the soil was worn out, and cotton, the chief crop,
was selling for an almost constantly lowering price. Although there
were few counties with a lower yield of cotton per acre, one-quarter
of a bale, over 42 per cent. of the tilled land of the county was
devoted exclusively to this crop. Very little machinery was used in
the farming, the antique scooter plow and hoe being the main reliance.
The soil was rarely tilled more than three or four inches deep. There
was, in fact, a superstition among whites as well as blacks that deep
plowing was injurious to the soil. Two-horse teams were seldom used.
Sub-soiling, fall plowing, fallowing, and rotation of crops were
little known and less practised. The county was producing per capita
per year only about five pounds of butter, four dozen eggs, and less
than three chickens.

The Negroes were with few exceptions shiftless and improvident
plantation laborers and renters. Of the almost 13,000 Negroes in the
county not more than fifty or sixty owned land. They lived almost
exclusively in one-room cabins. Sometimes in addition to the immediate
family there were relatives and friends living and sleeping in this
one room. The common diet of these Negroes was fat pork, corn bread,
and molasses. Many meals consisted of corn bread mixed with salt
water. This, then, was the raw material with which Booker Washington
had to work and from which has been developed, largely through his
influence, one of the most prosperous agricultural counties in the
South--a county which has been heralded in the press as feeding itself
because of the great abundance and variety of its products. In 1910
the per capita production for the county was: 40 gallons of milk, 11
pounds of butter, 7 dozen eggs, and 5 chickens. It must, of course, do
more than this before it will actually feed itself.

Mr. Washington was constantly drum