Our Foreigners: A Chronicle of Americans in the MakingOrth, Samuel Peter
History
Our Foreigners: A Chronicle of Americans in the Making
Orth, Samuel Peter
Immigrants -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
With the free land gone and the cities crowded to overflowing, the
door of immigration, though guarded, nevertheless remains open and the
pressure of the old-world peoples continues. Where can they go? They
are filling in the vacant spots of the older States, the abandoned
farms, stagnant half-empty villages, undrained swamps, uninviting
rocky hillsides. This infiltration of foreigners possessing themselves
of rejected and abandoned land, which has only recently begun, shows
that the peasant's instinct for the soil will reassert itself when the
means are available and the way opens. It is surprising, indeed, how
many are the ways that are opening for this movement. Transportation
companies are responsible for a number of colonies planted bodily in
cut-over timber regions of the South. The journals and the real estate
agents of the different races are always alert to spy out
opportunities. Dealing in second-hand farms has become a considerable
industry. The advertising columns of Chicago papers announce hundreds
of farms for sale in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. In all the older
States there are for sale thousands of acres of tillable land which
have been left by the restless shiftings of the American population.
In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution.
Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their
solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which
neglect has woven about them. One can see paralysis creeping over them
as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender
one by one the little industries that gave them life. These are the
opportunities of the immigrant peasant. Wherever the new migration
swarms, there the receding tide leaves a few energetic individuals who
have made for themselves a permanent home. In the wake of construction
gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these
immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an
immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down
house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus
for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the
large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and
there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an
unerring instinct for weeds. Now and then a family finds a forgotten
acre, builds a shack, and starts a small independent market garden.
Within a few years a whole settlement of shacks grows up around it,
and soon the trucking of the neighborhood is in foreign hands.
Seasonal agricultural work often carries the immigrant into distant
canning centers, hop fields, cranberry marshes, orchards, and
vineyards. Every time a migration of this sort occurs, some settlers
remain on land previously thought unfit for cultivation--perhaps a
swamp which they drain or a sand-hill which they fertilize and nurture
into surprising fertility by constant toil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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