Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 4, June 1905Various
General
Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 4, June 1905
Various
United States -- Politics and government -- Periodicals
This brief study of typical counties may be closed with certain
comparative data from Fulton, which contains the state’s capital,
Atlanta, a progressive and rapidly growing city distinctly of the “New
South” type. Fulton was not laid out until 1853, hence is relatively
young in the sisterhood of counties. Only about 2,000 slaves were set
free in this county. Compare the number with the 16,000 manumitted in
Chatham. But today there are more than 50,000 negroes in Fulton, and,
although they own but a thousand acres of land in the county, yet the
aggregate value of their whole property is a bare trifle below one
million dollars!
To extract the most important meanings from such figures is not
difficult. In connection with them several facts should be kept in mind,
the first of which is that the negro’s land-holdings in Georgia as well
as in adjoining states are usually parceled out in very small individual
lots. In a canvass of fifty-six typical counties of the state, the
following table was established to show the average size of the farm
lots among negro proprietors:
CLASSIFIED SIZE PER CENT. OF
TOTAL OWNERS
Under 10 acres 30.50
10 or under 40 acres 27.00
40 or under 100 acres 21.85
100 or under 200 acres 12.80
200 or under 500 acres 6.89
500 acres or over .93
The fifty-six counties canvassed represent the majority of negro holdings
in the state, and the average here established may fairly be taken as
that of the state at large, or, indeed, of the agricultural South. The
fact that a very large proportion of the farms are so limited in size
as to amount only to gardens, or, in negro parlance, “patches,” augurs
well rather than ill, for it means many small proprietors instead of
merely a few large ones and the rest all renters or day laborers. Since
out of 369,265 black people in the state ten years of age or over who
are engaged in gainful occupations, almost two-thirds are employed in
some line of agricultural work, is it not well that the million acres
owned by negroes should be distributed in small holdings? It is easy to
deduce from this the manifest decline of the metayer, or tenant system
of farming. To be sure, these one-acre, or even ten-acre farms will
seldom support the owner, though he may have the smallest family, or none
at all. Such farms are largely instances of what may be called, in the
German phrase, _Parzellenbetriebe_—that is, farms not large enough to
occupy the labor of a family, but serving as sources of partial support
to those with supplementary occupations. Yet, in many cases, these little
plots of ground will grow to goodly farms within a few years. The same
story has been traced a thousand times in the past quarter of a century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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