girls came home for a three-month vacation. Mar., 1870, I rented an adjoining farm (giving up the one I had) of three hundred and thirty-six acres, for which I paid six dollars per acre, for one year.

The three years I lived in Scott Co. I made but little money above expenses, but these two years renting, though paying a seemingly large rent, I made more money than in any others of my life, as stock and all farm products were bringing "boom" or "war" inflated priced, and had been for some seven years past, without intermission. So I was induced to buy a farm again, which I did in the spring of 1870, in Fayette Co., on the Versailles turnpike road, four and three-fourths miles from Lexington, to which I removed in Aug. of the same year. It was justly conceded to be the best farm of its size (two hundred and fifty-two and one-half acres) in all that rich, blue-grass region of Ky., which is called "the garden-spot of the world," and by a humorous writer "the asparagus bed." I paid one hundred and thirty dollars and twelve cents per acre for it, and excepting the elegant, large, new brick house, in an unfinished state, it was very poorly improved or fenced, and by the time I improved and fenced it the cost was at least one hundred and fifty dollars per acre. It was my purpose to raise hemp and hogs, and I expected fully to pay off all the debt I had assumed, within five or six years, as for some seven years previous hemp had sold for an average of ten dollars per hundred and twelve pounds, and hogs for about the same.

I raised the first year sixty acres of hemp that yielded one thousand pounds per acre, and sold it for seven dollars and seventy- five cents per hundred, and fed two hundred hogs and sold them for six dollars and a half; the second year I had one hundred acres of hemp, with the same good yield, and sold for five dollars, and eighty hogs sold for five dollars. I then left off hogs and corn and raised hemp and wheat, and for the remaining eight years sold my hemp at an average of four dollars and a half, which was about the cost of production; debt and interest were fast gaining on me, though I raised fine crops; prices had so declined that I saw that it was only a question of time when I would be bankrupt. My wheat crops were unusually good; for seven years

[Continued on page 371]

Thanks to Catherine Bradford for transcribing this page.