Arkansas State Press

Buy South, Young Man-
By Robert Durr

Several years ago the principal of a small college in the South, founded in a four-tier county area in which there was at that time no high school, was advising young men, especially veterans, to invest in the relatively cheap land especially near main highways. I went out and bought a twenty acre farm about forty-five minutes drive (20 and one half miles) from the heart of a metropolitan area of a 300,000 population city on a county road. I worked.

My father. Since that time telephones and rural electrification power lines have been strung alongside my property. And what with people wanting to move from urban areas towards the outskirts where they can breathe good clean fresh air, enjoy quiet sleeping far from the noise, dirt, smoke and fumes filled air I can easily get four times what I paid for the place seven years ago, I could cut it up into lots--build some low cost rental houses and be assured of a reasonable amount of social security in the hoped for long evening of my life. Possess.

What with people scouring the nearby rural areas where they can build homes with surrounding elbow room and better living I find that my investment in that farm is just about my biggest saving and has brought more income than I could have had from an investment even in good U. S. Saving Bonds. There are still hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the South which can be had for a song and a dance. And the same scientific knowledge and adventure which is giving us the atom bomb, television and the many other wonders of this age hand in hand with ever evolving spiritual forces will add undreamed-of wealth to the land you can now buy for your children to hold.

My father sees it. He has already expressed the desire that if he passes, the children do, we should hold on. Do I think he thinks that some day God will reward his posterity with compound interest payments for all the forced and uncompensated toil degradation and violation of personality suffered at the hands of the ones who held my grandparents in slavery, kidnapped and traded their brothers and sisters from the fireside of their screaming mothers whose frustrated cries still echo in my soul. Possess and keep the land in the South. Someday God through it will give you what your forefathers lost there during our days of bondage. It was on that land we lost so much. On that land we will someday find much more than we lost.