Abstract

Hay and Corn

This article presents the author's views on businessman Arthur J. Mason who has devoted his life to the problem of checking the falling away of America's Corn Belt into the Gulf of Mexico. Mason had recently retired from a most lucrative business as contracting engineer on the day fifteen years ago when he chipped off with his golf club that bit of prairie dirt. Much of his work had been done in steel, and he felt that he had come to a time in the industry's development when there was a dearth of the pioneering spirit. Above all things this man is a pioneer with a constant vision before him of a new and orderly society, such as hovers in the rear of every engineer's mind. So when he picked up the prairie earth from the tiny mound and discovered that it was vastly inferior to the rich black soil of the lower lands on the course, he began to speculate. When he got back to his country house twenty-five miles out of Chicago, he took a shovel and went across the fields to the tracks of the Illinois Central railroad. There are some 200 feet of virgin soil on either side of these tracks forming the original grant of land made to the railroad by the State and never touched by plows.