State

Creating A fresh new agricultural empire is being created in North Carolina. It is built on land which had been scorned as worthless by the pioneers. They streamed around the great swamps of eastern Carolina and took lands higher up. A century after that scramble spread across the mountains, over the plains and reached the Pacific, the land they passed by is coming into its own. Down in Hyde. Washington. Tyrrell and Beaufort counties several hundred thousand acres are being cleared, drained and put into cultivation, chiefly in corn, soybeans and pasture, though some vegetables also arc being raised. Earlier this year American Land Company had a SI. 000.000 stock is¬ sue over-subscribed. One of its sub¬ sidiaries. Lake Phelps Farms, Inc., already has invested $5 million in land. The company has sold about 12.000 acres to farmers from the Midwest and from North Carolina, and this acreage is in cultivation. It has sold other large tracts and is working on another 100,000 acre area, with plans to finish the work about 1968. The Three L Company (Land, Lumber, Livestock), headed by J. D. Parker. Jr., is clearing a large acreage in Hyde, and is also farming 5.000 acres. The MacArthurs of Chicago Foreit and field» tell Ihc *tory of Washington's tremendous natural resource». a New Farm Empire Pulpwood for the big plont at Plymouth is harvested over a wide area. — (Stole News Bureau.) cleared and drained about 4,000 acres purchased from the Roper Company. Down near Engelhard a group from Mississippi is turning a 3,000-acrc tract into a farm. The W. R. Grace interests are work¬ ing on several thousand acres in Tyr¬ rell County, and a Mr. Powe is de¬ veloping 73,000 acres in Hyde. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, working with Harry Mc- Mullan. Jr., of Washington, N. C., is building several miles of roads and planting a 20,000-acre tree farm. Several other large developments are underway, some of which were started before the current "boom." This includes the Murchison Plantation up around Alligator Lake. In fact, so many new super-plantations are open¬ ing up that it is hard to keep track of them, and new ones arc being an¬ nounced every month or so. And they often are of such dizzy proportions that what ordinarily would be considered a sensational drainage program is al¬ most unnoticed. The largest of the operators is the American Land Company, which is tied in with the international real estate brokers, Previews, Inc. One of the developers noted that most of the land is too rich in farm potential to use for growing timber, but since paper companies acquired about a million acres years ago for a very low figure, they probably will use it for tree growing for a long time. Meantime, it now appears that the old "swampland" not committed to this purpose is going to blossom forth as North Carolina's newest and most prosperous agricultural frontier. sound