Page:Eastern North Carolina Encyclopedia.djvu/49

 Irish potatoes, cabbage and early berries, such as strawberries, dewberries and huckleberries, are a source of wonderful revenue. The principal crops are corn, cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes, oats, wheat, rye, soja beans and pea vine hay. Some alfalfa and clover are also grown. The best hog exhibits in the State are to be found in this county, several specimens at our last County Fair weighing over 1,000 pounds. Pure bred cattle are rapidly increasing in the county.

There are numerous creeks and small rivers coursing through the county, affording an abundance of pasture lands and fresh water for stock and cattle farms. The forest abounds in timber and hard wood suitable for building material and all kinds of wood working enterprises.

Our county boasts of economic but progressive county government. The tax rate is smaller than in many other less progressive counties. We have a whole-time Health Officer and trained nurses. Farm demonstrator and superintendent of the domestic science work in the county. A whole-time Welfare Officer, Public Clinics for operations and treatment of venereal diseases, a county farm and home for the poor, aged and infirm people, incapable to provide their own support. Our rural population is not dense, hence our farms are usually large and our lands are cheap. We need to increase our population, subdivide our large farms and intensify our farming.

More improvements have been made in Sampson County in the past decade in building better homes, adding home comforts, in added facilities for better schools and churches, in improved farming lands, and in improved fertility of the soil, in improved stock, hogs and cattle, in better highways and improved health conditions, and in every way that tends to make farm life more pleasant and profitable, than in many other counties in this section of the State.

The editor of the Wilmington Star, the largest daily newspaper east of Raleigh, has visited our county on several occasions recently and made a personal inspection of our lands and the products of our farms and inventoried our resources, and we copy below from a leading editorial of Nov. 5th, 1923, and a front page display write-up of Sampson County in the issue of Nov. 8th, 1923, and a second page display article on Nov. 10th, 1923.

"A variety of products which no other region on earth could assemble at any time of the year.

"At the Sampson County Fair at Clinton every branch of agricultural and live stock industries will be seen as they have never before been assembled east of Raleigh. The exhibition of products is large and of great variety, including cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and every product of the temperate zone. Forty-Three