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INCIDENTS IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE SAGINAW VALLEY BY JUDGE ALBERT MILLER
We have yet to draw upon, for our growth and improvement, the trade of a vast agricultural region with a soil of inexhaustible fertility; we have the manufacturing interests (aside from those of salt and lumber) which always center at points which have the facilities for cheap living and cheap transportation that bay cities have.
All the early settlements at Saginaw made for agricultural purposes were on the banks of the streams, principally on the Tittabawassee; we thought, in those days, that nothing but the alluvial bottom lands would pay to clear and cultivate. I once owned the forty acre lot known as Mapes' addition to-East Saginaw, which now includes the site of the depot and other railroad buildings of the F. & P. M. R. R., which I exchanged with the late Jame & Fraser for a farm on the Tittabawassee, situated two miles below the present railroad crossing at Paines' That farm was considered a choice selection,, there being sixty acres of river bottom on it, and the crops raised on those lands might well satisfy the farmer, and the abundance of them amply compensated him for the inconvenience of an occasional overflow of his land by the spring freshets. Seventy bushels of shelled corn to the acre was no uncommon yield. I have raised common field pumpkins that weighed sixty pounds: each, and from one vine I raised twenty-two pumpkins, the aggregate weight of which was 382 pounds.
Michigan
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