Excerpt from Report of the Director for the Year Ending October 31, 1927 Fifty years ago in the vast territory west of the Mississippi there were still unconquered tribes of Indians, herds of wild buffalo and millions of acres of cheap land, the too rapid settling of which brought disaster not only to the farmer but to the nation as a whole. There was no telephone, no automobile, the radio was undreamed of and the railroads were just beginning to reach out into the great central grain and cattle country. In 1875 the reaper was a relatively new tool; last season in a single day, a Kansas farmer and his son harvested and threshed 100 acres of wheat with a combine. In Connecticut we were growing our own fresh beef, mutton and pork - the first refrigerator car reached New York in 1879. Creameries manufacturing butter and cheese were to be found in almost every town in the State. A few far seeing men had sensed the changes that were to come, and many more had only a vague feeling of uneasiness - they saw cheap grain, wool, meat and butter flooding New' England, and some predicted the everlasting ruin of our New England agriculture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.