In the introduction to On the Way Home, Rose Wilder Lane wrote: “My mother had saved one hundred dollars to take to The Land of the Big Red Apple. All those dollars were one piece of paper, named ‘a hundred dollar bill.’ She hid it in her writing desk.”
The money was used to buy the forty acres that became Rocky Ridge Farm. Rose wrote that her parents paid the $100, and took out a mortgage for $300. The thing is, there doesn’t seem to have been a mortgage on the original forty acres, implying that the Wilders had more than a mere $100 to start their new life with. The forty acres, part of the NW SE 22-28-15 and part of the NE SE 22-28-15, was purchased on September 21, 1894, about three weeks after Laura’s diary ended on August 30. The Wilders purchased more land three years later, and began buying town property five years later. The first mortgage was on the town property, not the farm.
So maybe there was more than $100. Maybe the story of the “hundred dollar bill” was thrown in for effect by Rose. (She also says her father made the writing desk, but it was most likely purchased.) If you think about it, why would the Wilders place their entire future in one piece of paper? Wouldn’t it have been safer to have, say, two fifty dollar bills and have one hidden with Almanzo and one sewn into Laura’s corset. Or five twenties and have them hidden around, including one with Rose?
I got to thinking about the early years in Mansfield, Missouri, because I’ve been reading Laura’s (and Almanzo’s) earliest articles published in the Missouri Ruralist. There are a couple with Almanzo’s byline about the early days of the farm.
In “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm,” Almanzo (probably Laura) wrote that there was a $200 mortgage on the original forty acres, and that when they bought the farm, 4 acres were planted in apples and there were enough trees in nursery rows to plant 20 more acres.
In “My Apple Orchard,” Almanzo wrote that there were 200 trees set out, with 800 in nursery rows. This article also says that the trees were planted 25 feet apart in rows 32 feet apart, and that Almanzo planted the whole orchard in this way.
If you make a nice grid (like I just did on paper), you’ll see that nine trees 25 feet apart is 200 feet. Seven rows at 32 feet apart is 192 feet. That’s close enough to 208.71, so Almanzo had roughly 63 trees per acre. This isn’t anywhere near exact because I’ve got trees on every intersection of the grid, and if you start the next acre, you’ll also have trees on every intersection, and the last rows should really be blank because those are the first rows of the next acre.
Using Almanzo’s measurements and numbers of trees given, both articles are correct, give or take a few rows, etc.
An acre is an interesting unit of measure. Today, acres are measured in feet: a square acre measures 208.71 feet on each size, or 43,560 square feet. An acre started out being the amount of land that could be plowed in a day with oxen; more exactly, the amount of land that could be plowed in the morning, since oxen had to graze all afternoon in order to have strength to plow the next day. An acre was measured in something called “perches” – a strip 40 perches long and 1 perch wide was a rood (not rod). In the 16th century, the acre began to be thought of in terms of square feet or square rods (not roods). The length of an acre – 40 perches – was a long furrow that was the length oxen could go before needing a breather. So this “furrow-long” became known as a furlong (220 yards). If you were plowing with oxen, you wanted long furrows because it was hard to turn the team.
