Kitabı oku: «Studies in The South and West, With Comments on Canada», sayfa 17
The city has as yet no public parks, but the very broad streets—from sixty to one hundred and twenty feet in width—the wide spacing of the houses in the residence parts, and the abundant shade make them less a necessity than elsewhere. The city spreads very freely and openly over the plain, and short drives take one into lovely Blue-Grass country. A few miles out on Churchill Downs is the famous Jockey Club Park, a perfect racing track and establishment, where worldwide reputations are made at the semi-annual meetings. The limestone region, a beautifully rolling country, almost rivals the Lexington plantations in the raising of fine horses. Driving out to one of these farms one day, we passed, not far from the river, the old Taylor mansion and the tomb of Zachary Taylor. It is in the reserved family burying-ground, where lie also the remains of Richard Taylor, of Revolutionary memory. The great tomb and the graves are overrun thickly with myrtle, and the secluded irregular ground is shaded by forest-trees. The soft wind of spring was blowing sweetly over the fresh green fields, and there was about the place an air of repose and dignity most refreshing to the spirit. Near the tomb stands the fine commemorative shaft bearing on its summit a good portrait statue of the hero of Buena Vista. I liked to linger there, the country was so sweet; the great river flowing in sight lent a certain grandeur to the resting-place, and I thought how dignified and fit it was for a President to be buried at his home.
The city of Louisville in 1888 has the unmistakable air of confidence and buoyant prosperity. This feeling of confidence is strengthened by the general awakening of Kentucky in increased immigration of agriculturists, and in the development of extraordinary mines of coal and iron, and in the railway extension. But locally the Board of Trade (an active body of 700 members) has in its latest report most encouraging figures to present. In almost every branch of business there was an increase in 1887 over 1886; in both manufactures and trade the volume of business increased from twenty to fifty per cent. For instance, stoves and castings increased from 16,574,547 pounds to 19,386,808; manufactured tobacco, from 12,729,421 pounds to 17,059,006; gas and water pipes, from 56,083,380 pounds to 63,745,216; grass and clover seed, from 4,240,908 bushels to 6,601,451. A conclusive item as to manufactures is that there were received in 1887 951,767 tons of bituminous coal, against 204,221 tons in 1886. Louisville makes the claim of being the largest tobacco market in the world in bulk and variety. It leads largely the nine principal leaf-tobacco markets in the West. The figures for 1887 are—receipts, 123,569 hogsheads; sales, 135,192 hogsheads; stock in hand, 36,431 hogsheads, against the corresponding figures of 62,074, 65,924, 13,972 of its great rival, Cincinnati. These large figures are a great increase over 1886, when the value of tobacco handled here was estimated at nearly $20,000,000. Another great interest always associated with Louisville, whiskey, shows a like increase, there being shipped in 1887 119,637 barrels, against 101,943 barrels in 1886. In the Louisville collection district there were registered one hundred grain distilleries, with a capacity of 80,000 gallons a day. For the five years ending June 30, 1887, the revenue taxes on this product amounted to nearly $30,000,000. I am not attempting a conspectus of the business of Louisville, only selecting some figures illustrating its growth. Its manufacture of agricultural implements has attained great proportions. The reputation of Louisville for tobacco and whiskey is widely advertised, but it is not generally known that it has the largest plough factory in the world. This is one of four which altogether employ about 2000 hands, and make a product valued at $2,275,000. In 1880 Louisville made 80,000 ploughs; in 1886, 190,000. The capacity of manufacture in 1887 was increased by the enlargement of the chief factory to a number not given, but there were shipped that year 11,005,151 pounds of ploughs. There is a steadily increasing manufacture of woollen goods, and the production of the mixed fabric known as Kentucky jeans is another industry in which Louisville leads the world, making annually 7,500,000 yards of cloth, and its four mills increased their capacity twenty per cent, in 1887. The opening of the hard-wood lumber districts in eastern Kentucky has made Louisville one of the important lumber markets: about 125,000,000 feet of lumber, logs, etc., were sold here in 1887. But it is unnecessary to particularize. The Board of Trade think that the advantages of Louisville as a manufacturing centre are sufficiently emphasized from the fact that during the year 1887 seventy-three new manufacturing establishments, mainly from the North and East, were set up, using a capital of $1,290,500, and employing 1621 laborers. The city has twenty-two banks, which had, July 1, 1887, $8,200,200 capital, and $19,927,138 deposits. The clearings for 1887 were $281,110,402—an increase of nearly $50,000,000 over 1886.
Another item which helps to explain the buoyant feeling of Louisville is that its population increased over 10,000 from 1886 to 1887, reaching, according to the best estimate, 177,000 people. I should have said also that no city in the Union is better served by street railways, which are so multiplied and arranged as to “correspondences” that for one fare nearly every inhabitant can ride within at least two blocks of his residence. In these cars, as in the railway cars of the State, there is the same absence of discrimination against color that prevails in Louisiana and in Arkansas. And it is an observation hopeful, at least to the writer, of the good time at hand when all party lines shall be drawn upon the broadest national issues, that there seems to be in Kentucky no social distinction between Democrats and Republicans.
XIII.—MEMPHIS AND LITTLE ROCK
The State of Tennessee gets its diversity of climate and productions from the irregularity of its surface, not from its range over degrees of latitude, like Illinois; for it is a narrow State, with an average breadth of only a hundred and ten miles, while it is about four hundred miles in length, from the mountains in the east—the highest land east of the Rocky Mountains—to the alluvial bottom of the Mississippi in the west. In this range is every variety of mineral and agricultural wealth, with some of the noblest scenery and the fairest farming-land in the Union, and all the good varieties of a temperate climate.
In the extreme south-west corner lies Memphis, differing as entirely in character from Knoxville and Nashville as the bottom-lands of the Mississippi differ from the valleys of the Great Smoky Mountains. It is the natural centre of the finest cotton-producing district in the world, the county of Shelby, of which it is legally known as the Taxing District, yielding more cotton than any other county in the Union except that of Washington in Mississippi. It is almost as much aloof politically from east and middle Tennessee as it is geographically. A homogeneous State might be constructed by taking west Tennessee, all of Mississippi above Vicksburg and Jackson, and a slice off Arkansas, with Memphis for its capital. But the redistricting would be a good thing neither for the States named nor for Memphis, for the more variety within convenient limits a State can have, the better, and Memphis could not wish a better or more distinguished destiny than to become the commercial metropolis of a State of such great possibilities and varied industries as Tennessee. Her political influence might be more decisive in the homogeneous State outlined, but it will be abundant for all reasonable ambition in its inevitable commercial importance. And besides, the western part of the State needs the moral tonic of the more elevated regions.
The city has a frontage of about four miles on the Mississippi River, but is high above it on the Chickasaw Bluffs, with an uneven surface and a rolling country back of it, the whole capable of perfect drainage. Its site is the best on the river for a great city from St. Louis to the Gulf; this advantage is emphasized by the concentration of railways at this point, and the great bridge, which is now on the eve of construction, to the Arkansas shore, no doubt fixes its destiny as the inland metropolis of the South-west. Memphis was the child of the Mississippi, and this powerful, wayward stream is still its fostering mother, notwithstanding the decay of river commerce brought about by the railways; for the river still asserts its power as a regulator of rates of transportation. I do not mean to say that the freighting on it in towed barges is not still enormous, but if it did not carry a pound to the markets of the world it is still the friend of all the inner continental regions, which says to the railroads, beyond a certain rate of charges you shall not go. With this advantage of situation, the natural receiver of the products of an inexhaustible agricultural region (one has only to take a trip by rail through the Yazoo Valley to be convinced of that), and an equally good point for distribution of supplies, it is inevitable that Memphis should grow with an accelerating impulse.
The city has had a singular and instructive history, and that she has survived so many vicissitudes and calamities, and entered upon an extraordinary career of prosperity, is sufficient evidence of the territorial necessity of a large city just at this point on the river. The student of social science will find in its history a striking illustration of the relation of sound sanitary and business conditions to order and morality. Before the war, and for some time after it, Memphis was a place for trade in one staple, where fortunes were quickly made and lost, where no attention was paid to sanitary laws. The cloud of impending pestilence always hung over it, the yellow-fever was always a possibility, and a devastating epidemic of it must inevitably be reckoned with every few years. It seems to be a law of social life that an epidemic, or the probability of it, engenders a recklessness of life and a low condition of morals and public order. Memphis existed, so to speak, on the edge of a volcano, and it cannot be denied that it had a reputation for violence and disorder. While little or nothing was done to make the city clean and habitable, or to beautify it, law was weak in its mobile, excitable population, and differences of opinion were settled by the revolver. In spite of these disadvantages, the profits of trade were so great there that its population of twenty thousand at the close of the war had doubled by 1878. In that year the yellow-fever came as an epidemic, and so increased in 1879 as nearly to depopulate the city; its population was reduced from nearly forty thousand to about fourteen thousand, two-thirds of which were negroes; its commerce was absolutely cut off, its manufactures were suspended, it was bankrupt. There is nothing more unfortunate for a State or a city than loss of financial credit. Memphis struggled in vain with its enormous debt, unable to pay it, unable to compromise it.
Under these circumstances the city resorted to a novel expedient. It surrendered its charter to the State, and ceased to exist as a municipality. The leaders of this movement gave two reasons for it, the wish not to repudiate the city debt, but to gain breathing-time, and that municipal government in this country is a failure. The Legislature erected the former Memphis into The Taxing District of Shelby County, and provided a government for it. This government consists of a Legislative Council of eight members, made up of the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners, consisting of three, and the Board of Public Works, consisting of five. These are all elected by popular vote to serve a term of four years, but the elections are held every two years, so that the council always contains members who have had experience. The Board of Fire and Police Commissioners elects a President, who is the executive officer of the Taxing District, and has the power and duties of a mayor; he has a salary of $2000, inclusive of his fees as police magistrate, and the other members of his board have salaries of $500. The members of the Board of Public Works serve without compensation. No man can be eligible to either board who has not been a resident of the district for five years. In addition there is a Board of Health, appointed by the council. This government has the ordinary powers of a city government, defined carefully in the Act, but it cannot run the city in debt, and it cannot appropriate the taxes collected except for the specific purpose named by the State Legislature, which specific appropriations are voted annually by the Legislature on the recommendation of the council. Thus the government of the city is committed to eight men, and the execution of its laws to one man, the President of the Taxing District, who has extraordinary power. The final success of this scheme will be watched with a great deal of interest by other cities. On the surface it can be seen that it depends upon securing a non-partisan council, and an honest, conscientious President of the Taxing District—that is to say, upon the choice by popular vote of the best eight men to rule the city. Up to this time, with only slight hitches, it has worked exceedingly well, as will appear in a consideration of the condition of the city. The slight hitch mentioned was that the President was accused of using temporarily the sum appropriated for one city purpose for another.
The Supreme Court of the United States decided that Memphis had not evaded its obligations by a change of name and form of government. The result was a settlement with the creditors at fifty cents on the dollar; and then the city gathered itself together for a courageous effort and a new era of prosperity. The turning-point in its career was the adoption of a system of drainage and sewerage which transformed it immediately into a fairly healthful city. With its uneven surface and abundance of water at hand, it was well adapted to the Waring system, which works to the satisfaction of all concerned, and since its introduction the inhabitants are relieved from apprehension of the return of a yellow-fever epidemic. Population and business returned with this sense of security, and there has been a change in the social atmosphere as well. In 1880 it had a population of less than 34,000; it can now truthfully claim between 75,000 and 80,000; and the business activity, the building both of fine business blocks and handsome private residences, are proportioned to the increase in inhabitants. In 1879-80 the receipt of cotton was 409,809 bales, valued at $23,752,529; in 1886-87, 603,277 bales, valued at $30,099,510. The estimate of the Board of Trade for 1888, judging from the first months of the year, is 700,000 bales. I notice in the comparative statement of leading articles of commerce and consumption an exceedingly large increase in 1887 over 1886. The banking capital in 1887 was $3,300,000—an increase of $1,560,000 over 1886. The clearings were $101,177,377 in 1877, against $82,642,192 in 1880.
The traveller, however, does not need figures to convince him of the business activity of the town; the piles of cotton beyond the capacity of storage, the street traffic, the extension of streets and residences far beyond the city limits, all speak of growth. There is in process of construction a union station to accommodate the six railways now meeting there and others projected. On the west of the river it has lines to Kansas City and Little Rock and to St. Louis; on the east, to Louisville and to the Atlantic seaboard direct, and two to New Orleans. With the building of the bridge, which is expected to be constructed in a couple of years, Memphis will be admirably supplied with transportation facilities.
As to its external appearance, it must be said that the city has grown so fast that city improvements do not keep pace with its assessable value. The inability of the city to go into debt is a wholesome provision, but under this limitation the city offices are shabby, the city police quarters and court would disgrace an indigent country village, and most of the streets are in bad condition for want of pavement. There are fine streets, many attractive new residences, and some fine old places, with great trees, and the gravelled pikes running into the country are in fine condition, and are favorite drives. There is a beautiful country round about, with some hills and pleasant woods. Looked at from an elevation, the town is seen to cover a large territory, and presents in the early green of spring a charming appearance. Some five miles out is the Montgomery race-track, park, and club-house—a handsome establishment, prettily laid out and planted, already attractive, and sure to be notable when the trees are grown.
The city has a public-school system, a Board of Education elected by popular vote, and divides its fund fairly between schools for white and colored children. But it needs good school-houses as much as it needs good pavements. In 1887 the tax of one and a half mills produced $54,000 for carrying on the schools, and $19,000 for the building fund. It was not enough—at least $75,000 were needed. The schools were in debt. There is a plan adopted for a fine High-school building, but the city needs altogether more money and more energy for the public schools. According to some reports the public schools have suffered from politics, and are not as good as they were years ago, but they are undoubtedly gaining in public favor, notwithstanding some remaining Bourbon prejudice against them. The citizens are making money fast enough to begin to be liberal in matters educational, which are only second to sanitary measures in the well-being of the city. The new free Public Library, which will be built and opened in a couple of years, will do much for the city in this direction. It is the noble gift of the late F. H. Cossitt, of New York, formerly a citizen of Memphis, who left $75,000 for that purpose.
Perhaps the public schools of Memphis would be better (though not so without liberal endowment) if the city had not two exceptionally good private schools for young ladies. These are the Clara Conway Institute and the Higby School for Young Ladies, taking their names from their principals and founders. Each of these schools has about 350 pupils, from the age of six to the mature age of graduation, boys being admitted until they are twelve years old. Each has pleasant grounds and fine buildings, large, airy, well planned, with ample room for all the departments—literature, science, art, music—of the most advanced education. One finds in them the best methods of the best schools, and a most admirable spirit. It is not too much to say that these schools give distinction to Memphis, and that the discipline and intellectual training the young ladies receive there will have a marked effect upon the social life of the city. If one who spent some delightful hours in the company of these graceful and enthusiastic scholars, and who would like heartily to acknowledge their cordiality, and his appreciation of their admirable progress in general study, might make a suggestion, it would be that what the frank, impulsive Southern girl, with her inborn talent for being agreeable and her vivid apprehension of life, needs least of all is the cultivation of the emotional, the rhetorical, the sentimental side. However cleverly they are done, the recitation of poems of sentiment, of passion, of lovemaking and marriage, above all, of those doubtful dialect verses in which a touch of pseudo-feeling is supposed to excuse the slang of the street and the vulgarity of the farm, is not an exercise elevating to the taste. I happen to speak of it here, but I confess that it is only a text from which a little sermon might be preached about “recitations” and declamations generally, in these days of overdone dialect and innuendoes about the hypocrisy of old-fashioned morality.
The city has a prosperous college of the Christian Brothers, another excellent school for girls in the St. Agnes Academy, and a colored industrial school, the Lemoyne, where the girls are taught cooking and the art of house-keeping, and the boys learn carpentering. This does not belong to the public-school system.
Whatever may be the opinion about the propriety of attaching industrial training to public schools generally, there is no doubt that this sort of training is indispensable to the colored people of the South, whose children do not at present receive the needed domestic training at borne, and whose education must contribute to their ability to earn a living. Those educated in the schools, high and low, cannot all be teachers or preachers, and they are not in the way of either social elevation or thrifty lives if they have neither a trade nor the taste to make neat and agreeable homes. The colored race cannot have it too often impressed upon them that their way to all the rights and privileges under a free government lies in industry, thrift, and morality. Whatever reason they have to complain of remaining discrimination and prejudice, there is only one way to overcome both, and that is by the acquisition of property and intelligence. In the history of the world a people were never elevated otherwise. No amount of legislation can do it. In Memphis—in Southern cities generally—the public schools are impartially administered as to the use of money for both races. In the country districts they are as generally inadequate, both in quality and in the length of the school year. In the country, where farming and domestic service must be the occupations of the mass of the people, industrial schools are certainly not called for; but in the cities they are a necessity of the present development.
Ever since Memphis took itself in hand with a new kind of municipal government, and made itself a healthful city, good-fortune of one kind and another seems to have attended it. Abundant water it could get from the river for sewerage purposes, but for other uses either extensive filters were needed or cisterns were resorted to. The city was supplied with water, which the stranger would hesitate to drink or bathe in, from Wolf River, a small stream emptying into the Mississippi above the city. But within the year a most important discovery has been made for the health and prosperity of the town. This was the striking, in the depression of the Gayoso Bayou, at a depth of 450 feet, perfectly pure water, at a temperature of about 62°, in abundance, with a head sufficient to bring it in fountains some feet about the level of the ground. Ten wells had been sunk, and the water flowing was estimated at ten millions of gallons daily, or half enough to supply the city. It was expected that with more wells the supply would be sufficient for all purposes, and then Memphis will have drinking water not excelled in purity by that of any city in the land. It is not to be wondered at that this incalculable good-fortune should add buoyancy to the business, and even to the advance in the price, of real estate. The city has widely outgrown its corporate limits, there is activity in building and improvements in all the pleasant suburbs, and with the new pavements which are in progress, the city will be as attractive as it is prosperous.
Climate is much a matter of taste. The whole area of the alluvial land of the Mississippi has the three requisites for malaria—heat, moisture, and vegetable decomposition. The tendency to this is overcome, in a measure, as the land is thoroughly drained and cultivated. Memphis has a mild winter, long summer, and a considerable portion of the year when the temperature is just about right for enjoyment. In the table of temperature for 1887 I find that the mean was 61.9°, the mean of the highest by months was 84.9°, and the mean lowest was 37.4°. The coldest month was January, when the range of the thermometer was from 72.2° to 4.3°, and the hottest was July, when the range was from 99° to 67.30. There is a preponderance of fair, sunny weather. The record for 1887 was: 157 days of clear, 132 fair, 65 cloudy, 91 days of frost. From this it appears that Memphis has a pretty agreeable climate for those who do not insist upon a good deal of “bracing,” and it has a most genial and hospitable society.
Early on the morning of the 12th of April we crossed the river to the lower landing of the Memphis and Little Rock Railway, the upper landing being inaccessible on account of the high water. It was a delicious spring morning, the foliage, half unfolded, was in its first flush of green, and as we steamed down the stream the town, on bluffs forty feet high, was seen to have a noble situation. All the opposite country for forty miles from the river was afloat, and presented the appearance of a vast swamp, not altogether unpleasing in its fresh dress of green. For forty miles, to Madison, the road ran upon an embankment just above the flood; at intervals were poor shanties and little cultivated patches, but shanties, corn patches, and trees all stood in the water. The inhabitants, the majority colored, seemed of the sort to be content with half-amphibious lives. Before we reached Madison and crossed St. Francis River we ran through a streak of gravel. Forest City, at the crossing of the Iron Mountain Railway, turned out to be not exactly a city, in the Eastern meaning of the word, but a considerable collection of houses, with a large hotel. It seemed, so far in the wilderness, an irresponsible sort of place, and the crowd at the station were in a festive, hilarious mood. This was heightened by the playing of a travelling band which we carried with us in the second-class car, and which good-naturedly unlimbered at the stations. It consisted of a colored bass-viol, violin, and guitar, and a white cornet. On the way the negro population were in the majority, all the residences were shabby shanties, and the moving public on the trains and about the stations had not profited by the example of the commercial travellers, who are the only smartly dressed people one sees in these regions. A young girl who got into the car here told me that she came from Marianna, a town to the south, on the Languille River, and she seemed to regard it as a central place. At Brinkley we crossed the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas road, ran through more swamps to the Cache River, after which there was prairie and bottom-land, and at De Valle’s Bluff we came to the White River. There is no doubt that this country is well watered. After White River fine reaches of prairie-land were encountered—in fact, a good deal of prairie and oak timber. Much of this prairie had once been cultivated to cotton, but was now turned to grazing, and dotted with cattle. A place named Prairie Centre had been abandoned; indeed, we passed a good many abandoned houses before we reached Carlisle and the Galloway. Lonoke is one of the villages of rather mean appearance, but important enough to be talked about and visited by the five aspirants for the gubernatorial nomination, who were travelling about together, each one trying to convince the people that the other four were unworthy the office. This is lowland Arkansas, supporting a few rude villages, inhabited by negroes and unambitious whites, and not a fairly representative portion of a great State.
At Argenta, a sort of railway and factory suburb of the city, we crossed the muddy, strong-flowing Arkansas River on a fine bridge, elevated so as to strike high up on the bluff on which Little Rock is built. The rock of the bluff, which the railway pierces, is a very shaly slate. The town lying along the bluff has a very picturesque appearance, in spite of its newness and the poor color of its brick. The situation is a noble one, commanding a fine prospect of river and plain, and mountains to the west rising from the bluff on a series of gentle hills, with conspicuous heights farther out for public institutions and country houses. The eity, which has nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, can boast a number of handsome business streets with good shops and an air of prosperous trade, with well-shaded residence streets of comfortable houses; but all the thoroughfares are bad for want of paving, Little Rock being forbidden by the organic law ( as Memphis is ) to run in debt for city improvements. A city which has doubled its population within eight years, and been restrained from using its credit, must expect to suffer from bad streets, but its caution about debt is reassuring to intending settlers. The needed street improvements, it is understood, however, will soon be under way, and the citizens have the satisfaction of knowing that when they are made, Little Rock will be a beautiful city.
Below the second of the iron bridges which span the river is a bowlder which gave the name of Little Rock to the town. The general impression is that it is the first rock on the river above its confluence with the Mississippi; this is not literally true, but this rock is the first conspicuous one, and has become historic. On the opposite side of the river, a mile above, is a bluff several hundred feet high, called Big Rock. On the summit is a beautiful park, a vineyard, a summer hotel, and pleasure-grounds—a delightful resort in the hot weather. From the top one gains a fair idea of Arkansas—the rich delta of the river, the mighty stream itself, the fertile rolling land and forests, the mountains on the border of the Indian Territory, the fair city, the sightly prominences about it dotted with buildings—altogether a magnificent and most charming view.
