That night the Mosquito Man telephoned to a drainage expert in New York and demanded that he come out the next day.
"I don"t like to work on Sunday," the expert objected.
"It is absolutely essential that you come at once," he was told. "Can you take the first train?"
The first train and the expert arrived in Darien at 5:51. Before the day was over a contract had been drawn up to the purport that the expert would drain the salt marshes between Stamford and South Norwalk for $4,000.
The Mosquito Man now began to talk mosquitoes to every one who would listen and to many who did not want to listen. "That bug," the old settlers called him at the time--for old settlers are very settled in their ways. The young women at the Country Club, whenever they saw him coming, made bets as to whether he would talk mosquitoes--and he always did. Every property-owner in the township was asked for a subscription, and some gave generously and some gave n.i.g.g.ardly and some did not give at all. The subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. This was in 1911, and only in 1915 has a mosquito law been pa.s.sed in Connecticut. The Mosquito Man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not expedite matters.
A subscription of $1,000 came from the big land corporation of the neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly expressed itself.
"I want $1,000 from you," said the Mosquito Man to the representative of the president--the president was in South America. The representative laughed, so the Mosquito Man spent several days explaining to him why property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. But every time that the $1,000 was mentioned, the representative could not restrain the smile.
"Well," the Mosquito Man said, at last, "I will make the drainage on your property anyway, and it will cost me $2,000. If you want it left you will have to pay me every cent of the $2,000, not just the $1,000 that I am asking now. Otherwise I shall fill up my ditches and let you enjoy your mosquitoes."
The representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in South America. As the president had just been at Panama, and had seen the mosquito extermination work, the $1,000 subscription came back by return cable.
The Darien Board of Health also was a spot against which in direct influence was knocking, for it was a rich Board of Health with $150 at its disposal--and the Mosquito Man wanted that appropriation to flaunt in the faces of the old settlers.
"G.o.d sent mosquitoes," objected one member of the Board of Health, "and it is going in the face of Providence to try to get rid of them."
All in all, the money was raised. Some whom he asked for $100 gave $25, and some whom he asked for $25 gave $100, and some millionaires did not give at all--but a sail-maker is still telling proudly of how he gave $5, and "I haven"t regretted a cent of it since."
The draining now commenced, and the expert and the Mosquito Man were of the same stripe. The work was completed in six weeks. Just about this time people stopped calling the Mosquito Man "a bug," and the members of the Country Club even tried to make him talk mosquitoes to them, while the sail-maker felt sure that his $5 had done the whole job. Hammocks were swung out in the yards--and a hammock hung outside of the screens is the barometer of the mosquito condition.
The Mosquito Man was feeling very satisfied the night he went to a dance at the Country Club. But the east wind blew in the mosquitoes from the Norwalk marshes.
"It was the most embarra.s.sing experience I have ever had," said the Mosquito Man. "I sat right behind a big fat lady whose dress was very low and I watched the mosquitoes bite her; her whole back was covered with red lumps. That night I telegraphed to the man who had done the draining and he telegraphed back that all of Norwalk township must be drained."
Norwalk proved to be a much severer task than Darien. In Darien the Mosquito Man had found only indifference and prejudice; in Norwalk he met active opposition. Property owners and city councils seem to be afraid that the value of property will be brought down if any sanitation scandal is advertised. It really appeared to be simpler and better business to ignore the fact.
To do away with this opposition, the Mosquito Man handled his campaign in a popular manner. The cooperation of the newspapers was gained and every day he published articles on the mosquito question; some of the articles were educational and others were facetious--while one came out that brought the property owners crying "murder" about his ears. This was the article in which he gave the statistics of Norwalk"s health rate in comparison with other Connecticut towns. The smallest subscriptions were encouraged, for, after a man has given a dollar to a cause, that cause is his. Many a child was received with a welcoming smile when he brought to the campaign offices a ten-cent donation.
True, ten-cent donations were not suggested to adult contributors, and the Mosquito Man did much to induce the well-to-do citizens to subscribe according to their means. He still tells with relish of the club of women which took up a collection, after his talk, and presented him with two dollars, in small change.
"The women, though, were my greatest help," he adds; "I found that the women are as a rule better citizens than the men and are glad to be organized to fight the mosquito and fly menace. Of course, I found some uneducated ones that owned a piece of property a foot square, and were afraid that I would walk off with it in my pocket if I came to look it over--but, as for the educated women, I could not have managed my campaign without them."
A large contributor to the fund was the monastery at Kaiser Island. For years this had been a summer resort for the monks, who filled the dormitories in the old days before the mosquitoes took the island. Only one priest was there when the Mosquito Man visited the place to ask for a subscription.
"Very few come any more," said the priest. "It is because of the mosquitoes."
"Will you contribute $500 to get rid of them?" asked the Mosquito Man.
Briefly, the Mosquito Man offered to repay the $500 himself if he did not exterminate the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes went; the monks came back to Kaiser Island.
Yet, in spite of the occasional generous giver, the $7,500 was never quite raised, and the Mosquito Man himself had to make up the deficit.
The citizens of Norwalk, for instance, contributed only $150.
This all happened three years ago, and now not a child in the twelve miles but can tell you all about mosquitoes and how a community can avoid having them. The Mosquito Man is appreciated now, and the community understands what he has done for them and what he is still doing--for the contract merely drained the salt marshes, doing away with the salt-water mosquitoes. There were still the fresh-water mosquitoes, and there was still much work for some one to do. That some one has been the Mosquito Man.
During the three years, he has made it his business to drain every inland marsh within his territory, to turn over every tub which may collect water, to let the plug out of every old boat which is breeding mosquitoes, and to convince every ancestor-enc.u.mbered autocrat that his inherited woods can breed mosquitoes just as disastrously as do the tin cans of the Hungarian immigrant down the road. The Mosquito Man has an a.s.sistant, paid by the towns of Darien and Norwalk--and together they traverse the country.
"It was difficult finding a man who would go into mud to the waist when need was," said the Mosquito Man, "but I finally found a good man with the proper scorn of public opinion on the clothes question, and with a properly trained wife who cleaned without scolding."
You can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of Darien or Norwalk. In a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth as a knife--or you find new gra.s.s in a place which you remember as a swamp. Perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers themselves, digging with their pick and spade--for all summer long the Mosquito Man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task.
You might even find him in New York some off-day--and you will know him, for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that the tank on his roof is unscreened. For they do say that he carries his activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do say that, when he was in Italy not so very long ago, he went out to investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night before.
"Now you must oil your swamp," said he to the innkeeper.
That night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed the order to the best of his ability. He had poured all of his best olive oil on the mosquito marsh.
_(Country Gentleman)_
Five half-tone ill.u.s.trations, with the following captions: 1. "A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile."
2. "Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods."
3. "Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville."
4. "Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara County Farm Bureau, New York."
5. "Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers."
A COUNTY SERVICE STATION
WHERE NEW YORK FARMERS GET HELP IN THEIR FRUIT GROWING AND MARKETING PROBLEMS
BY D. H. WILLIAMS
You"ve got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county"s farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete. You"ve got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers.
As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county"s economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct cla.s.s by itself.
Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its northern line. A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.
Forty-eight hours to Chicago"s markets, the same distance to New York"s; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself--Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda--operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls--these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident.
Beginning with the southern plain section, Niagara"s agriculture changes in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached, until within the zone of Lake Ontario"s tempering influence the fruit industry almost excludes all other types of farming.
There is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the northern half of Niagara County. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, quinces make up the county"s horticultural catalogue. The latest available figures rank Niagara County first among the counties of New York in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of bushels of fruit produced; first in the quant.i.ty of peaches, pears, plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels of apples.
Yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a whole--in other words, the bedrock rating of the county. You have to get at these things by a different avenue of approach.
A rather close auditing during 1914 of the accounts of some eighty-seven typical good farms in perhaps the best section of Niagara County brought out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could not be cla.s.sed as strictly giltedge. One diagnosis made by a Niagara County investigator is recorded in these words:
"Though Niagara County has many of the best fruit farms in New York State, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the ravages of insects and disease. There is also a tendency toward extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in many large plantings being made.
"Niagara County does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present production."