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when there was a good mast bacon was plentiful but when the mast failed there was no meat except beef. but then the range was fine and good fat beef was cheap and plentiful the year round. The year 1857-58 will be remembered as long as the people that were here then live. All that year my Father with others had to haul on wagons drawn by oxen all the corn he needed for bread sixty miles and pay two dollars and fifty cts pr bushel for it and 1885(?) did not prove to be any better for crops than 57, the Springs being late and the summers dry. In August 57 it began to rain and the cotton in a few weeks looked as though it would yield a bale pr acre but Alas! as it often does here it made weed but fruited light but luckily for my father a merchant offered him five hundred dollars for his crop of forty acres as it stood and he accepted the offer, but when it was gathered it fell far short of five hundred. This trade enabled us to live another year but Kind reader here let me inform you from my own personal experience that Texas as a farming country is the worst over rated place I ever heard of to take it on an average there is about a full crop made every seven years in Texas. The dry weather generally begins about the 20th of June and lasts from six weeks to three months and sometimes longer. Thirty three years ago it was an easy matter to live. Nearly every settler had cattle and they raised very little crop except wheat which generally yielded from 30 to 40 bu pr acre then easier than it yields 8 lb and 12 now but it is my own candid opinion that it is the way that it is sown causes the difference in the yield. Then as soon as the wheat was harvested off of the land, the plows were started in the stubble The land all turned with a large plow and 3 or 4 yoke of oxen and then the wheat was sown generally in September not later than Oct but now the farmers are all absorbed in cotton and never get ready to sow wheat before November and December hence the failure. My father still rented the same farm and as 59 was a very good crop year he bought land on time as he had by this time spent all the money he had brought with him to Texas, but he did not get moved on his own land until the winter of 60. This year is spoken of yet as the driest year every known in Texas to the oldest settlers. There was
Handwritten notes written by Cornelia Garner describing what she remembers of moving to Texas as a child, living on a farm in Navarro County, managing a ranch and making cloth during the Civil War, and various other details that she remembered. There are sketches at the end that appear to be properties, labeled with names.
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