The Country Estate as Medicine: Why Seattle’s Elite Are Buying Farms to Save Their Nerves

LITTLE PLACE IN THE COUNTRY.

The rich man of a few years ago who had to do with a large farm — the man who made his living in the city and ran out to his country home on Sunday right, or a few days there in summer — those men never troubled themselves about the question of turn. But now many are looking to fill a little place in the country. State and trust to get back to it. It doesn't cost them but in the first year, after which they frequently come from changing. If a broker, accountant, banker, lawyer or editor in this country place as a sort of invigorator, how much more wisely has he chosen his medicine than he would have filled his pockets with patent nostrums! What the man confined to business all the week wants, is a good sweat. His pores have been closed up on the desk, perhaps by the blasts of the trade wind; he is nervous and restless, sleep is broken at night and digestion is getting bad. In such a condition internal stimulants only aggravate the case. No man can afford to lodge a liquid dynamite under his liver, when in time he will blow it up or induce rapid induration.

But if he to his country place, gets a change of air, water, scenery, tries his hand for an odd hour or two at the hoe, scythe or rake, throws off his coat, perspires freely, and feels a great deal better, he has gained materially where he was losing rapidly before. The medicine is simple enough, but if it is efficacious the end is gained. Suppose the left-handed dividends of a country estate are from three thousand up to five or six thousand dollars a year. That is what the investor puts in. Now he gets back health, a new lease of life, spring buoyancy, a cooler head, steadier nerves, a brighter horizon; his medicine cheap enough. In fact this is the only way in which most of the small country estates are made to pay at all.

Now and then one will take advantage of his early experience as a farmer's boy and figure down the operation to a paying basis in dollars and cents. He has not driven cows to pasture, barefooted, stubbing his toe nails off for nothing; he has not ridden a hot horse fixed on but day by day to plow out corn after the primitive fashion without some practical results. If he has got out of bed in the Winter time an hour before day to fodder cattle, and has in the early Spring been made a plow-boy, but doing a man's work from a ten year old upward, he has laid up a pretty good stock of experience. All these are fully handy with tools. He looks at a farm-horse, colt, or thoroughbred short-horn with a knowing look, and turns a furrow or two for the fun of it in a deft and natural sort of way. If you ask him where he was raised, ten to one it will turn out that it was on a rough farm of a hundred acres, where a whole family had to get their living, and they managed to get it and thrive, too, on hard work.

Very likely such an owner of a country estate will draw enough on his early stock of experience to bring his dividends over the shoulder. Pretty soon John, the man of all work, who runs the firm, finds out that the owner of that estate is not a fool. He proposes to get out of his farm, health and moderate dividends. But he is the exception. As for the rest, the country estate will always need a gentle financial stimulant. Front Street, St. Louis and California in Market streets are doing considerable in the way of fancy farming, and the luxury, if somewhat costly, is on the whole bearable enough, isn't it? Is it not better that the Spring chickens should have cost five dollars a piece than that this and more should have gone after a leaf harmful and satisfying luxury in the city? Strawberries, at a dollar each, are not always dear, nor is Jersey butter at five dollars a pound, nor the trout from the artificial pond, which may have cost as much to make every pound. However, your fine country gentleman who works on California street or in that vicinity, don't figure in that way. If he is content, let no hard-hearted farmer in the country poke fun at his fancy farming. — Hittie.