The $100-Acre Garden: How Puyallup’s ‘Rich Farming’ Made Landlords Rich and Farmers Poor
In the fertile valleys of Tacoma County, land speculators from Philadelphia are buying up prime soil for $150 an acre, turning subsistence farming into a high-stakes real estate game.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
TACOMA, March 8.—To raise corn on a farm in our fair land is not uncommon; but to buy the land is not so common still in the wheat country, where land runs only from $12.50 to $50 per acre and when sold at $50 to sell at from 1½ cents to 4 cents a bushel.
But to make the ‘rich farming’ work on Puyallup valley garden land at $150 per acre is now common.
Mrs. J. A. Cutter, who left this city last week, sold her husband’s half of his 120 acres of grain and fruit to pay $18,000 for 120 acres of the rich land, which is like all the ‘rich land’ in the valley, which was sold at the early assessor’s rich productivity.
The sale is made by Thomas De Witt Cutter and wife, of Philadelphia, who included this title in a multiparty foreclosure proceedings.
As a further instance of the profit in real estate farming, it may be mentioned that W. H. Pashman has cleared over $1,000 on his farm the past season.
This 1900 report on Puyallup’s agricultural boom reveals an early pattern of speculative land valuation that mirrors modern housing crises. Just as today's developers price out local farmers with inflated land costs, these Philadelphia investors were treating fertile valley soil not just as a resource for food, but as a financial asset to be flipped, setting the stage for the concentration of land ownership that would define the region's economy.
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