The Failed Toothpick Empire of Merrihew
A classic tale of a get-rich-quick scheme gone wrong, where a man's attempt to corner the national market on thorns turned his farmland into an impassable fortress.
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.
I sat down to dinner last week to look at a horse. As I was riding along the road with Major Barry, we passed a couple of fields that were covered with such a wild, tangled confusion of bushes that they resembled a jungle. 'That,' said the Major, 'is Merrihew's Toothpick Plantation.' I didn't understand. 'You see, Merrihew once owned that farm, and he got along well until one day an idea struck him. He came to me and he said: "Barry, I've got the biggest idea you ever heard of. There are about eight million men in this country, ain't there? Well, how many toothpicks does each man use in a year? Say four a month, on an average; that's about fifty a year apiece, or four hundred millions a year for the whole nation. Now, what is the best toothpick in the world? It's a thorn—say two inches long, hard, smooth, with a sharp point, and not likely to break. I've got a bush full of them on my place, and I'm going to grow them, till the whole farm with them, introduce them to the trade, and make my fortune." So, sure enough, Merrihew went to work and sowed about one hundred and seventy-five acres in those thorn bushes, and the next summer he had the awfullest crop of thorns you ever saw—filled the whole place. When the thorns were grown, Merrihew employed twenty men to pick them. It took them about a month at two dollars a day for each man. That was one thousand dollars. Then he got the toothpicks tied up in bundles and sent them to the city. After hunting around for five or six weeks trying in vain to sell them, a man offered him forty dollars for the lot, and he accepted the bid. The forty dollars just paid his board bill and carried him home. Two days afterward, the man had him arrested for fraud, because the toothpicks poisoned the mouths of his customers, and the court made him refund the money and pay the costs. By the time the case was settled, the thorn-bushes had grown so fast that an elephant clad in sheet iron couldn't have made his way through one of the fields; and when Merrihew got some of his friends to come out and advise him what to do, they decided that it would cost more to clear off the land than the property was worth. So he did, and now he is driving a mule team for a man in Smyrna at a dollar and a half a day, and the toothpick plantation is going to seed.'
“The forty dollars just paid his board bill and carried him home.”
Merrihew’s ill-fated agricultural gamble serves as an early Washington cautionary tale about the perils of speculative market disruption. Much like modern tech startups betting on a 'revolutionary' product without market fit, Merrihew learned the hard way that a clever idea is no substitute for actual consumer demand—and that clearing a massive, unwanted liability off your land is often more expensive than the land itself.
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