are registered in the name of the Administration Office 39,577 shares. This leaves 560,372 shares in the name of the remaining 6,940 stockholders, as registered on the company's books, the average holding being 80,4 shares, or $8,074. 100 There are in America 4,350 stockholders, owning 355,227 shares, being 59 per cent of the whole. 21 In each one of the twelve States in which the company runs its trains we have a number of proprietors, ranging from 6 in Nebraska, who own 149 shares, to 879 in Illinois, who own 38,117 shares, or $3,811,700. The certificates of stock are registered as follows: 73 78 Shares. 72,057 58,406 154, 667 49,300 In 6 names, 5,000 shares or over, 121 per cent of the whole.. 96 599, 949 The above statement shows that a decided and growing majority of the stock is held in America, and of all the holdings the majority is held in lots of less than 500 shares ($50,000). The actual number of proprietors is even greater than the statement shows, because each account is treated on the books of the company as one holding, although many such accounts represent executors, trustees, and corporations acting for many individuals. In one sense this experiment of the Illinois Central Railroad, so far as the plan for its employees acquiring holdings is concerned, may be regarded as a profit sharing arrangement. It was doubtless adopted with this motive in view, but the report of its workings to date shows that in reality it is regarded by the employees more as a savings fund. The interest of a holder of one share of stock in the earnings of the corporation is not apt to outweigh very strongly his interests as a wageearner in case of labor disputes, especially if the stock is readily marketable and he can sell without much loss or even at a profit. The plan will become effective in its influence as a preventive of strikes only when the holdings become very much more numerous and larger than at present. Now probably less than 10 per cent of the total number of employees of the railroad hold a share of stock. The Great Northern Railway has also recently inaugurated a plan providing for investments by employees in stock holdings. Ten thousand shares ($1,000,000) were set aside by the directors to be handled by a company known as The Great Northern Employees' Investment Association, Limited. Certificates were issued against these shares in multiples of $10 bearing 7 per cent interest payable in quarterly dividends. Any employee who has been at least three years in the service of the company and who does not receive over $3,000 per annum for his services is eligible to buy these shares. The holders of the shares may withdraw at any time, receiving the full amount of dividends accrued to date. The average market rate of the stock being $155 there seemed at the time of the inauguration of this plan to be ample security for a 7 per cent investment of savings. THE NEGROES OF LITWALTON, VIRGINIA: A SOCIAL STUDY OF THE "OYSTER NEGRO." BY WILLIAM TAYLOR THOM, PH. D. The present study, made under the direction of the United States Commissioner of Labor in the early months of 1901, is a continuation of a series of investigations of small, well-defined groups of Negroes in various parts of the country," of which there have already been published The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia, Bulletin of the Department of Labor, No. 14, January, 1898, and The Negroes of Sandy Spring, Maryland, Bulletin No. 32, January, 1901.(a) The Litwalton and Whealton neighborhood lies in Lancaster County, Virginia, on the eastern bank of the Rappahannock River, some 25 miles above its mouth. Whealton is at the mouth of Morattico Creek, which is here the dividing line between Lancaster and Richmond counties. The general line of this creek was followed for several miles easterly, forming the northern boundary of the neighborhood; a turn of some 2 miles to the south gave the eastern boundary, and the southern boundary extended from this point westerly to the Rappahannock again at Deep Creek. This gave an irregular quadrilateral of country about 2 miles wide, fronting on the Rappahannock River and extending back some 5 or 6 miles toward the rising land of the county watershed between the Rappahannock and the Potomac rivers. The hamlet of Litwalton is assumed to be the center of the neighborhood, at the northwestern corner of which is the steamboat landing and oyster shipping village of Whealton. The inhabitants of the neighborhood are chiefly engaged in the oyster industry, and the purpose of this investigation was to study the Negroes of Litwalton neighborhood and Whealton village as excellent types of the "oyster Negroes" of the Chesapeake and its tributaries, since the same general conditions of life obtain here as prevail in varying conditions on both shores of the Chesapeake and as far south as Norfolk. That is to say, aside from fish and oyster interests, the prevailing type of life is agricultural, and the chief agricultural a Other articles relating to the Negro have been published by the Department of Labor, as follows: Condition of the Negro in various cities, Bulletin No. 10, May, 1897; The Negro in the black belt: Some social sketches, Bulletin No. 22, May, 1899, and The Negro landholder of Georgia, Bulletin No. 35, July, 1901. 351-No. 37-01-7 1115 products are wheat, indian corn, oats, and hay, as they have been for many years since tobacco cultivation was given up. In some of the Chesapeake sections, both of Virginia and of Maryland, the cultivation of peas and of small fruits for the city markets has, in part, displaced the usual crops mentioned above. This is also true of the peachgrowing districts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and is, of course, true of the trucking country back from the water around Norfolk. What is said in the following pages would have to be greatly modified to apply to the latter sections with especial force. But it is believed, as the result of inquiries addressed to those in a position to know the various local conditions, that the Litwalton-Whealton neighborhood may be taken as a fair, if somewhat pronounced, type of the condition of the Negroes in this great oyster and fish producing region, in which they are apparently making themselves more permanently at home; but whether in increasing numbers proportionately to the whites is a matter of doubt. When the peanut country of southern Virginia and the cotton region of North Carolina are reached, the agricultural conditions are so changed as to make it doubtful if the conclusions here set forth are applicable. The counties of Virginia and Maryland bordering on the Chesapeake and its oyster-bearing affluents, which this report aims to represent, contained, according to the census of 1890, about 600,000 inhabitants, of whom about 250,000 were Negroes. The total land area is about 11,000 square miles. As appears elsewhere only a certain portion of the territory and of the Negro population are included in this discussion. LANCASTER COUNTY. Lancaster, organized into a county in 1652, is the southernmost county of the famous "northern neck" of Virginia, as for about 250 years that tract of the Old Dominion has been called which begins at Chesapeake Bay and broadens out between the Potomac on the east and the Rappahannock on the west and is bounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the northwestern part of the State. The name is usually understood nowadays to apply to the lower part of this territory, washed by the tides in these two majestic streams. The northern neck seems to have been named by way of distinction from the peninsula, beginning farther down the bay between the York and the James, and from the "south side" of the James. The term "neck" is doubtless due to the fact that at one point the waters of the Potomac are divided from those of the Rappahannock by a narrow neck of land only a few miles wide. Lancaster County is bounded on the east by Chesapeake Bay, on the northeast by Northumberland County, on the north by Richmond County, and on the west and south by the Rappahannock River, which is from 3 to 5 miles wide the entire length of the county and covers some of the finest oyster beds in the country. The banks of the Rappahannock are for the most part several feet above the surface of the water, rising in many places to low bluffs. The fertile lowlands extend some distance back from the river, and then the country rises somewhat to the low central plateau, where there are considerable hills in the watershed, formed apparently by the erosions of small streams. This central plateau is still spoken of as the "forest" by the country people, a name that carries its own suggestion of the limits of former settlement and cultivation under the old tobacco régime, when the wealthy planters lived gayly along the water front; a name, also, that in more recent years, until the rise of the oyster industry, marked probably the chief source of wealth to the county. For it is only within the very recent past that the valuable forest has been stripped from the face of the country. There is still a little lumbering going on, but the industry has been ruined for years to come. According to the record in the county clerk's office in 1900, Lancaster County contains 80,434 acres. In 1890 the census showed the following division of the land into farms: NUMBER AND PER CENT OF FARMS IN LANCASTER COUNTY, BY SIZE, 1890. Sixty-seven per cent of the farms were under 50 acres, and the average size of the farms was 68 acres. This indicates that the process of breaking up the large tracts into small farms had gone far. It is still going on, as will be seen. The following table shows the tenure of farms in Lancaster County in 1890: TENURE OF FARMS IN LANCASTER COUNTY, 1890. Lancaster belonged in 1890 in the third of the counties of Virginia which had 80 per cent or more of owner cultivators. It was almost the equal in this particular, 82.66 per cent against 83.77 per cent, of the admirably situated Montgomery County, Md., and much above the per cent, 70.71, for Prince Edward County, Va.(a) These 888 farms were worth in 1890, $892,870; they had on them farm implements worth $28,380. With an outlay of $8,153 for fertilizers, they produced crops and farm products of various kinds to the value of $150,210, an average of about $169 per farm as compared with an average of about $782 per farm for Montgomery County. The farm products were as follows, a few very small items being omitted: The live stock on these farms in 1890 was as follows: Horses $130.00 Mules Oxen. Sheep Cows 1,045 67 842 972 1, 139 The combined true valuation of the real estate and live stock in 1890 was $1,018,800. The assessed valuation of real estate and improvements at the census of 1890 was $625,914. In 1900 the assessed valuation was $713,399, representing a gain of 13.98 per cent for the period of 10 years. a See reports for Sandy Spring and Farmville, Bulletins Nos. 32 and 14. |