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Show section of school land. The company had been authorized to sell the property at $10 an acre for the owner, who desperately needed money. We couldn't understand how Father could buy land there when we would have to take three years to earn our ownership of the homestead at Nada. Father explained that four sections were set aside in each six-mile square or "township" of new land federally surveyed. The school land was to be sold to help support schools of the future. And he had been lucky--just plain lucky-enough to chance onto an available section of Iron County land which had been officially surveyed and offered for sale. Our Nada claim, as I mentioned, was in the as yet unsurveyed part of Beaver County. Mother radiated joy. She repeated a story about her father. After pioneering successfully in Northern Iowa, Grandfather Hansen traveled with two of his sons to homestead in prairie newly opened for entry in North Dakota. He filed on a claim. Then he changed his mind. He left to return to Iowa "because the schools were better." That quarter-section Grandfather abandoned became the very heart of Fargo, soon to be a bustling rail and business center. If he'd held on, he could have sold for more per front foot than his Iowa farm brought per acre. So the word "townsite" turned on Mother's dreams. Kerr turned out to be a different situation. Father paid a high price for that dramatic bit that came through the curtains of his room in the Nada "hotel"--a playlet written and rehearsed for him or the next sucker, we later guessed. Let's say, he paid $1000 a line for that "blackout." Much better than TV writers get, I'm told. On the other hand, we sank several times that much in the Nada land which we got for absolutely nothing--except the costs of developing and living on it. Some of the costliest "farms" in United States |