In Texas there are a number of such colonies, of
which the largest, at Bryan, numbers nearly two thousand persons. In
California the Italian owns farms, orchards, vineyards, market
gardens, and even ranches. Here he finds the cloudless sky and mild
air of his native land. The sunny slopes invite vine culture.
In the North and the East the alert Italian has found many
opportunities to buy land. In the environs of nearly every city
northward from Norfolk, Virginia, are to be found his truck patches.
At Vineland and Hammonton, New Jersey, large colonies have flourished
for many years. In New York and Pennsylvania, many a hill farm that
was too rocky for its Yankee owner, and many a back-breaking clay
moraine in Ohio and Indiana has been purchased for a small cash
payment and, under the stimulus of the family's coaxing, now yields
paying crops, while the father himself also earns a daily wage in the
neighboring town. Where one such Italian family is to be found, there
are sure to be found at least two or three others in the neighborhood,
for the Italians hate isolation more than hunger. Often they are
clustered in colonies, as at Genoa and Cumberland in Wisconsin, where
most of them are railroad workmen paying for the land out of their
wages.
The Slavs, too, wedge into the most surprising spaces.
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