Excerpt from Hill's Reference Guide: For Land Seekers, Travelers, Schools, Tourists, Emigrants and General Readers, Including Description and Outline Maps, With New Methods of Quick-Finding Location, in Each State of Any City or Village of 290 Population and More

"Back to the Land." Easy to say but difficult to perform when there is no available land.

How to make the land a reality, how to get there and how to come into the possession of a sufficiency of it to give the family a support are questions that millions of people want answered.

Pertaining to the getting of a farm are numerous conditions, which relate to location, price, terms of purchase, climate, rainfall, fertility of soil, liability to drouth, extremes of heat and cold, annual number of growing days, population of neighboring market towns, cost of shipping farm products, etc.

For the purpose of explaining these many conditions this book is prepared. It is intended to give an honest, impartial description concerning opportunities for new settlers in every region of the United States, from the long sunshine summer days of Alaska to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, from the hills and valley farms of New England to the verdant plains, the lowlands and the uplands of the Pacific Coast.

These descriptions are not colored in the interest of certain lands for sale. They are a truthful exposition of conditions which the land-seeker will find upon investigation.

As a Guide, as an independent, disinterested work of reference, examination will reveal how large has been the task we have attempted to perform. For our purpose we have sought every means to do this work justice. Maps, descriptions, government surveys, cyclopedias, agricultural reports, public documents and statistics have been ours to investigate. Travel, personal observation and experiment have been ours to study.

The result is this large subject condensed into this compact volume, small enough for the tourist and traveler to carry, printed in a type small enough to give a great amount of description, yet so displayed as to be easy to study as a work of reference.

A long period of time has been necessary in the preparation of this volume, to have it contain all that is necessary, to have it reliable, and so arranged that the reader can quickly find the information which is desired.

To aid this work the 2, 770 counties in the United States have been brought into use and in them the many thousand villages and cities of the country have been placed. While this does not always locate the town as closely as if the name was on the map, it gives the general idea of location in the region and state, and permits the finding, in a few seconds, the general situation of several thousand towns more than could possibly be given, even in the finest type, if names were printed on the map.

This arrangement, which is entirely new and original with the author, enables us to give populations of all towns down to small villages of 200 people, the shape, situation and population of all counties, each state and its bordering states being so clearly defined, plainly lettered and marked as to give the student a general knowledge of the main features of every state.

This book does not pretend to compete with fine books on geography. No effort has been made here to show situation of lakes, direction of rivers, location of mountains, bays or islands. We rest content in the endeavor to give general understanding of location, populations, and such description as will aid people who seek new location for residence, employment and business opportunities.

The expectation is that what we give will so stimulate desire to know further as to lead to a more extended study of the best maps, and create more a