s this
bottom."

I said, "Why can't we get the dirt somewhere else? Dirt is dirt."

And the engineer said, "Well, that's the plans." We had a little
contrariness there, and I had to threaten to drop the case as far as
that tract of land was concerned. If you fight long enough and hard
enough in such cases you may find some other person who is interested in
nut trees. We did; we found an engineer higher up, and that group of
hickory trees is now a picnic area. They used a borrow pit somewhere
else, and it gives me a great pleasure to drive past that group of
hickory trees and see them still standing there. In the fall of the year
you'd be surprised at the number of people at that picnic area, and they
keep those hickory nuts picked up clean as fast as they fall.

In our county hospital just started they happened to select a piece of
ground I own an interest in for a county hospital. On that are some good
hickory nut trees. I told them they'd never get the land until they made
some arrangements in regard to those nut trees. The engineer that
designed that hospital must have had some sense, because they are
building a canopy around one of the trees adjacent to that hospital, and
have arranged to cut only one scrub oak. The other trees will be
mentioned in the deed with restrictive covenants to protect them.

If you sign anything a company gives you, you are liable to have
anything cut on your land. Remember the saying that "the big print gives
it to you and the fine print takes it away." And it's the fine print you
want to watch in all your right of ways or in your condemnation
proceedings.

I know a man who had almost 160 acres of river-bottom hickories. During
his lifetime he was very careful about those trees. He would cut the
brush around the trees and harvest those hickory nuts as if it was a
crop of corn or beans. Upon his death his children were scattered over
the various states. They didn't care anything for this hickory grove.
It's been cut. Now there is a bulldozer in there trying to clean out
those hickory stumps. They are not making much progress. All you now
have in that farm is 160 acres of old tree stumps, wild honey-suckle
vines, poison ivy and poison oak, and even a coon hunter gripes when he
has to take his dogs through there on a coon hunt. Those heirs care
nothing about it.

In selling land it doesn't make any difference whether it's a sale to a
neighbor, or to a friend or a stranger, you should