William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[92] on a subject about which he had no practical knowledge, and his agricultural experiment at Chappaqua received a vast amount of attention from pen and pencil. But such sneers were far astray. Greeley's ideas on farming were not quixotic; they were good, and they were founded on the advice of the best authorities of the day. The Chappaqua estate was ridiculed on the assumption that it did not “pay.” Most of the “gentlemen farmers” of this country would have to confess to a similar failure of their experiments if judged by their account books. Chappaqua, too, was not selected by Greeley, but by his wife, or rather to meet three conditions on which she insisted-viz., a spring of pure water, a cascade or brawling brook, and a tract of evergreen woods, and, to be accessible to the busy editor, the site must be near the city. The best he could do, in satisfying these conditions, was to accept with them “a rocky, wooded hillside, sloping to the north of west, with a bog at its foot.” Much money was spent on this unpromising tract that might have been saved where so many obstacles were not to be overcome; but the owner overcame many of these, and by intelligent methods. When he wrote his autobiography he declared that he had been