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46
MEXICAN GULF COAST ILLUSTRATED.
“In surveying these magnificent parks and verdant pastures, one cannot help indulging in dreams of the imagination as to what this Mississippi sea-coast might be made if the thickets and scrub pine forests were felled from the shining belt of white sands that fringes the shore with a lace-like frill of foamy ripples and wavelets to the margins of the winding rivers, which course like silver bands between the rising plateaus of the interior and the sea-swept plains of the gulf frontage. Back from the front it is a broad grass-clad piece of tableland. The pine forests and dwarf pine growth are rapidly disappearing. There are miles and miles of clearings whose green swards delight and rest the eye. One of the artistic effects of this clearing process will be presented while the subject is held forth in'a materialistic point of view. There would be a belt of country fifty miles long, nearly, and from two to ten miles broad, where the practically unlimited vision might always rest upou the crystal-capped waves of a green sea, and the dim stretches of distant islands to the southward, the misty, undulating’outlines of the pine-clad hills far to the northward ; the curving sweeps of placid bays to the eastward or the westward, and a continuous park everywhere around, green with rich grasses, graced here and there by stately groves, and dotted everywhere along its front by beautiful little cities, growing towns and thousands of elegant summer and winter villas.”
The prophecy is, in part, already fulfilled. At the older (’oast towns, wealthy and promiuent citizens of New Orleans and elsewhere have beautiful homes—residences surrounded with spacious and ornamented grounds where they spend much of their time. But the attractions of the Coast are becoming known farther awa}7, and an intelligent and progressive element from distant States, of no mean proportions, is moving upon this attractive region. It is becoming a rival of California and Florida on account of its genial climate, healthfulness, opportunities for rational and invigorat-. ing recreation, and the variety and excellence of its fruits and other products of the soil, as will be seen further on in these pages.
Fifty miles west of Mobile is Bellefontaine station, near which lives a genial, hospitable, and intelligent gentleman, W. R. Snyder, Esq., from whom much valuable information pertaining to the Coast in the preparation of this work has been elicited. Situated upon one of the scores of beautiful sites which line Fort ^ayou for many miles on either bank of that sylvan and navigable stream, in the midst of a section unsurpassed on the Coast for fruit, the home place and surrounding lands have been given the appropviate name of *“Fruitlands.” In the vicinity is the widely-kuown and jufe{ly celebrated “Shannon Pear Orchard.” A short distance in the