A Tribute to a Benefactor (continued) Page 2

The dollars that Mr. Vogt's discovery caused to change hands and has
since been employed in the channel of trade, and in one way or another have
found their way into the pockets of others sorely needing them, is beyond
computation.

This section today is one of the most prosperous on earth. Our farmers
have a market at their very doors for all the truck they can grow - the demand
keeping up with supply. If our farmers are not making money, it is their own
fault. They sell all they can grow and for what they sell they will get hard
cash.

Dunnellon, though but ten years old, is known all over the world. It
has two good newspapers, with jobs attached, churches, schools, mercantile
houses galore, a mayor and marshall, and all the paraphenalia of a city
government. It has deep water to the sea - for which we are largely indebted
to Mr, Vogt's tireless and intelligent labors. It is the richest mining dis-
trict on the globe. It has a monthly payroll in its immediate neighborhood
of over two-hundred thousand dollars. Prosperous mining towns have sprung
into existence from the Suwanee river on the north to Port Tanpa on the south,
and the wealth all along this once barren section is written even by some
individuals with seven figures, and the output of rock has helped to enrich
the earth.

If he "who makes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before"
is a benefactor to the world, then indeed my hero is a benefactor.

His discovery, if it has not already done so, will in the end richly
carpet the whole earth with grass, yet nobody is building, or proposing to
build, a mansion for Albertus Vogt, and he wouldn't accept it if one were
tendered him. He was born on the wrong side of the Potomac for that.

But every individual putting up a phosphate plant in this state all con-
ciously is erecting a monument to Albertus Vogt, and will remain so through
all time to his memory.

It is almost appalling to think what would be the condition of Florida
today had it not been for Mr. Vogt's opportune discovery. Instead of universal
desolation and distress following in the pathway of the great freeze which
swept to the ground every orange tree for a distance of three hundred miles
(the greatest calamity that ever befell any state), we hear instead, the glad
song of the pick and shovel, and the whir of the wheels of busy industry.

I lift my voice in praise of the man who made these things possible.

__ L. L. Aiken, in the
Ocala Banner 1899