Gulf of Mexico were established, their numbers increased rapidly and New Orleans became one of the leading Italian centers in the United States.  From the city they soon spread into the adjoining region.  Today they grow cotton, sugar-cane, and rice in nearly all the Southern States.  In the deep black loam of the Yazoo Delta they prosper as cotton growers.  They have transformed the neglected slopes of the Ozarks into apple and peach orchards.  New Orleans, Dallas, Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, and other Southern cities are supplied with vegetables from the Italian truck farms.  At Independence, Louisiana, a colony raises strawberries.  In the black belt of Arkansas they established Sunnyside in 1895, a colony which has survived many vicissitudes and has been the parent of other similar enterprises.  In Texas there are a number of such colonies, of which the largest, at Bryan, numbers nearly two thousand persons.  In California the Italian owns farms, orchards, vineyards, market gardens, and even ranches.  Here he finds the cloudless sky and mild air of his native land.  The sunny slopes invite vine culture.

In the North and the East the alert Italian has found many opportunities to buy land.  In the environs of nearly every city northward from Norfolk, Virginia, are to be found his truck patches.  At Vineland and Hammonton, New Jersey, large colonies have flourished for many years.  In New York and Pennsylvania, many a hill farm that was too rocky for its Yankee owner, and many a back-breaking clay moraine in Ohio and Indiana has been purchased for a small cash payment and, under the stimulus of the family’s coaxing, now yields paying crops, while the father himself also earns a daily wage in the neighboring town.  Where one such Italian family is to be found, there are sure to be found at least two or three others in the neighborhood, for the Italians hate isolation more than hunger.  Often they are clustered in colonies, as at Genoa and Cumberland in Wisconsin, where most of them are railroad workmen paying for the land out of their wages.

The Slavs, too, wedge into the most surprising spaces.  Their colonies and settlements are to be found in considerable numbers in every part of the Union except the far South.  They are on the cut-over timber lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, usually engaged in dairying or raising vegetables for canning.  On the great prairies in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the Bohemians and the Poles have learned to raise wheat and corn, and in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, they have shown themselves skillful in cotton raising.  Wherever fruit is grown on the Pacific slope, there are Bohemians, Slavonians, and Dalmatians.  In New England, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Maryland, the Poles have become pioneers in the neglected corners of the land.  For instance in Orange County, New York, a thriving settlement from old Poland now flourishes where a quarter of a century ago there was only a mosquito breeding swamp.  The drained area produces the most surprising crops of onions, lettuce, and celery.  Many of these immigrants own their little farms.  Others work on shares in anticipation of ownership, and still others labor merely for the season, transients who spend the winter either in American factories or flit back to their native land.