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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

W. JOE FERGUSON

Another attorney in Lake City, who was truly a gentleman and a fine man, was W.J. "Joe” Ferguson. He
conducted a private Law Practice in Lake City for years and years, and did a lot ofland trading, buying
and selling, and apparently became fairly wealthy. He was known to be a good trader, but a fair one.

1 can recall years ago when I was having supper one night in the Old Magnolia Barbeque on East Duval
Street, that Joe and his wife, Meredith were eating supper in there too, and at that time 1 only knew Mr.
Ferguson casually. (We got to be close friends later on). After I had finished my supper, and they had
finished theirs, I sat down with them for a brief conversation and 1 remember asking Joe this question:
“Mr. Ferguson, if you could state your philosophy in regards to trading for land, what would it be?” He
thought a few minutes and said to me “Lenvil, I have never tried to put into words what my philosophy
is in buying and selling land, but 1 think the reason I have been successful in doing it is that when I am
buying land 1 always make the man a fair offer right to start with, and do not ever increase my offer.
When I am selling a piece of land, I give the buyer a fair price, and then I don’t ever come off of that
price a dime.”

In my own buying and selling of land, I have never forgotten what he said that night, and have tried to
make my dealings with people patterned along the same lines, and if I do say so myself, it has worked.

With all respect to used automobile dealers, I have never allowed my land dealings to take on the aspect
of “haggling” in accordance with how Mr. Ferguson said he handled his, and once you had a price on
something from Dicks Realty, that was what you were going to pay if you got it.

That has been fortunate for me over the years, since I believe that every piece ofland that I ever sold to
a man, that man could make money on that tract ofland further down the line somewhere. So, I don’t
think 1 have any dissatisfied customers, with a possible exception of a very few who would not, or could
not, pay me, and on which I had to enter a foreclosure suit.

Back in the days when I first started selling my own land to people in smaller sizes, that is to say in one
acre lots, 5 acre tracts, or 10 acre tracts, at first I attempted to only sell for cash. It did not take me long
to discover that people simply did not have the cash, and most of them were not fortunate enough to
have an Uncle Ollie or an Uncle Henry that they could borrow from, and most of them would have had
trouble borrowing from a bank. Therefore, I soon learned that if I was going to sell much land, 1 had to
sell it on credit. That really was a stroke of good fortune, since over the years I have made more money
in receiving interest on mortgages than I received as an actual profit on the piece ofland I was selling.

The first tract I ever sold on credit was a 40 acre tract that 1 sold to a man (and I don’t know why I
remember his name to this day) named Williford Jones. My contemporaries and competitors in the real
estate business told me I was foolish to do that, since I would get the money over such a long period of
time and in such small amounts per month that I would never realize that I had really sold anything.
What they did not know, (nor did I at that time,) was that it would not be but a couple of years since I
had dozens, if not hundreds, of tracts that I was receiving monthly payments on, and when it got up to
several hundred accounts I was receiving enough money per month that I certainly realized that 1 was
getting something.

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