Five Dollars Worth of Potatoes Becomes the Seed Capital for a Million-Dollar Farming Empire

John M. Horner told this story to illustrate divine providence working through small and simple things.

In the summer of 1845, he and his brother dug up the odd corners of his father's cornfield — patches the farm teams couldn't reach — and planted potatoes there in spare morning and evening hours. They expected little from it.

In January 1846, just before leaving for California, Horner sold his share of those potatoes for five dollars. He used it to buy a Colt revolver in New York. When he arrived in California amid the Mexican-American War, he found no one to shoot — so he traded the pistol to a Spaniard for a yoke of oxen. With those oxen he plowed his first crop of vegetables in 1847.

He reflected: 'From this small beginning grew the large business referred to... Little did we think that eight years from that time, we would have raised and sold for gold coin over one million dollar's worth of potatoes, in a strange country, three thousand miles away.'

His tracing of the chain: no potatoes → no five dollars → no pistol → no oxen → no plowing → no farming empire. He saw in this progression the hand of God multiplying small faithful efforts into an extraordinary harvest.