Success Quote by Ezra Cornell

A businessman talking about “staking off the ground” sounds like pure logistics until you notice how audacious the number lands: 1,000 apple trees. Ezra Cornell isn’t daydreaming about a quaint homestead; he’s outlining a scalable future in the plainest possible language. The verb choices matter. “Staked off” is the diction of surveying and development, not pastoral reverie. This is land turned into a plan, a hillside converted into an asset that will compound over time.

The line’s quiet power is its time horizon. Apple trees don’t pay out next quarter. They demand patience, maintenance, and faith in continuity. Cornell’s “I want to get” carries the impatience of an industrial age learning to speak in long-term investments: start now, because the payoff is years away, and because delay is its own cost. There’s also subtext in “agrowing,” a folksy phrase that softens what is, essentially, an expansion project. It frames ambition as cultivation, growth as something natural rather than imposed.

Context sharpens the intent. Cornell lived through the canal-and-rail boom, when fortunes were made by seeing infrastructure not as a single transaction but as an ecosystem. An orchard is a miniature version of that worldview: set the conditions, do the work up front, then let the system produce. Read this way, the quote becomes a blueprint for his larger legacy - the conviction that building capacity (whether trees, tools, or institutions) is the real engine of prosperity.