A native of California, USA, Edward E. Christensen arrived as a school teacher in the Philippines in 1901. His first station was in Kalibo, Aklan (1901-03) before joining the forestry service for a year. After this, he went home to rest and later pursued his passion for teaching.
In 1913, he returned to the country to assume as manager of the 832-hectare Mindanao Estates Company (MEC), a hemp estate in Padada, Davao del Sur, leased by American planter Brudett Crumb. The farm was then experiencing losses and low production. Eighty hectares of the farm were tilled with 80,000 hemp hills while over 200 hectares were planted to 22,000 coconut palms
Adjacent to the estate was his own land, the 953-hectare Christensen Plantation Compa-ny, which was exclusively cultivated by Cebuanos recruited from Cebu and paid P1.10 in the daily minimum wage. Christensen knew the obligation of treating his laborers well, fearful that unfair practices would force them to abandon their jobs and seek employment in nearby plantations.
Many of Christensen’s farmhands, after saving money from their wages, took up 24-hectare homesteads, built modest homes, and brought their families to Padada. Those who fell on hard times for various reasons were forced to work for the homesteaders as peons.
Overall, Christensen managed 1,785 hectares across two extensive abaca estates.
The principal stockholders of MEC included Paul Gulick, a lumberman of Baguio and La-guna; M. L. Miller and David Walstrom, manager and teller of International Banking Corpo-ration (IBC) in Cebu, respectively; U.S. Army Major H. F. Cameron, who was stationed in Philadelphia; and P. C. Round, a former judge of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
On the other hand, Christensen Plantation Company’s shareholders, aside from the ma-jority stockholder, were Gates L. Spalding, a teacher from Kansas who taught in the islands; Federico Aznar, plantation manager of MEC under Christensen’s supervision; and Manuel Aznar, the manager of Christensen’s estate. It has an authorized capital is P100,000.
The American Chamber of Commerce Journal, in its December 1926 issue, explained in detail this pattern of Cebuano migration (‘Hemp, Coconuts and Dividends at Padada’) that helped developed the two plantations:
“[The farmhands] are paid by the day and found, so that the average minimum wage works out about P1.10 and the highest, for field foremen, about P2.00. Hemp is stripped with the Universal hemp machine… The husking of coconuts preparatory to drying the meat into copra is the only labor left to contract. This wage labor is found quite satisfactory; it has been the direct stimulus to very extensive homesteading by Cebuanos in the Padada district.
“The men come to Padada with the prospect of being hired on the plantations. This oc-curs. When they have saved some money and looked up locations, they take up homesteads and bring on their families; and more recently they bring their families with them. Men, who actually file claims, gather around them several kasamas who fall into their debt but open fields on the homesteads and work these fields on the shares. Among four or five men, per-haps one becomes a prospective freeholder; the rest are his peons and he alone has advanced to a better state. He must, however, dispense fairly decent treatment to the men, because the plantations are nearby and they could find work there if they left him.”
After Christensen’s death, his sprawling estate was subject to an intensive legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. For being an American citizen, his will was contested by his heir. Still, the high tribunal, opposed to the lower court’s decision that invoked the internal law of California, ruled to apply the Philippine statute interpreting the inheritance issue.
