The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

NATURE AND THE NEW SOUTH:

COMPETING VISIONS OF RESOURCE USE IN A DEVELOPING REGION, 1865-1929

A Dissertation in History

by

William D. Bryan

 2013 William D. Bryan

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2013

The dissertation of William D. Bryan was reviewed and approved* by the following:

William A. Blair Liberal Arts Professor of American History Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Mark E. Neely McCabe Greer Professor in the American Civil War Era

Solsiree Del Moral Assistant Professor of History

Robert Burkholder Associate Professor of English

Adam Rome Associate Professor of History and English The University of Delaware Special Member

David G. Atwill Director of Graduate Studies in History

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

iii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines conflicting visions for natural resource use and economic development in the American South in the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression. Emancipation toppled the region’s economy and led many

Southerners to try to establish a “New South” to replace their antebellum plantation society. Their task was unprecedented, and necessitated completely reimagining the economic structure of the entire region. Although most Southerners believed that the region was blessed with abundant natural resources, there were many competing ideas about how these resources should be used in order to achieve prosperity. By examining how these different visions shaped New South economic development, this dissertation reconsiders a longstanding interpretation of the postbellum American South, and provides a fresh historical perspective on the challenges of sustainable development in underdeveloped places worldwide.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 “Nature’s Bounty” ...... 17

Chapter 2 Touring a New South ...... 71

Chapter 3 Waste and Efficiency ...... 123

Chapter 4 Balancing Tests ...... 170

Chapter 5 “The Garden Spot of the Nation” ...... 226

Conclusion Resource Use in a Developing Area ...... 282

Bibliography ...... 294

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have incurred many debts over the course of writing this dissertation. This seeds for this project were planted while I was an undergraduate at Furman University, where I spent a semester researching and writing about Conestee Mills—a cotton mill in Greenville, South

Carolina that successfully challenged industrial pollution in the 1920s. Steve O’Neill supervised that thesis and introduced me to the fields of Southern and environmental history. He led me to want to pursue these two fields in graduate school, and I will always be grateful to Steve for understanding and cultivating my interests—even if at the time I could not always discern these interests myself. At Furman, Gary Malvern also provided welcome support for my historical endeavors, and was an invaluable sounding board for questions about scholarship and life, besides being a good friend.

Penn State provided a wonderful community of scholars that shaped my own work and greatly benefitted my dissertation. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee, which stuck with me through my masters’ defense, comprehensive exams, and dissertation. I will never be able to fully thank Adam Rome for his guidance throughout the course of my graduate career.

He challenged me to take up a topic that at times seemed impossibly broad, but provided the support and education needed to pull it off. He has a knack for always making me leave a meeting feeling encouraged about my work, and perhaps more than anything else I appreciate his constant encouragement over the past six years. I will always be proud to call myself one of his students.

Bill Blair has also provided crucial support for this work, and I am extremely thankful for his guidance. He graciously stepped in to chair my dissertation committee in the midst of this project, and provided direction as I was writing and revising. He encouraged me to always think about how my work related to the scholarly literature on the South, and provided a welcome reminder to frame it for the largest possible audience. His insightful comments made this

vi dissertation far better than it otherwise would have been, and his support made my experience in graduate school a very pleasant one.

I can never look at documents the same after taking a class with Mark Neely, and he brought the same critical eye to my dissertation that he teaches his students to use in interpreting primary sources. I am grateful for his valuable feedback. Solsiree Del Moral has pushed me think beyond the South, and to consider Southern history in light of broader trends in Latin American and the Caribbean. I greatly appreciate her help in thinking about the challenges of postbellum

Southern economic development in this broader historical context. Robert Burkholder provided valuable insights into my dissertation from outside the historical field, and was the source of many interesting and enjoyable conversations about nature writing, Southern food, hiking, camping and kayaking, among other topics.

Aside from my dissertation committee, a number of other faculty members at Penn State were welcome supporters of my work and graduate career, including Nan Woodruff, Sally

McMurry, Crystal Sanders, and Mike Milligan. Dan Letwin gave me the opportunity to present my dissertation research to his Gilded Age/Progressive Era class, and he also provided helpful feedback on my work. At Mississippi State, Mark Hersey read and commented on drafts of several chapters, and provided immensely valuable advice from afar throughout the entire course of this project. I deeply appreciate all the time that he took to meet with me and his willingness to help out along the way. Jim Cobb and Elliott West commented on an early draft of this dissertation during an on-campus seminar arranged by The George and Ann Richards Civil War

Era Center. They provided direction for reworking and polishing parts of my argument, and I am thankful for the time that they put into reading and reviewing my work. I owe them both a great deal, and the final draft of my dissertation is far better because of their suggestions.

This project would not have been possible without the help of a number of fantastic librarians at Penn State. I would especially like to thank Eric Novotny, who helped me find

vii documents that I assumed were forever lost, and provided valuable insight into conducting research for this dissertation generally. Penn State’s Interlibrary Loan department somehow processed hundreds of my ILL requests, and constantly amazed me by what they were able to track down and send to me. This ultimately saved me many hours of travel and helped me finish this dissertation within a reasonable amount of time.

Funding for this project has come from many sources. The George and Ann Richards

Civil War Center not only provided collaboration with other scholars working on topics in nineteenth-century America, but has provided generous funding throughout the course of this project. This could never have been completed without the support of the Richards Center. The

Department of History at Penn State was also generous in providing funding for research and travel to conferences, as well as providing teaching opportunities throughout my time in graduate school. The Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State provided an office space, scholarly community, and financial support during the writing process, and I appreciate their intellectual and financial investment in this project. The Penn State Alumni Association also supplied generous support for the later stages of this project.

I presented pieces of this dissertation at several conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association. I appreciate the suggestions of my fellow panelists, chairs, and commentators, including Paul

Sutter, Christine Keiner, Monica Gisolfi, Tom Okie, Nicole Cox, Matthew Vitz, Amanda

McVety, Eric Dinmore, Jon Free, and Merritt McKinney.

This dissertation would never have been completed without the encouragement of my fellow graduate students at Penn State, who provided a community of scholarly and social support throughout my time in State College. Thanks to Laurent Cases, Aryendra Chakravartty,

Andrea Gatzke, David Hensley, John Hoenig, Jeff Horton, Kevin Lowe, Lesley Rains, Rob

Shafer, Juan Tebes, and Eric Welch. I especially appreciate my officemates in Pond Laboratory

viii for putting up with me for the past six years and for always bringing their flag-football prowess to the field during our annual Pond-Weaver football game. Thanks to Anne Brinton, Bill Cossen,

Katie Falvo, Lauren Golder, David Greenspoon, Chris Hyashida-Knight, Antwain Hunter, Kelly

Knight, Matt Isham, Paul Matzko, Rachel Moran, Tim Orr, Andrew Prymak, J. Adam Rogers,

Evan Rothera, Emily Seitz, Jonathan Steplyk, Sean Trainor, Alfred Wallace, and Tim Wesley.

Although Mary Geier has not lived with this project as long as I have, she made the final year of work more enjoyable than any other, and her encouragement kept me going during the process of writing and revising. Finally, my parents have provided more support than I will ever be able to thank them for. Although my interest in history began on the many family vacations we took to historical sites, my parents have always allowed me to follow my own path and encouraged me along the way. For their unflagging love and support, this project is dedicated to them.

Introduction

On September 1, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegraph from his desk in the

Oval Office to open the nation’s first exposition devoted to the conservation of natural resources.

Held in Knoxville’s Chilhowee Park, the National Conservation Exposition was one of hundreds of expositions organized throughout the United States in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although they were often a source of entertainment to visitors, expositions were chiefly intended “to boost the economic development of the cities and regions in which they were held” by promoting the conversion of the nation’s natural resources into manufactured commodities.

They were perhaps most prevalent in the South—a region struggling to rebuild in the aftermath of the Civil War—and provided Southern leaders with a way to publicize the possibilities offered by the region’s latent natural resources.1 Yet the Conservation Exposition was different because its primary intention was “to teach the lesson of conservation” to people throughout the United

States.2 To this end, it featured over one hundred thousand square feet of exhibits that publicized methods of conserving natural resources, including a sixteen thousand square foot bas-relief map of Southern natural resources, a working farm demonstrating “the most approved methods of scientific agriculture,” comparisons of crops grown in fertile and unfertile soils, models showing the relationship between deforestation and soil erosion, and wildlife and forest conservation displays, among others.3

1 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2. 2 “Conservation Show Ready,” The Call [San Francisco, CA], 31 August 1913: 32; W. M. Goodman, ed., The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders: An Official History of the National Conservation Exposition, held at Knoxville, Tenn., in 1913 and of its Forerunners, the Appalachian Expositions of 1910- 11 (Knoxville: Knoxville Lithographing Co., 1913), 14. 3 “Bas-Relief Maps Southern States,” Tulsa Daily World, 16 June 1912: 11; W. M. Goodman, ed., The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders, 108-40.

2 At the time of the exposition, the conservation of natural resources was prominent on the national agenda. As the American economy grew rapidly in the late-nineteenth century, many

Americans became concerned that the nation’s resources were dwindling and unique landscapes were falling victim to development. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a conglomeration of sportsmen, scientists, hikers, naturalists, and public officials called attention to the urgent need to conserve the nation’s resources so that they would be available to future generations, and succeeded in convincing federal authorities to protect unique places like

Yellowstone and Yosemite.

By the twentieth century, conservation had become federal policy through Progressive- era legislation designed to manage the use of timber, animal, and water resources located mostly on government-owned lands in the West. Above all, federal management of these resources was guided by ideas emanating from Progressive reformers who emphasized the efficient, rational, and democratic use of natural resources. Most conservationists did not want to remove the nation’s resources from use, but simply to ensure that this use was efficient through regulation.

This perspective increasingly came into conflict with that of naturalists like John Muir, who advocated the preservation of wilderness spaces and were less enthusiastic about using natural resources for industrial development—no matter how efficient. These two perspectives were clashing even as visitors strolled through Chilhowee Park, when fierce debates between the Sierra

Club and the Department of the Interior over damming the Hetch-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite

National Park were coming to a head. Knoxville’s Conservation Exposition, then, occurred just as management of the nation’s natural resources had become one of the most pressing issues facing the American public.4

4 See Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington: Island Press, 2001), 152-55; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920, Third Printing (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 192-95; Roderick

3 Much of the momentum for conservation came from scientists, bureaucrats, and politicians dealing with what one historian calls the “problems of Western economic growth.”5

Aside from the Weeks Act in 1911—which authorized the federal government to purchase lands in the eastern United States and paved the way for the creation of Pisgah National Forest in

1916—the most far-reaching efforts to conserve natural resources occurred in the West. Between

1873 and 1913, the federal government acted to protect places like Yellowstone, Yosemite,

Mount Rainier, Colorado’s Mesa Verde, Devil’s Tower, Arizona’s Petrified Forest, the Grand

Canyon, and what is now Glacier National Park in northern Montana.

In this context, the choice of Knoxville, Tennessee as the location for the Conservation

Exposition might seem curious. Yet it suggests that ideas about resource conservation were becoming important to many Southerners, and that many people perceived the South as an integral component of the broader nationwide movement to conserve natural resources. Indeed, visitors to the exposition frequently commented that Knoxville was the ideal location for such an event. Even Gifford Pinchot—the former chief of the U.S. Forest Service and the nation’s leading conservationist—claimed, “It was fitting…that the South should hold this exposition.” Like many others, Pinchot believed that the South remained underdeveloped even as late as 1913, and argued that the region offered the best hope for conserving resources before further could degradation occur. This was largely because the South was “just in the awakening of its development, its opportunities had largely been passed over, and it was in great part virgin.” Pinchot praised the exposition for teaching Southerners methods of conservation, and concluded that “the South was just ripe for the application of the lessons which the costly experiences of other sections had taught so graphically.”6

Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Third Edition (1967; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 161-81. 5 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 5. 6 W. M. Goodman, ed., The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders, 14.

4 Although Pinchot characterized the South as untouched by business interests and conservationists alike, the reality was that it had been worked over by both of these groups for years. By 1913 state governments and private interests throughout the region had taken steps to curb the exploitation of the South’s wildlife and resources.7 Many of these efforts were directed toward the southern Appalachians, and one observer claimed that the exposition was located “in the center of a region in which conservation work is especially active at this time.”8 The

Conservation Exposition was effective as publicity for Southern businesspeople and public officials hoping to paint the region as progressive in the hopes of attracting investment in the region’s development. Visitors and organizers alike commented that the exposition demonstrated progress made in building a new Southern economy and conserving the region’s natural resources. For instance, a Kentucky newspaper claimed that the exposition disproved persistent beliefs that “the eyes of the Southland are still turned on things and events that long since have passed into history,” and characterized it as “a living example of the fact that the great New South of to-day…is marching shoulder to shoulder with the balance of the country towards better things and a better and greater united country.”9 A visitor from Pennsylvania even declared, “If there is anything that typifies the spirit of the new South better than this great exposition could, I have failed to see it or to hear of it.”10

Indeed, the exposition’s organizers—who were among Knoxville’s most well-known civic and business leaders—were proud that it was not orchestrated by federal bureaucrats, but rather “conceived…and born in the new south.” They were familiar with the tenets—if not the practice—of conservation, and their descriptions of the exposition’s goals read as if they were

7 Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An Environmental History, Revised Edition (1983; Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 127-46. 8 “Conservation Exposition,” Hopkinsville Kentuckian [Hopkinsville, KY], 14 November 1912: 6. 9 “South is Awake,” Mountain Advocate [Barbourville, KY], 29 August 1913: 4. 10 As quoted in W. M. Goodman, ed., The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders, 411.

5 penned by Gifford Pinchot himself.11 Whereas past expositions were “record[s] of conquest over nature wrought by human genius,” organizers claimed that Knoxville’s exposition looked to the future by promoting the “highest development and best uses of the great and bounteous natural resources of the country.”12 Like utilitarian conservationists throughout the nation, Knoxville’s businessmen understood conservation not as a hindrance to economic development, but as enlightened development. The central purpose of the exposition, then, was not to slow development for purposes of conservation, but to promote forms of development that would use the South’s natural resources in the most responsible ways. In the words of one organizer, the exposition was intended to “go beyond the promotion of mere development. Its special efforts will be directed toward making the development permanent,” while another claimed that the exposition would “advance the highest development and best use of all natural resources, including forests, streams and soils.”13

Though “best use” and “permanent development” were the exposition’s buzzwords, the variety of businesses represented by exhibits suggests that the Knoxville’s boosters and

Southerners more generally had a number of different ideas about what enterprises were ideal.

Besides municipal exhibits from Baltimore, Louisville, Birmingham, Lynchburg, Knoxville, and

Greenville as well as many other smaller towns, the exposition also featured over one hundred different railroad, mineral, agricultural and manufacturing companies. Each of these companies displayed an array of products made from Southern natural resources, including furniture,

11 “Conservation Exposition to Bring Thousands of Visitors to Knoxville,” The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 20 July 1913: 3A. 12 W. J. McGee, “Growth of the Exposition Idea,” in The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders: An Official History of the National Conservation Exposition, Ed. W. M. Goodman (Knoxville: Knoxville Lithographing Co., 1913), 15; Knoxville Arab Patrol of Alhambra Shrine Tennessee, Advertisement, The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 10 May 1913: 11. 13 The National Conservation Exposition: Knoxville, Tennessee, Sept. 1st to Nov. 1st, 1913 (n.p., 1913); Advertisement, The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 4 June 1913: 94. For more on the definition of “conservation” as understood by federal officials and others in the first decade of the twentieth century, see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 122-23; Char Miller, “A Sylvan Prospect: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Early Twentieth-Century Conservationism,” in American Wilderness: A New History, Ed. Michael Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 131-47.

6 mattresses, agricultural machinery, textile goods, asphalt, gunpowder, livestock, lumber, boxes, bricks, tables, iron stoves, pipe, various crops, and even electricity generated from the South’s waterways. Although these exhibits were an important source of advertising, they also provided each company with a way to legitimize their claim to the South’s natural resources. By arguing that their products represented the best path to stewardship and wise use of Southern natural resources—especially at a time when conservation was becoming a national priority—each company ultimately contributed to what the fair’s organizers saw as the “permanent development” of the South, but in very different ways.14

The competing visions for economic development evident at the Conservation Exposition had a long history, and were the culmination of clashes over how the region’s natural resources should be used that reached back to the end of the Civil War. Emancipation and four years of war had leveled the foundation of the region’s longstanding plantation economy, destroyed much of the region’s economic infrastructure, and eliminated capital needed for rebuilding. Throughout the nation, people understood that nothing less than a complete overhaul of the region’s economy would be necessary to again realize prosperity. Many Southerners therefore hoped to replace their antebellum plantation society with a “New South.” Their task was unprecedented, and necessitated completely reimagining the economic structure of an entire region. Although there was widespread optimism that the South had, in the words of one newspaper editor, the

“matchless resources” and “combined advantages of almost every country of the world,” there were many different ideas about how these resources should be used in order to realize prosperity.15 As Southerners sought to determine the ideal paths for the South’s development, they struggled over the best ways to use the region’s resources. The variety of businesses

14 W. M. Goodman, ed., The First Exposition of Conservation and Its Builders, 100-226. 15 Richard H. Edmonds, as quoted in Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Myth- Making (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 1.

7 represented at the Exposition suggests that these questions had not been decided even as late as

1913.

***

The natural environment has been prominent in scholarship on the American South since the early twentieth century.16 Despite a general attentiveness to the South’s natural environment, scholars have overlooked how different visions for natural resource use shaped economic development in the postbellum South.17 Ever since C. Vann Woodward characterized the New

South economy as “colonial” over six decades ago, most scholars have concluded that

Southerners were so eager for economic development that they thought little about its long-term consequences, leading to the cutting of the South’s forests, the erosion of its soils, and the pollution of its waters and skies.18 The postbellum South’s “tributary economy,” in the words of

Woodward, mired Southerners in “farming, mining, forestry, or some low-wage industry, whether they liked it or not,” resulting in the “further intensification of the old problems of worn-out soil, cut-over timber lands, and worked-out mines.”19 Environmental historians have recently provided nuanced analyses of ecological changes in the South caused by humans over the course of hundreds of years, but the complicated path that led to these changes has all too often been

16 For an overview of early literature on the Southern environment, see Mart A. Stewart, “Southern Environmental History,” A Companion to the American South, Ed. John B. Boles (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2002), 409-23. 17 This is true of literature on economic development in the United States and world generally. Indeed, economist Edward Barbier notes that despite emerging literature on environmental history, “the role of natural resources in shaping economic development has been somewhat of a neglected topic in the study of history.” See Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xiii. 18 For instance, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Thomas D. Clark, Three Paths to the Modern South: Education, Agriculture, and Conservation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965), 61-94; Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), among others. 19 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 319-20.

8 reduced to a choice to simply prioritize profits over environmental quality. Most scholars simply conclude that the desperate need for jobs overrode any sense of stewardship that Southerners had toward their natural resources and landscape. As a result, environmental histories of the New

South era typically read as narratives of environmental declension, and perpetuate stereotypes of

Southerners as having little concern about environmental issues.20

In short, environmental degradation has become one of the most enduring symbols of the

New South. For instance, one historian blames “the New South credo of development at all costs” for the region’s environmental woes, while the most recent survey of American environmental history discusses the postbellum South in a chapter entitled “Extracting the New South.”21 The common wisdom, then, is still that “the concepts of conservation and environmental protection were too esoteric to stand up against the region’s seemingly insatiable desire for more industrial payrolls,” and that “Rivers, trees, the soil, all could be taken for granted—jobs were the truly precious commodity in an economically deprived Dixie.”22 For most scholars, then, postbellum

20 See Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South; Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Mart Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002; Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lawrence S. Early, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Lynn A. Nelson, Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). There are some exceptions to this general trend. See Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp; Claire Strom, Making Catfish Bait Out of Government Boys: The Fight Against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Mark D. Hersey, My Work is That of Conservation : An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke: The Fight Over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 21 Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 215; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99-115. 22 James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 121-22.

9 environmental degradation seems like the unremarkable result of Southern desperation to create new jobs at any cost.

It is undeniable that there was severe environmental exploitation during the New South era. Between 1880 and 1919 lumber companies cut forty percent of the South’s first-growth forests. Deforestation and poor methods of cultivation washed away over five hundred million tons of topsoil each year. Southerners also confronted the nation’s most visible environmental disasters, including the boll weevil infestation, industrial pollution and acid rain at Ducktown,

Tennessee, unprecedented flooding on the Mississippi River, chestnut blight, plummeting wildlife populations from overhunting, and enough soil erosion to create a gully in Georgia commonly known as the “little Grand Canyon.”23 The purpose here is not to deny that postbellum economic development resulted in severe exploitation, or to suggest that region’s residents were all John

Muirs with a Southern accent. To the contrary, there were all too few Southerners who were interested in how the region’s resources were used aside from their economic value. Yet scholars’ blind focus on New South environmental degradation has obscured a more complex story about

Southern economic development and natural resource use.

This is largely because most narratives of Southern environmental declension ignore a critical context: the New South was born in the midst of nationwide efforts to conserve natural resources. As Knoxville’s Conservation Exposition suggests, not all Southerners were oblivious to ideas about conservation, and the “the New South credo of development at all costs” is a caricature.24 The South was a key player in a broader national and international discourse about conservation, and this experience frequently informed the ways that many Southerners thought about their natural resources, the best paths to economic development, and the region’s future.

23 See Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke; Paul S. Sutter, “What Gullies Mean: Georgia’s ‘Little Grand Canyon’ and Southern Environmental History,” The Journal of Southern History LXXVI, No. 3 (August 2010): 579-616; Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 127-31, 144-45. 24 Albert Cowdrey coined the phrase “New South credo of development at all costs.” See Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 215.

10 Many Southerners did not want the region to become a “raw-material economy.”25 They surveyed how the region’s enterprises used resources and promoted paths they believed would result in permanent economic growth and long-term uses of the South’s natural resources—though the best choice was not always clear. Examining Southern economic development in light of these other potential paths will move the literature beyond simplistic narratives of “environmental declension,” and will lead to a more complete understanding of the choices that Southerners and

Northerners made in rebuilding the region as well as the process by which environmental degradation did occur.26

One way to understand postbellum economic development is therefore by examining the many visions that people had for using the region’s natural resources and their attempts to translate these visions into reality. Environmental historians have long been interested in understanding human ideas about nature across different historical contexts. Donald Worster explains that one of the key approaches to “doing environmental history” involves studying human perceptions of nature and ideas about how resources should be used. As Worster notes,

“People are constantly engaged in constructing maps of the world around them, in defining what a resource is, in determining which sorts of behavior may be environmentally degrading and out to be prohibited.” Understanding these ideas not only sheds light on the place of nature in any society, but also the broader “perceptions, ethics, laws, myths, and other structures of meaning” that “become part of an individual’s or group’s dialogue with nature.”27

Although Worster distinguishes between the “socioeconomic realm” and “the purely mental or intellectual,” the two are intertwined.28 As Elliott West explains, humans are uniquely

25 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 311. 26 Ted Steinberg, “Down, Down, Down No More: Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension,” Journal of the Early Republic 2, No. 2 (Summer 2004): 260-66. 27 Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 293. 28 See William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” The Journal of American History 76, No. 4 (March 1990): 1122-1131.

11 equipped to imagine changes to the natural environment and then translate these visions into reality—creating a distinction between “perceived” and “effective” environments. West suggests that “A place, as an area of human use, is created not just by the arrangements people forge between themselves and resources, the day-to-day working connections between humans and things,” but is also shaped by “the possibilities that people envision, the linkage between what they see and what they dream.” Although these visions are rarely realized in full, the

“dissonance” between human visions and reality can reveal a great deal about how people relate to natural resources and choose to use them.29

This is a useful framework for thinking about the postbellum South. Despite widespread perceptions that the region had unparalleled stores of natural resources, there were many different opinions about how these resources should be used. Attempts to bring these visions to fruition— whether successful or not—shaped New South economic development in important ways. Taking both realized and unrealized possibilities seriously not only sheds light on the many different ways that Southerners and others related to the region’s environment, but also lays bare the dynamics between different groups as they clashed over the future of the South. Environmental history therefore offers an opportunity to better understand changes to the Southern environment as well as important social, political, and economic forces at work in the postbellum South.

Although the majority of Southern resources were privately owned, even people without a formal claim to them had a stake in how these resources were used and participated in conflicts over the region’s future. Conflicting visions for using the South’s natural resources involved a diverse array of people on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line. As urban businesspeople and public officials sought to direct the region’s economic development, they came into conflict with planters, merchants, industrialists, railroad officials, journalists, tourists, financiers,

29 Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 54, xix.

12 sharecroppers, and other stakeholders with different dreams for the future. The resolution of these conflicts and ultimate control of the region’s development was not a function of having the most popular vision for resource use, but of most adeptly navigating the political and business landscape of the postbellum South. Conflicts over natural resources were therefore shaped by a complex mix of environmental, political, social and economic ideas about the South’s future held by a variety of actors.

Indeed, struggles over natural resources were never separate from the broader social, political, and racial landscapes of the South. Scholars have long demonstrated that environmental management has social implications.30 The South was not an unpopulated wilderness, and

Southerners were always aware that they would have to deal with existing structures as they sought to rebuild the region’s economy. Because natural landscapes cannot be extricated from the people who live in or near them, visions for resource use reflected deeply-held beliefs about which groups should benefit most and least from the South’s development. Some of the most intense conflicts over economic development emerged out of attempts to shape the postbellum

South’s socioeconomic and racial organization in different ways, and reflected imbalances in access to natural resources as well as the economic and political structures that could affect resource use. Although conflicts over resource use sometimes challenged and sometimes affirmed prevailing racial and social boundaries, they were never separate from this context.

In order to examine how conflicting visions for the region’s natural resources shaped

New South economic development, it is necessary to depart from traditional environmental histories both in geographic scope and chronology, and the boundaries of this study are dictated more by human factors than environmental ones. This study does not define the South by its

30 For instance, Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For Southern examples see Mart Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 239-68, among others.

13 ecosystems, nor does it trace long-term environmental change. Instead, it considers how economic development was shaped by different visions for natural resources in a region bound together primarily by cultural similarities, rather than environmental ones.

This study therefore employs a wide chronological lens. There has been decades of scholarly debate over what years constitute the New South. C. Vann Woodward defines the New

South as the years between 1877 and 1913. Howard Rabinowitz defines it as 1865 to 1920.

Edward Ayers claims that the New South began in 1877 and ended as early as 1906, while

George Tindall claims that it did not truly begin until 1913. Numan Bartley even suggests that there was no New South until the end of the Second World War.31 Despite varying opinion about what the New South is, this study begins in 1865 with the end of the Civil War. The future of the region was an open question, and this was perhaps the first time that new possibilities for the region’s economic development and use of natural resources were considered in a meaningful way. This was also a period of significant economic growth. As the nation recovered from the financial downturn of 1873, industrial development and railroad construction in the South boomed. The region quickly added new extractive and manufacturing enterprises, which increased pressure on the South’s resources and exacerbated conflicts over these resources— sparking intense struggles over how they should be used. This study concludes with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Despite real economic growth, much of the region remained underdeveloped up through the third decade of the twentieth century, when New South dreams of development ended with the financial upheaval of 1929. By making the federal government a player in the Southern economy, the Great Depression significantly changed the dynamics of the region’s development and conflicts over resources.

31 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South; George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967); Howard N. Rabinowitz, The First New South, 1865-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

14 This study also departs from many environmental histories by spanning multiple ecosystems within the political and cultural boundaries of the South. One of the most enduring debates in the literature on the American South is the extent to which it holds together as a coherent region. Scholars point to cultural, economic, social and even climatic differences between the South and the rest of the nation to affirm Southern distinctiveness. Yet it is difficult to overlook the diversity within the South, and this is especially true of its environment.32

Although the South was never a coherent ecological region, studies of environmental change specific to certain ecological sub-regions miss important cultural and social factors that spanned the entire South. Whether discussing tobacco cultivation, textile manufacturing, turpentine extraction, or iron manufacturing, most Southerners were conscious of their place as participants in a broader program of New South economic development, and couched their arguments about resource use and the best paths to development in terms of what would be best for the South as a whole. In order to understand how the South’s cultural similarities shaped resource use, this project employs a fairly traditional definition of the geographic boundaries of the South, defined as the eleven states of the Confederacy along with Kentucky.

Clashes over the proper use of the South’s natural resources occurred in every sector of the region’s economy—agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing, and tourism—and this study proceeds thematically. The first chapter, entitled “Nature’s Bounty,” examines plans for the

South’s economic development as formulated by new urban classes of business and industrial elites. Visions for the South’s future based on the promise of abundant natural resources grew up

32 The literature on these topics is vast. See U. B. Phillips, “The Central Theme in Southern History,” The American Historical Review 34, No. 1 (October 1928): 30-43; C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History,” The Journal of Southern History 19, No. 1 (February 1953): 3-19; C. Vann Woodward, “Look Away, Look Away,” The Journal of Southern History 59, No. 3 (August 1993): 487-504; C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 3-27; Edward L. Ayers, “What We Talk about When We Talk about the South,” in All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62-82.

15 alongside emerging ideas about the need for resource conservation, and this chapter explores how these two themes shaped the context in which Southern development occurred.

The remaining chapters examine how clashing visions for the region’s agricultural, industrial, and tourist development were driven by different ideas about the best uses of the region’s natural resources. The second chapter, entitled “Touring a New South,” examines conflicts over natural resource use in the South’s burgeoning tourist economy. Because tourist enterprises typically value aesthetic uses of natural resources over using these resources as raw materials for production, most scholars have concluded that tourism and industrial development were incompatible. Yet railroad companies—the region’s most prolific tourist boosters—did not see the two as incompatible. Instead, they used tourism to promote industrial and agricultural development by publicizing the New South and its resources to potential investors. By the twentieth century, however, conflicts between promoters of tourism and other enterprises had become common—due primarily to increasing numbers of tourists traveling by automobile as well as perceptions that tourism could be a stand-alone industry—and tourism began to serve as a brake on more exploitative uses of the region’s natural resources.

The third chapter examines conflicts over the presence of extractive industries on the

Southern landscape. Southerners had long been wary of their status as an economic colony, and extractive industries like lumbering and mining companies were the most visible indicator that profits from the region’s natural resources were making others wealthy. Although scholars often claim that public officials—and the South’s residents themselves—gave these companies a free hand to do as they wanted with the South’s timber and minerals, this chapter suggests that there were many attempts to reign in timber and mining companies. This is most clearly seen in campaigns to eliminate wasteful uses of the region’s natural resources, a strategy that went hand- in-glove with the nation’s emerging ethos of conservation. Enterprises like paper and furniture manufacturing were predicated on eliminating waste by using Southern raw materials more

16 efficiently, and many Southerners were optimistic that these and similar enterprises would solve the region’s environmental problems by promoting long-term uses of Southern resources.

Chapter four, entitled “Balancing Tests,” examines the region’s manufacturing economy, especially in the Piedmont region of the South. The manufacture of Southern raw materials into finished goods in local factories was the ultimate goal of most industrial boosters, but the South’s new manufacturing economy brought unanticipated problems of water and air pollution and altered traditional ways of using the region’s rivers and skies. This chapter uses the region’s waterways as a window into conflicts over the best types of industrial development. Most

Southerners wanted industrialization, but not at any cost. As pollution and obstruction of the

South’s waterways spread, farmers, businessmen and municipal elites were forced to decide whether industrial development was worth these side effects. Many Southern communities chose not to uncritically accept industrialization, and instead took steps to halt the environmental problems wrought by new factories and dams.

The final chapter examines conflicts over the use of the South’s soils and other agricultural resources. Although boosters were confident that the region would soon become “The

Garden Spot of the Nation,” widespread soil erosion and declining fertility challenged their efforts to build an entirely new system of agriculture in place of staple crop agriculture. Attempts to find a solution to these problems—whether through new labor agreements, commercial fertilizers, or diversification—indicate the extent to which ideas about natural resources were intertwined with broader social and racial factors. Yet they also suggest just how much environmental issues undergirded different visions for the New South, and shed light on the challenges of achieving permanent growth.

17 Chapter 1

“Nature’s Bounty”

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the single most pressing question throughout the nation was what to do with the South. Emancipation and four years of war had swept away the South’s plantation economy and upended its slave-based social structure. Two-thirds of the region’s net wealth had been destroyed, its few cities were in ruins, railroads were virtually nonexistent, farmland lay idle, monetary and banking systems were in turmoil, state governments faced crippling debts, and there was little functioning industrial infrastructure.1 Although there were many different ideas about what the South’s future would be, practically everyone understood that the region required rebuilding, and that a “New South” would have to replace the region’s antebellum plantation society.2 Ben Allston—a former Confederate officer and ruined

South Carolina rice planter—perhaps expressed it best in 1869 when he declared that “We must…begin at the beginning again. We must make a new start.”3

Because the South’s political and social structures had been moored to the region’s plantation economy, it was widely understood that economic change would be the heart of any effort to rebuild the South. Writing in 1876, John Calvin Reed of Georgia noted that “The South has been made to feel the pangs of a sudden impoverishment and the incalculable discomfort of complete economical unsettlement,” but concluded that the region was “doing painfully the slow

1 Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 17. 2 There has been a great deal of scholarly debate about what the term “New South” encompasses. Although many historians have used it to designate a span of time or to denote specific visions for rebuilding the South in the image of the industrial North, I have chosen to use it more broadly to refer to any attempt to re-envision the region’s economy. In this sense, my use is perhaps closest to that described by the New South’s first historian, Holland Thompson, who noted in 1921 that “Many…have used the term loosely to signify any change in economic or social conditions which they have discovered.” See Holland Thompson, The New South: A Chronicle of Social and Industrial Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 7. 3 “Art. VI.—Address By Col. Ben Allston,” DeBow’s Review (August 1869): 669. As quoted in Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 23. For a brief biographical overview of Allston see Bruce S. Allardice, Confederate Colonels: A Biographical Register (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 41-2.

18 task of repairing lost fortunes; seeking after the system proper to succeed planting,” and “striving to make their homes pleasant again and to give their children a fair hope in the land.”4 Yet this was an unprecedented task. It required not only reimagining the economic structure of an entire region—which no other part of the United States had ever attempted—but also reimagining the

South’s labor systems, legal framework, social structure, and political orientation. These were questions that involved the entire nation. Because “Prosperity South means prosperity North,” as the editor of the Philadelphia Times explained, the future of the Southern economy had implications for the whole American economy, and resolving these unanswered questions was particularly urgent. 5 As John P. King—a railroad official and delegate to Georgia’s 1865 constitutional convention—concluded, “The prosperity of every material interest in the free States depends upon the successful development of Southern resources.”6

This was a considerable challenge. Yet there was widespread optimism that the South could be rebuilt and incorporated back into the United States as a productive part of the national economy. This was fueled mostly by the pervasive belief that the South was home to unparalleled stores of natural resources that would facilitate its economic development.7 Whereas agriculture and industrial development had depleted resources in places like the Northeast, observers believed that the South’s single-minded, but inefficient, pursuit of staple crop cultivation had spared most of the region’s natural resources. As J. D. B. DeBow explained in 1866, “whilst the

Northern and Western States…exhibited miracles of progress and development, the South, with vast natural resources for mining, manufactures, and agriculture, advanced in but the slow ratio of

4 John Calvin Reed, The Old and the New South (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1876), 1. 5 A. K. McClure, as quoted in “The South,” Southern Workman, 1 February 1881: 16. 6 “President Johnson,” Memphis Daily Avalanche [Memphis, TN], January 1, 1866: 2. 7 The most comprehensive overview of the relationship of natural resources to the thinking of New South boosters can be found in the chapter entitled “The Opulent South” in Paul M. Gaston’s study of the New South Creed. See Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Kopf, 1970), 43-79.

19 its natural increase.” DeBow concluded that “immense dominions, capable of contributing untold treasures to the commerce of the world, remained hermetically sealed.”8

DeBow was the long-time editor of DeBow’s Review—one of the most popular newspapers throughout the South—and was perhaps the earliest voice linking the region’s natural resources to its future prospects.9 Throughout the antebellum era, DeBow had been an outspoken advocate of using the South’s natural resources to promote industrial development, hoping that economic diversification would free the South from its dependence on the North in the hopes of preserving slavery. Indeed, in 1852 he had even published an immense three-volume work on the

“industrial resources” of the South and West—one of the first surveys of Southern resources ever compiled.10 As he resumed publication of his paper following the Civil War, DeBow was perhaps the loudest voice calling attention to the need to put the region’s abundant natural resources to good use. Indeed, an 1865 article in a Dallas newspaper announced that DeBow “proposes to conduct his Review in such a manner as will best aid in the awakening of Southern industry and enterprise, and lead to the most profitable application of capital and immigration to the development of Southern resources.”11 Until his death in 1867 he did just this, and besides reviewing the natural resources of virtually every state in the former Confederacy, DeBow’s

Review called attention to a variety of new ways of using these resources. Although DeBow was not the first to articulate the idea that the South had abundant natural resources, he popularized it and provided a high-profile forum in which to discuss how these resources should be used.12

DeBow’s Review was the leading periodical in the region following the Civil War, and his comments were quickly echoed by businesspeople, public officials, journalists, and others

8 J. D. B. DeBow, “The Future of the South,” DeBow’s Review 1, No. 1 (January 1866): 6. 9 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 23-28. See also Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. DeBow: Magazinist of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 181-215. 10 J. D. B. DeBow, The Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States (New Orleans: DeBow’s Review, 1852). 11 Dallas Herald [Dallas, TX], 11 November 1865: 2. 12 Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. DeBow: Magazinist of the Old South, 181-215.

20 who were interested in the plight of the postbellum South. Most commentators concluded that the

South’s natural resources were its most significant asset remaining in the wake of the Civil War.

For instance, after considering what elements could contribute to the South’s “future progress,” author Charles Calvin Reed concluded that “She retains her genial climate, her kindly soil, and her many natural resources,” while newspaperman Richard H. Edmonds claimed that the South’s future was assured by “natural advantages that war could not destroy.”13 W. A. Harper of Atlanta noted that the Civil War had resulted in the South’s “system of labor…destroyed and its land made valueless,” and concluded that “There was only left its climate, its great rivers and exuberant soil, and the indomitable energies of its people.”14 In 1881 a Galveston newspaper correspondent commented that during the Civil War “The South lost four thousand millions, but her greatest wealth remained intact—her manhood and her vast domain of undeveloped mineral and agricultural resources,” while the Boston Herald hypothesized that “the Southern States would have been more than the rivals of the northern commonwealths in material wealth” had slavery been made “extinct” earlier. The Herald concluded that “Nature has given to the people of that section many advantages which we do not enjoy, but until very recently the social condition of the people made them indifferent to their opportunities and incapable of utilizing them.”15 Throughout the nation, people similarly assessed the state of the region’s natural resources, and concluded that successful economic development was assured.16

As a result of their confidence that resources would facilitate efforts to rebuild the region’s economy, Southerners and Northerners alike became preoccupied with the South’s natural resources as never before. Indeed, after visiting the Gulf in 1885 Charles Dudley Warner

13 John Calvin Reed, The Old and the New South, 13; Richard H. Edmonds, Facts About the South: Promise of Its Prosperity In Light of the Past Based on Limitless Resources (Baltimore, MD: Manufacturers’ Record Publishing Company, 1907), 63-64. 14 W. A. Harper, “The New South,” The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 1 October 1881: 21. 15 Northern Capital and Southern Resources,” The Galveston Weekly News [Galveston, TX], 11 August 1881: 1; Boston Herald as quoted in “Resources of the South,” Clinch Valley News [Jeffersonville, VA], 1 June 1888: 2. See also Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 55-59. 16 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 69.

21 even declared that “The mind of the South to-day is on the development of its resources, upon the rehabilitation of its affairs.”17 Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith, a Georgian, concurred, and commented that “If you wish to interest the people of the South to-day, talk to them of the resources and development of their section.”18 A seemingly endless parade of newspaper articles and speeches throughout the nation described the region’s natural resources as “bountiful,”

“abundant,” “matchless,” “profuse,” “inexhaustible,” “opulent,” “vast,” “unlimited,” “immense,”

“boundless,” and “illimitable,” and these claims did not slow until well into the twentieth century.19 Every state in the South published glowing estimates of its own resources and opportunities, and chambers of commerce throughout the region boosted their particular locale in advertisements, speeches, fairs, and meetings.

Americans eagerly read thousands of published accounts on the natural resources of the

New South, and literature describing “Southern resources”—both fiction and non-fiction— became almost a genre unto itself. Books depicting the New South sold extremely well, and many were printed in multiple editions. For instance, in his 1886 Southern travelogue Henry Field reported that previous editions of the book had received a “reception which was wholly unexpected” because “Northern readers were gratified by the pictures of what the New South which was taking the place of the Old; of its new life, new industries, and new ambitions.”20 A review of Frank Presbrey’s book, The Empire of the South, suggested in 1900 that “It is a sort of encyclopedia of the Southern States, and its 184 large pages are packed full of valuable and interesting facts, while the pictures of scenes along the line of the railway are beautifully reproduced from photographs taken with skill and care.” The reviewer concluded that it “is a

17 Charles Dudley Warner, “Impressions of the South,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 71, No. 424 (September 1885): 548. 18 Hoke Smith, “The Resources and Development of the South,” North American Review 159 (July/December 1894): 129. 19 See Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 54-79. 20 Henry M. Field, Blood is Thicker Than Water: A Few Days Among Our Southern Brethren (New York: George Munro, 1886), vii.

22 perfect guide book to the traveler unfamiliar with the South, and would be a source of pleasure to almost any one at all interested in the development of this country, whether a traveler or stay-at- home.”21

New South economic development even became a popular backdrop for many novelists.

Postbellum fiction called attention to the South as a place of business and reinforced the nation’s preoccupation with abundant Southern resources. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirized efforts to develop the South’s resources in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, which focuses on the failed attempts of a Tennessee family to sell seventy-five thousand acres of land and resource rights to speculators.22 The main character of Francis Hopkinson Smith’s popular

Colonel Carter of Cartersville, published in 1892, works to interest a consortium of English investors in a potential railroad project to develop mineral lands in Virginia.23 In Thomas Dixon’s

1902 novel, The Leopard’s Spots, planter and former Confederate General Daniel Worth even mirrors the rhetoric of many Southern boosters when he tells a crowd of freedpeople that “I believe that terrible as the loss of four billions of dollars in slaves will be to the South, if the

South is only let alone by the politicians and allowed to develop her resources, she will become what God meant her to be, the garden of the world,” and he devotes himself to bringing a cotton mill to North Carolina.24 Edwin Lefèvre’s 1907 novel, Sampson Rock, of Wall Street, revolves around various attempts by northern capitalists to acquire the Virginia Central Railroad as well as several industrial establishments in Virginia.25 Although fictional accounts often served as a way to criticize Southern development, they perpetuated ideas about the South as a region of abundant

21 “A New Book on the South,” New York Observer and Chronicle, 15 March 1900: 344. 22 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (Chicago: F. G. Gilman, 1873). 23 Francis Hopkinson Smith, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1892). 24 Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902), 65-66. 25 Edwin Lefèvre, Sampson Rock, of Wall Street (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907).

23 resources and contributed to a climate in which Southern development was one of the foremost topics on the national agenda.26

In their efforts to make the South’s resources seem distinctive, promoters of Southern development favorably compared the region with other parts of the nation or world. Writing in a trade journal in 1902, one author noted that “Taking the South as a whole, its resources have not been exploited to the same extent as the possibilities of other parts of the country have been.” He concluded that “In the basic elements that constitute the wealth of a country, the South is richer than any other part of the United States to-day,” due both to the “soil, climate, forests and minerals” as well as the fact that “the development of these great resources was obstructed for almost a quarter of a century by the Civil War.”27 Richard Edmonds—the editor of the popular

Manufacturers’ Record—similarly argued that that the region’s climate, soil, minerals, timber, waterways, seacoast, and healthfulness proved that “nature seems to have done her best for this favored land.” He affirmed that “No one can carefully study the remarkable combination of resources which the South enjoys without being convinced that, in natural advantages, the section stands far ahead of any other country in the world.” After comparing the South with the West,

Edmonds concluded that “The conditions for this are far more favorable than in the West during the period of the most rapid growth of that region, and this prosperity, being free from fictitious inflation, will be permanent.”28 In short, throughout the New South era the region was increasingly defined not in terms of political boundaries as much as a collection of abundant natural resources ripe for the taking.

26 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 339-72. See also Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Wayne Mixon, “The New South,” in The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Place, People, Movements and Motifs, Eds. Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002): 544-46. 27 “Resources and Progress of the South,” Bankers’ Magazine 65, No. 4 (October 1902): 440. 28 Richard H. Edmonds, The South’s Redemption: From Poverty to Prosperity (Baltimore: The Manufacturers’ Record Co., 1890), 3-4.

24 Advocates of economic development claimed that the South’s “mild” climate made its natural resources even more valuable as raw materials for industrial or agricultural production.

These boosters argued that the Southern states were free from the extremes of weather found in other parts of the nation, and were fond of contrasting the “sunny South” with other, more frigid, climes. These were not simply natural advantages, but business advantages. As Patrick Walsh— the editor of the Augusta Chronicle—explained, the region’s genial climate made it possible for industrial and agricultural workers to “work the year round, unhindered for a day on account of the excessive cold.” Besides making workers more productive, Walsh also argued that transportation and waterpower infrastructure necessary for business prosperity was never hindered by “trouble from frozen streams.”29 Southerners like Walsh claimed that the South’s climate preordained successful economic development in the region, and a Nashville newspaper even declared that “Our Southern climate and soil are destined by nature to support a dense population, simply because a given amount of human effort will command more of the comforts of civilized life here than in any colder region.” The paper concluded that this was “an industrial, social and political advantage…The whole nation wants to enjoy these benefits.”30 Like the abundance of natural resources, the region’s climate had long been intertwined with claims of

Southern distinctiveness, and was used to promote opportunities for economic development as well as to amplify claims about the South’s abundant resources.

American hope in Southern natural resources was not simply naïve optimism, however, but was shaped by longstanding ideas about the place of natural resources in economic development. The future of the New South economy was being worked out in the midst of what one scholar calls the “Golden Age of Resource-Based Development,” in which improvements in transportation and communication facilitated “a new global era of rapid settlement, resource

29 As quoted in “Rapid Development of the South,” Southern Cultivator 51, No. 12 (December 1893): 551. 30 “Railways Running North and South,” Nashville Union and American, 6 January 1875: 2.

25 exploitation and economic growth.”31 As economist Edward Barbier has suggested, resource- based economic development is characterized by the utilization of increasingly scare natural resources. As resources become scarce, regions or nations are forced to continually search for new “frontiers” in order to ensure continued economic growth. Between 1870 and 1914 nations throughout the world sought new sources of natural resources, and often engaged in patterns of development that were dependent upon resource extraction from the “new frontiers found in the developing regions of the world.”32 Southerners simply had to look at places like India and Africa to conclude that global economic development favored underdeveloped regions, and that their own resources were becoming increasingly valuable. Indeed, William Finley’s claim that “the wasteful cutting of the timber of other sections and the advancing price of forest products make the woodlands of the South constantly more valuable,” was seen as a truism that applied to all of the South’s natural resources.33

The postbellum South fits Barbier’s definition of a “frontier” as “an area or source or unusually abundant natural resources and land relative to labor and capital,” and throughout the

United States people believed that Southern natural resources would fuel the American economy and facilitate sectional reconciliation. Although scholars understand that having abundant supplies of natural resources does not assure successful economic growth, at the time there was a widespread optimism—based on material examples from around the globe—that the South’s plentiful resources would bring about regional prosperity.34

Although they did not use Barbier’s terminology, people throughout the United States did indeed perceive the South as a new “frontier” of development. By the late-nineteenth century the idea that economic development was drawn to areas with abundant sources of raw materials had

31 Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed through Natural Resource Exploitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 369. 32 Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers, 369. 33 William W. Finley, “Southern Railroads and Industrial Development,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 35, No. 1 (January 1910), 102. 34 Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers, 31.

26 become an axiom used by promoters of Southern development, and many claimed that the laws of economics preordained the success of the South’s economic reconstruction.35 As Richard

Edmonds claimed, “the trend of the world’s economic development is toward the South, for, as

Andrew Carnegie has recently well said, in the past capital could draw raw materials to it, and thus industry centered where capital was most abundant, but now raw material draws the capital and dominates the development of industrial centers.”36 After contrasting the South’s cotton, coal, lumber, and iron with New England’s lack of these same resources, author Charles Morris similarly concluded that “It is an economic truism that natural advantages persist and are of progressive force, while artificial advantages diminish and disappear.”37 New England textile manufacturer Edward Atkinson declared that economic “diversity” was “not only governed by the different aptitudes and capacities of men, it is also governed by differences in soil, climate, and natural resources,” which the South had in excess.38 Because of this optimism that the South’s resources were abundant and that the principles of economics and natural resource use were on their side, advocates of economic development frequently based their visions for rebuilding the

South on the region’s natural bounty.

Much of the South did have abundant stores of natural resources. Promoters of Southern resources spoke in generalities, however, and were less concerned with how ecologically and climatically diverse the region actually was than in constructing a narrative that would justify their vision for the South’s development. Although parts of the region did have abundant resources, the South was an incredibly diverse area that spanned numerous ecosystems. The

Piedmont, Cotton Belt, Mississippi Delta, Appalachian Highlands, Lowcountry, and Virginia

35 See Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers, 368-462. See also Edward B. Barbier, Natural Resources and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 36 Richard H. Edmonds, Facts About the South, 63-64. 37 Charles Morris, The Old South and the New; A Complete Illustrated History of the Southern States (Philadelphia: n.p., 1907), 577-78. 38 Edward Atkinson, The Development of the Resources of the Southern States: An Address to the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, (Boston: n.p., 1898), 11.

27 Tidewater were all separate regions.39 Not surprisingly, the South’s most vocal spokespeople also almost always ignored the region’s many disadvantages, including the frequency of natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, soils depleted of nutrients after years of staple crop cultivation, the prevalence of dangerous diseases like yellow fever, the oppressive heat and high humidity of summertime, and the severe winter cold throughout the mountainous parts of the

South.

This was largely because promoters of Southern development used the narrative of abundant natural resources to justify a particular vision for the South’s future. Beginning during

Reconstruction, journalists, public officials, and businesspeople claimed that the South needed to remake itself in the image of the North, and advocated industrialization, urbanization, an overhaul of agriculture, and reconciliation with the rest of the nation. Republican leaders of the South’s

Reconstruction governments promoted economic development—what one historian calls a

“gospel of prosperity”—by pouring state aid into railroad development, easing potential hindrances to manufacturing, and actively seeking to attract the investment of outside capital in industrial enterprises.40 Although Reconstruction governments throughout the South failed to realize the widespread transformation that they envisioned, after the end of Reconstruction their programs were often taken up by the region’s new Democratic administrations. Because the

Democratic ranks contained a combination of former Whigs and planters, their policies represented a mix of incentives for both agricultural and industrial interests.41 In terms of economic development, they differed little from their predecessors, and promoted development

39 For more on the diversity of the South’s regions and natural resources see Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (1932; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936). 40 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 1988), 379-83; Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 15-18. 41 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1-22; See also James Tice Moore, “Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870-1900,” The Journal of Southern History 44, No. 3 (August 1978): 357-78.

28 not by direct subsidies to corporations, but by lowering or eliminating corporate taxes and handing over massive grants of state-owned lands.42

It was in this context that the dominant vision for the New South was born, and by 1870 the term “New South” had come to signify a program of economic development based on emulating the industrialized North or Great Britain.43 Although there was no consensus about what enterprises were best, promoters of the “New South Creed” urged a sharp break from the plantation economy that they held responsible for the South’s postbellum woes, and advocated a form of lassiez-faire capitalism based on bringing industry into the South. Industrialization was the main panacea for the South’s problems because it would free the region from its dependence on staple crops, centralize steady jobs in towns and cities, provide local markets for the region’s farmers, and hasten urbanization. Because the South could not industrialize overnight, however, regional boosters advocated the commercialization of agriculture—mainly through mechanization, new labor agreements, and crop diversification. In short, boosters wanted an economy in which the South’s agricultural and industrial sectors were balanced, even co- dependent, and an economy that more closely resembled the North both in terms of structure and individual work ethic.44

This was not simply a social, political, and economic vision, but an environmental one.

Southern boosters liked to explain the region’s underdevelopment by highlighting their abundant natural resources, which showed that their antebellum predecessors had wasted these very resources by not using them. They claimed that slavery and staple crop agriculture had unnaturally prolonged plantation agriculture, hindering the industrialization and urbanization that

42 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 9. 43 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 32. 44 Although New South boosters and the New South Creed are considered to be major forces shaping the postbellum South, they have received comparatively little serious scholarly attention. The classic work is Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). See also Randolph D. Werner, “The New South Creed and the Limits of Radicalism: Augusta, Georgia, before the 1890s,” The Journal of Southern History 67, No. 3 (August 2001): 573-600.

29 was occurring throughout the antebellum North.45 The evidence was right before their eyes, in the form of abundant resources. Writing in 1876 one author noted that “When our country was first settled, the Southern regions excelled the Northern in soil, climate, and other natural resources,” but claimed that “The subsequent advancement of the North has been so rapid as to excite the wonder of the world, while it is said by us of the South, jesting upon our own worn-out and exhausted land, that we have not done as much for the country as the Indians who dwelled here centuries ago, and left the soil as good as they found it.” The author concluded that “the plantation system was the great barrier to Southern progress.”46 In 1887 the Manufacturers’

Record asked

what did it matter to him [the Southern white man] if all the earth beneath his feet was loaded with all the minerals which contribute to the wealth, convenience or enjoyment of mankind, or that the stream running by his door had waterpower enough to turn a thousand wheels? He could not utilize them; he was bound hand and foot—bound to his slaves, bound to his plantation, bound to cotton, to his habits of life, to the exigencies of the situation.47

In this sense, the region’s abundant natural resources were not simply a description of the present and a promise for the future, but an indictment of the wastefulness of the plantation past.

Although they often spoke generally about the South’s variety of resources, Southern boosters generally believed that these resources would suggest the best avenues of economic development for the region. Shortly after the Civil War, Confederate general turned magazine

45 To some extent this was a myth. There was a significant industrial presence in the antebellum South, and contemporary historians have shown that Southern planters embraced the same capitalistic principles as their northern industrial counterparts. See Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Tom Downey, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and Atlantic World,” The Journal of Southern History 75, No. 3 (August 2009): 627-50, among others. 46 “The Old and the New South,” The International Review 3 (March 1876): 209. 47 Originally published in John W. Johnson, “The Emancipation of the Southern Whites,” Manufacturers’ Record, 9 July 1887. As reprinted in Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 58.

30 editor Daniel Harvey Hill urged Southerners to “interrogate nature” in order to determine the best uses of their resources. Hill declared that

if our soil is capable of higher fertility and of more varied and more valuable products, it must be put under severer contribution…if our forests yield timber of value in the arts and manufactures of foreign nations, we must find and prepare it, and give it to commerce; if our climate is adapted to the cultivation of the vine and the development of new industries, we must by no means lose the opportunity; if our table-lands and elevated mountain slopes can be turned to a valuable account in cattle-raising and wool-growing, we must no longer neglect so promising a source of wealth and prosperity; if our numerous rivers, in their extended courses from the mountains to the sea, can be made to manufacture the crude products of our fields, forests, flocks and mines into more valuable merchandise, and then to transport them to the world's markets, then must they no longer be allowed to mock and taunt us with their indolent roar and idle murmur; if the rock-ribbed earth itself, in the crags of the mountains, the ledges of the hills, or the beds of the plains, can furnish from their quarries material for the architect or the sculptor, or for any of the thousand and one arts of use or ornament of modern civilized life, or if there be ‘a vein for silver,’ or ‘dust of gold,’ or if Nature has laid up for us, in her ample store-house, accumulations of the 'more useful minerals, as coal, iron, etc., no labor or difficulty must deter us from exhuming these treasures.48

As Hill’s comments suggested, visions for rebuilding the South’s economy in the image of the

North and/or Great Britain were largely shaped by calculations of what the region’s natural resources best suited it for. It should not be surprising, then, that the South’s public officials and business leaders called for an economy centered on producing a diversity of industrial and agricultural goods from the South’s abundant raw materials. Partly shaped by promotional concerns, partly shaped by realistic understandings of the workings of economic development, and partly shaped by the reality of abundant resources, optimism about the South’s natural resources was visible everywhere, and went hand-in-glove with visions of building the South in the image of the North.

Indeed, visions for the future of the South were frequently expressed as an environmental transformation. As early as 1870 a Texas newspaper predicted that the development of Southern

48 “The Minerals of North Carolina,” The Land We Love 1 (1866), 162-63.

31 resources would result in “the wilderness blossoming as the rose.”49 Writing in 1876, author John

Calvin Reed lamented that since the Civil War there had been a “melancholy change” in the

Southern landscape. Reed described plantations where “the neat inclosures have fallen; the pleasant grounds and the flower-gardens, once so trim and flourishing, are a waste….The face of the country is much altered. Only a small part of the land, as compared with that tilled before the war, is under cultivation; the remainder becomes wild.” Yet Reed predicted that the coming of the

New South would change this, noting that “The South is in a thorough and long transition,” during which “Her fields are to be made fertile and to smile beautifully with an infinite variety of products.”50 In October of 1888 Grady spoke on “The South and its Problems” at the Texas State

Fair in Dallas. Although Grady’s speech mostly dealt with racial conflict in the South, he concluded with a vivid description of his vision for the region’s future. Grady pictured

a vision of surpassing beauty….I see a South the home of fifty millions of people; her cities vast hives of industry; her country-sides the treasures from which their resources are drawn; her streams vocal with whirring spindles; her valleys tranquil in their white and gold of the harvest; her mountains showering down the music of bells, as her slow-moving flocks and herds go forth from their folds.51

Just a few years later J. B. Killebrew expressed his vision of the New South in similar terms.

Killebrew argued that “with the race problem settled” development could continue, and “The desert places should be reclaimed. The banks of its beautiful streams, the gloom of its mines, the depths of its forests, the heights of its mountains should all be made glad with the hum of busy life.”52 For Grady, Killebrew, and others, then, the New South was not simply a vision for the future of the region’s economy, but a vision of the ideal Southern landscape, based on particular ways of using natural resources.

49 “Southern Development,” Tri-Weekly State Gazette [Austin, TX], 24 August 1870: 1. 50 John Calvin Reed, The Old and the New South, 17, 24. 51 Henry W. Grady, “The South and Her Problems,” in Joel Chandler Harris’ Life of Henry W. Grady, Including His Writings and Speeches, Ed. Joel Chandler Harris (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1890), 120. 52 J. B. Killebrew, “Destiny of the South Revealed in Its Resources,” in Manufacturers’ Record’s Baltimore-Southern Supplement (Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record Publishing Co., 1900), 11.

32 Since its inception, the scholarly literature on the New South has been focused on who was responsible for driving economic development in the region. The lines of debate have mostly revolved around whether a distinct planter class stayed in power and exerted the most influence over the South’s economic transition. Although many scholars point to the emergence of an entirely new class of urban professionals and businesspeople, others argue that former planter elites from rural areas were most responsible for shaping the trajectory of New South economic development. What this literature makes clear is that the process of economic development varied from one Southern community to the next. While former planters initiated mill building campaigns in North Carolina and controlled agricultural development in the Plantation Belt, this impetus came from new classes of urban businessmen and nascent industrialists with little connection to the old order in many other places. In the estimation of James C. Cobb, the South was “a society in transition, one whose governing elites could not ignore the needs of a still powerful agricultural sector, but one where aggressive business and industrial interests, with momentum on their side, were beginning to make themselves felt.”53

Although some scholars claim that planters opposed plans for economic development and sought to hamstring the region’s industrialization in order to ensure the survival of the plantation, the reality is that the vast majority of former planters and urban businesspeople embraced a remarkably similar bourgeois outlook about the future. Whatever their background, the leaders of the South’s postbellum development generally embraced a lassiez-faire approach to economic growth, and only hesitantly provided a mix of incentives in order to promote agricultural, industrial and commercial growth. All of these leaders were united in believing that economic development should serve certain social ends, and one of the key factors linking their visions for

53 For perhaps the best overview of this literature see James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South,” The Journal of Southern History 54, No. 1 (February 1988): 55, 45-68. See also James Tice Moore, “Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South,” The Journal of Southern History XLIV (August 1978): 357-78.

33 the future was the need to ensure cheap and docile labor and head off potential challenges to the region’s social status quo. Despite similar views toward economic growth and white supremacy, this diverse group was never of one mind when it came to the best forms of development for the

South. As they sought growth, the South’s business and agricultural elite had many different visions for what this would entail, and how new enterprises should use the region’s natural resources.54

Because the Southern leadership varied by location it is certainly difficult to generalize who was driving change throughout the entire South. Yet the flood of optimistic assessments of the region’s natural resources in the wake of the Civil War mostly emanated from a conglomeration of Southern public officials, rural elites, journalists, academics, speculators, and emerging classes of urban businesspeople. These groups had a direct financial and social stake in the success of the South’s economic development. In fact, these Southern boosters were mostly a product of South’s burgeoning urban areas, and the immediacy of their arguments about economic development and the use of the South’s abundant natural resources stemmed from their engagement with rapidly-growing urban centers that were dependent on industries converting these resources into raw materials.

Aside from a few port cities like Charleston and New Orleans where planters would export staple crops, the antebellum South was predominately rural. In 1860, less than seven percent of the region’s population lived in urban areas, and this figure had climbed to only a little under nine percent by 1880.55 Yet by the 1880s urban growth was beginning in earnest as railroad infrastructure linked the South to national and international markets, and by 1900 one out of every six Southerners lived in an urban area. Although large railroad hubs like Atlanta and

Charlotte are often most identified with the New South, the emergence of new “crossroads

54 James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 55-59. 55 Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 10-11.

34 hamlets” of less than ten thousand people was more typical of the region’s unique brand of urbanization. These municipal areas served as hubs for shipping raw materials like timber and crops, as well as manufactured goods, to regional and national markets, and reflected a shift of commercial activity from coastal areas to the region’s burgeoning railroad lines. Besides acting as transportation hubs for the region’s farmers and industrialists, towns also hosted businesses that provided needed services to rural Southerners, including cotton gins, merchants and wholesalers, construction companies, legal and medical services, and schools.56

Southern cities benefitted little from the foreign immigration sweeping the rest of the nation, and were instead settled by mostly black and white Southerners from rural hinterlands who had moved to urban areas in search of economic opportunity in new manufacturing or commercial enterprises. Although the vast majority of people found themselves working low- paying jobs, the South’s cities did provide opportunities for economic advancement for a subset of the region’s population, which formed a nascent middle class of professionals and businesspeople. Many of these merchants, clerks, journalists, lawyers, agents, salespeople, and other professionals had been born in the 1850s, and came of age in the midst of Reconstruction.

Whatever their relation to the former plantation elite that had dominated the South’s rural areas and state houses, these new urban professionals were, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, “of middle-class, industrial, capitalistic outlook.”57 They were keen to rebuild the Southern economy, and became the most avid supporters of economic growth through industrial and agricultural development in the region.

As Don Doyle has suggested, Southern towns and cities were important sites for the region’s economic development because they served as “the nerve centers of a changing economy

56 Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 55-70; Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 11. As Doyle notes, cities with populations of less than 10,000 increased 4 times in the three decades following 1880. For more on urban growth in the New South see Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 1-21 and David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 80-138. 57 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 20.

35 and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the

Civil War,” and the burgeoning urban business class was a driving force behind agitation for

Southern economic development.58 As the most vocal promoters of economic development, the urban business and industrial elite had a significant financial and social stake in the Southern economic development. Through newspapers, local and state governments, chambers of commerce, and boards of trade, these businesspeople sought to promote economic development and shape the South’s economy to fit with their vision of the region’s future. For these elites, then, the success of New South economic development was dependent on the region’s abundant natural resources, and their whole vision for the South’s future was structured around determining the best ways to use these resources.

The key to “developing” the region’s resources, as boosters liked to say, was attracting capital and labor from outside the South. Because Southerners had little cash to invest in either agricultural or industrial development, the success of their vision for the region’s economy was almost entirely dependent on outside capital and expertise. For instance, in 1870 DeBow’s Review declared that “Alabama only needs capital and enterprise to unlock the iron gates of her mountains and bring to light the treasures that lie hidden beneath,” while the chairman of the

1894 Southern Development Convention claimed that the region had “everything necessary for its development except money and muscle.”59 Attracting “money and muscle” from outside the region was no easy task, however. Yet promoters of Southern development claimed that the appeal of the South’s abundant natural resources would convince even the most hesitant investors to pour money into commercial and industrial enterprises. For instance, in 1890 George F.

Dauforth—the chairman of the Kentucky State Development Committee—wrote the presidents of each commercial club and board of trade in his state that “if foreign capital knew of your natural

58 Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, xiii. 59 “The Southern Pacific Rail Road, Alabama Coal and Iron,” DeBow’s Review (October 1870): 832; “Talk of the Future of the South,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 August 1894: 5.

36 resources, and the many advantages of your soil and location, it would be the means of bringing increased prosperity to your section.” Dauforth asked each official for information regarding local natural resources that they could publish and distribute “among those seeking investments.”60

Municipal officials in hundreds of Southern towns and cities hoped to attract attention to their community through similar means. Ultimately, this reflected widespread—but misplaced— optimism that capital would simply flood the South once investors learned of the potential profits from the region’s abundant natural resources.

Because the success of New South projects depended on outside capital, advertising the region’s opportunities was serious business, and most businesspeople and public officials believed that simply publicizing the region’s resources would attract the capital and labor needed for successful economic development. Indeed, in 1887 an Alabama editor reported that “We are well aware that the story of raising our farm supplies at home, and the establishment of manufacturing concerns in our southern cities has been worn threadbare by constant repetition,” but declared, “the idea cannot be repeated too often, it is the gospel of Southern development that must be constantly proclaimed by the press and from the forum, until it has burned itself into the popular mind, and produced those practical results without which we cannot hope to prosper.”61

Milton V. Richards—the Land and Industrial Agent for the Southern Railway—similarly remarked that “Of all the mediums for advancing the interests of the States, the community or the special industry, there is none more effective than the newspaper.”62 In this context, narratives of abundant natural resources were more a sales pitch to outsiders than a serious estimation of the

60 Letter, George F. Dauforth to Presidents of Commercial Clubs and Boards of Trade, 8 January 1890, Box 1, Louisville Commercial Club Records, Scrapbook, Louisville Area Chamber of Commerce Records, 1862-1988, University Archives and Records Center, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY [hereafter, Louisville Area Chamber of Commerce Records]. 61 Initially printed in the Selma Times. As reprinted in “The Gospel of Southern Development,” Huntsville Gazette [Huntsville, AL], 11 June 1887: 3. 62 “Col. M. V. Richards on the Press,” Charlotte Daily Observer [Charlotte, NC], 11 July 1909: 6.

37 South’s possibilities, but nonetheless shaped conflicts over economic development in important ways.

As Richards suggested, newspapers, magazines, and trade journals were key vehicles for promoting emerging visions about the New South and publicizing ideas about the best ways to use the region’s abundant natural resources. Prior to the Civil War weekly newspapers were, in the words of Thomas D. Clark, “handmaidens of politics” that focused mostly on political happenings and partisan talking points. The New South era coincided with a shift in the character of Southern newspapers. Weekly newspapers expanded their coverage of social and economic affairs, which lent itself to voluminous discussions about the South’s natural resources and future.63 There were antebellum precedents, like DeBow’s Review, which had long urged

Southerners to use the region’s resources for manufacturing. Yet the growth of urban areas throughout the South prompted a boom in local and regional newspapers that frequently took the lead in boosting the South’s resources and discussing its possibilities. By the 1880s large urban centers were dominated by newspapers like Henry Watterson’s Louisville Courier, Henry

Grady’s Atlanta Constitution, and Francis W. Dawson’s Charleston News and Courier, and C.

Vann Woodward explains that “the editors of city dailies…were public figures of supreme importance.”64 Indeed, by the 1880s, the Atlanta Constitution had the highest circulation of any newspaper. Yet the era was perhaps even more noted for the development of smaller towns and cities, and small town and rural weeklies increased rapidly. These newspapers were just as concerned with the South’s development as the Charleston News and Courier and Atlanta

63 Thomas D. Clark, The Southern Country Editor (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 20-21. See also Thomas D. Clark, The Rural Press and the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948). 64 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 145. Another writer puts it this way: “To possess the tympanum of the printing press in the post-Civil War period in the South was to possess power.” See C. G. Scruggs and Smith W. Moseley, “The Role of Agricultural Journalism in Building the Rural South,” Agricultural History 52, No. 1 (January 1979): 25; Carl R. Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press: Editorial Spokesmen of the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 149-97.

38 Constitution, and often reprinted the views of editors like Watterson and Grady verbatim.65 Rural and urban newspapers were increasingly joined by a host of trade journals representing enterprises that ranged from brick-makers to banking. Some of these—like Richard Edmonds’

Manufacturers Record—were devoted solely to reporting on Southern economic development.66

As members of the emerging class of middle-class urban businesspeople, Southern editors spoke directly to the interests of their class, and were undoubtedly the region’s most vocal spokespeople. Few state governments were willing to provide much funding for advertising, and newspapers and trade journals throughout the region took the lead in advertising the possibilities afforded by the region’s resources.67 Although they spoke for distinctly Southern interests, many of these periodicals reached a broader audience, and carried messages about the abundance of

Southern resources, the region’s future economic development, and prospects for the South’s future to people around the nation.

Despite claims to the contrary, discussions of the New South in the region’s newspapers were not simply intended to promote the public good. Newspaper editors had a significant financial stake in the visions that they promoted and in the success of New South programs of development. Urban newspapers like the Atlanta Constitution relied on a combination of subscriptions and advertising, which rose and fell with the prospects of their territory. Although rural newspapers benefitted less from subscription funding than did the South’s larger newspapers, they were often able to finance their operations by contracting with merchants to print agricultural lien notes, and Thomas D. Clark explains that this process forged a “close connection among merchants, county officialdom and the country papers.” It also gave rural newspapers a direct financial stake in the success of the region’s agriculture as well as economic

65 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 87; Thomas D. Clark, The Southern Country Editor, 28. 66 See Yoshimitsu Ide, “The Significance of Richard Hathaway Edmonds and his Manufacturers’ Record in the New South” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Florida, 1959). 67 Howard N. Rabinowitz, The First New South, 1865-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992), 31-32.

39 development more broadly. Despite differences between rural and urban newspapers, all were devoted to helping their particular region achieve economic growth so that they could prosper, and believed that advertising the region’s resources and opportunities was perhaps the best way to go about this.68

As Southern public officials and businesspeople sought to open up the South’s natural resources, Northerners jumped into the mix as well. Perhaps influenced by their neighbors to the

South, newspapers throughout the North also published glowing accounts of the region’s natural resources. Many simply reiterated the claims of Southern promoters regarding abundant natural resources and opportunities. Perhaps the best example was William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley—a radical Republican congressman and industrialist from Pennsylvania. In speeches throughout the

1870s outlining his vision for a post-emancipation South, Kelley frequently referenced the abundance of resources in the South, and urged Southerners to industrialize. During an 1871 speech in Montgomery, Alabama Kelley observed that the South was particularly blessed with iron, coal, limestone, fertile soils, and a long growing season, and declared that “Nature has been more profusely lavish of her gifts to you throughout the whole broad South than to us.” He concluded that Southern development was being held back, not by the region’s lack of resources, but by the underdevelopment of its people.69 Railroad attorney Chauncey Depew urged his fellow northerners to “Go South,” where there was a “vast country, WITH THE BEST CLIMATE IN

THE WORLD, with conditions of health which are absolutely unparalleled—with with vast forests untouched, with enormous veins of coal and iron which yet have not known anything beyond their original conditions, with soil that, under proper cultivation, for a little capital can

68 Thomas D. Clark, The Southern Country Editor, 22, 26-29. 69 William D. Kelley, The South—Its Resources and Wants (Washington, DC: Union Republican Congressional Executive Committee, 1871), 8-13.

40 support a tremendous population; with conditions in the atmosphere for comfortable living winter and summer which exist nowhere else in the country.”70

Republican and Democratic Southern state governments also worked to open up the region’s natural resources to outsiders, though Democratic policies especially often reflected some hesitancy to use the reins of government for this purpose. Beginning with Kentucky in

1867, state governments funded immigration bureaus to attract outside settlers or investors. They provided a host of incentives to railroads, such as generous grants of land for right-of-way, in the hopes that railroad development would open up previously isolated resources for development.

State governments also sold off vast tracts of the region’s public lands to industrialists and speculators for virtually nothing, offered up convict-lease labor to potential industrialists, and gave companies monopolistic rights to certain natural resources.71 For both Democratic and

Republican state administrations there was an understating that growth was desirable, but there was no consensus about where they should focus their energies.

By the twentieth century, however, Democratic municipal and state governments that were initially hesitant to provide direct incentives to promote economic growth began more active efforts to develop the region’s natural resources. As Southern boosters witnessed the growth of urban areas dependent on manufacturing, like Greenville and Birmingham, they redoubled their efforts to attract industry to their own community. Tax breaks for potential industries, land deals, and direct cash payouts were all fair game in what David Carlton calls “smokestack chasing,” and presaged the later efforts of mid-twentieth century state development commissions throughout the

South. State and municipal governments, commercial organizations, and even utility companies

70 Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, “Go South, Young Man”: The Honorable Chauncey M. Depew, in an address to the Alumni Association of Yale University, said, of his recent tour through the Southern States…: Go to Virginia, where the development is the greatest! Where the opportunities are the greatest!! Where all are welcome!!! (Roanoke: Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, 1910), 1. See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 115. 71 James Tice Moore, “Redeemers Reconsidered,” 368-69; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 115-20.

41 also continued to distribute a vast amount of information to potential industrialists and settlers about resources and opportunities in their respective location.72 By 1925, journalist George

Marvin described the prevailing attitude in the region, noting that “The average Southerner is a born booster, and the mood is contagious.”73

This is not to say that everyone bought into rhetoric boosting the region’s bountiful resources and tried to promote these resources. Many Southerners were not “born boosters,” and claims that the region had abundant resources ripe for the taking looked very different to poor white and African American sharecroppers and millworkers struggling to get by on what little was available to them. Although Reconstruction programs had at least initially fueled optimism among the South’s freedpeople that some of the region’s resources might be headed their way, it was quickly dashed. Over time, poor white and African American farmers found that their access to the South’s resources—the very resources that boosters claimed were plentiful—were being deliberately curtailed. No longer could many let their livestock roam on the Southern commons, wildlife populations that they depended on for subsistence were declining, state and local governments were limiting their ability to hunt and fish at will, and even their hope in landownership as a way to achieve a subsistence economy had mostly fallen through. While the

New South might have been identified with abundant resources for some, it was identified with scarce resources for many more.

These complaints reached a fever pitch in the 1890s, as the Farmers’ Alliance movement spread throughout the South and gave voice to the complaints of small farmers. Georgia’s agrarian leader, Tom Watson, was perhaps the most vocal critic of the dominant vision of the

72 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 95-97; David L. Carlton, “Smokestack-Chasing and Its Discontents: Southern Development Strategy in the Twentieth Century,” in The American South in the Twentieth Century, Eds. Craig S. Pascoe, Karen Trahan Leathem, and Andy Ambrose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 106-26; James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 6-26. 73 George Marvin, “Progress and the Parthenon,” Outlook CXXXIX (1925): 653. As quoted in George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 98.

42 New South, and his critiques often rested on a very different perception of the health of the

Southern environment than urban boosters like Henry Grady.74 During his stump speeches in

1888, Watson declared that “Mr. Grady in his great Dallas speech thinks that ‘Plenty rides on the springing harvests! It rides on Grady’s springing imagination.” He argued that Grady should

“Comment on actual conditions of Farming class,” and declared

It takes these city fellows to draw ideal pictures of Farm life—pictures which are no more true to real life than a Fashion Plate is to an actual man or woman….In Grady’s farm life there are no poor cows. They are all fat! Their bells tinkle musically in clover scented meadows & all you’ve got to do is hold a pan under the udder & you catch it full of golden butter. In real life we find the poor old Brindle cow with wolves in her back & ‘hollow horn’ on her head & she always wants to back up where the wind won’t play a tune on her ribs.

Watson went on to note that “In Grady’s farm life—lands all ‘Rich—richer—richest.’

Crops ‘Good, better, best,’” but claimed that the reality of the situation was “barren wastes—Gullied slopes—ruined lowlands.” In short, he claimed that “Grady’s speech” was “an indictment against us.”75 Here was a powerful portrayal of the region far removed from the claims of the region’s urban boosters, and it fueled widely different visions for the South’s future.

Yet even Farmers’ Alliance groups and others who were unhappy with the state of Southern economic development occasionally used claims that the South had an abundance of natural resources to lay out a different vision for the region’s future. For instance, in 1891 Marion Butler—the young president of the Farmers’ State Alliance of

North Carolina—acknowledged that the region did have abundant natural resources, but used this to call attention to everything that he believed was hindering the development of prosperous farming in the South. Chief among these was the structure of the nation’s

74 See Ferald J. Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson?: The Rhetorical Struggle for the New South, 1880- 1890 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994), 63-87. 75 As quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938; New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 126-27.

43 financial system, which he claimed was disproportionately hurting small farmers. Butler suggested that continued problems in agriculture were even more glaring “in the face of the facts that the country is one of inexhaustible resources and the government at peace with all the world.”76 Just a few years later L. W. Youmans—a large planter from Fairfax,

South Carolina—made a similar point while testifying before a congressional committee on agriculture. Youmans admitted that conditions were generally “deplorable,” but claimed that this was not a result of “any vicissitudes of the season, from any lack of industry on the part of the people, or from any failure in the soil to respond to cultivation.” Indeed, he claimed that crop yields had been high for several years, and concluded that farmers were being hurt by “artificial” factors. He concluded that “We can not charge it to natural circumstances. To claim that the triumphs of art or the bounty of nature would result in an overproduction of the good things of life and therefore bring about hardship and distress, it seems would be to argue an absurdity.”77

Ultimately dissenters against the New South’s narratives of abundant natural resources never gained much traction, and the Populist flag rose and quickly fell. In large part, this was due to the popularity of the New South Creed and its alluring vision for the future, which was founded on promises of abundance. As James C. Cobb explains, “New South dissenters fared so poorly within the region because, as transparent and contrived as it may seem in retrospect, the New

South Creed painted an almost seamless and undeniably seductive mural in which a glorious past, a reassuring present, and a glittering future were fully integrated and virtually indistinguishable.”78

76 North Carolina Farmers’ State Alliance, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the North Carolina Farmers’ State Alliance (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1891), 7. 77 U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports, Vol. 10: Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901), 117. See also Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land, 162. 78 James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98.

44 As will be seen in the chapters that follow, the South’s abundant natural resources served to justify many different visions for the future of the region. Not only was this idea trotted out to promote geological surveys, education, industrialization, agricultural modernization, and a variety of other typical “New South” programs, but it was also used by groups to call attention to the injustices of the South’s financial structure, and to promote banking reform, nationalization of railroads and other industries, plans for a subtreasury system, and a variety of other Populist programs. In short, narratives of abundant natural resources served many different functions and groups, and were employed to realize divergent visions for the region’s future economic development.

For most historians, boosterish claims that the region had an abundance of natural resources have masked the many different visions that Southerners and Northerners alike had for how these resources should be used. Even groups that generally bought into the narrative of abundant natural resources in the South were not of one mind about how they should be used.

Indeed, clashes over the best uses of the region’s natural resources and what the “New South” should look like began in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. These conflicts generally did not revolve around whether these resources were abundant or not, but around how they should be used. As early as 1872 the Republican editor of the Knoxville Daily Chronicle shed light on this challenge to building a new South. He lamented that Tennessee was woefully underdeveloped— with little capital, enormous debt, few good roads, and a poor system of common schools—but suggested that this was unnatural given the state’s abundant natural resources. He declared, “Our coal mines, our immense beds of the best iron ore, our fertile valleys and our forests of fine timber, constitute an inexhaustible fund of wealth, the extent to which has never been fully comprehended by the most sanguine.” In short, it was “universally conceded” that Tennessee had

“great natural resources,” and that successful economic development depended on these resources. Yet this editor suggested that there were multiple possible uses for the state’s natural

45 resources, and noted that the most pressing question of the era was “how…to reap their full benefit.”79 Throughout the region people wrestled with this question, and there was no consensus about how to answer it.

***

Attempts to re-envision the Southern economy occurred in the midst of a nationwide revolution in attitudes about the nation’s natural resources. As Henry Grady and others were calling for the construction of a “New South” based on intensively using the South’s natural resources, people throughout the nation were beginning to call for more restrained uses of

American natural resources. These two narratives—abundant Southern resources in the midst of declining American resources—grew up alongside each other, and shaped different ideas about the future of the Southern economy.

The United States had long been perceived as a land of plenty, and there was little thought about the need for more restrained ways of using the nation’s natural resources until the late-nineteenth century, when a combination of factors began to challenge the widely-held belief that American natural resources were inexhaustible.80 As the American economy boomed in the mid-nineteenth century, the nation’s natural resources came under increasing pressure. Sharp increases in population, impending development of wilderness areas and other unique places, the sale of huge tracts of the public domain to speculators, visible declines in natural resources, and increasing problems of pollution all contributed to a growing understanding that the nation’s resources were not unlimited. These fears were underlined by claims that the American frontier had come to an end, and that the nation’s social and political decline would result from scarce land and resources.

79 “Our Future Hope,” Knoxville Daily Chronicle [Knoxville, TN], 22 August 1872: 2. 80 For a historical overview of ideas about American abundance see David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).

46 Although writers like Henry David Thoreau, John James Audubon, and Francis Parkman had long expressed alarm at the destruction of wilderness, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that their voices began to coalesce into a movement to preserve wilderness places.81 In large part this was due to the influence of George Perkins Marsh, who published his immensely influential book, Man and Nature, in 1864. For perhaps the first time, Marsh provided a detailed record of how humans had transformed the global environment, especially through deforestation, and he was one of the first people to implicate humans in broader environmental changes. As

David Lowenthal explains, “Many before Marsh had noted various specific facets of environmental change; none had seen or traced the effects of human impact as an interrelated whole.”82 In doing so, Marsh provided a powerful justification for the need to reign in excesses in using natural resources. Indeed, he was one of the first people to use the term “conservation” to refer to the restrained use of natural resources, and William Cronon even claims that “It is no exaggeration to say that Man and Nature launched the modern conservation movement.”83

By the late-nineteenth century, the concerns of Marsh and others had coalesced into a coherent movement to preserve wilderness spaces mostly in the West. This was a remarkably diverse movement. Sportsmen concerned about the decline of wildlife, middle and upper-class urban dwellers concerned about the loss of wilderness places of great beauty, outdoor enthusiasts concerned about the loss of places of recreation, public officials concerned about the loss of the nation’s public resources, businesspeople concerned about the effects of deforestation and flooding on commerce, railroads concerned that competitors might beat them to the potential profits from travel to wilderness places, and others concerned about how the loss of wilderness places would affect the national character all participated in efforts to preserve wilderness areas.

81 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 96-107. 82 David Lowenthal, introduction to Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh (1864; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), xv. 83 William Cronon, foreword to Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh (1864; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), x.

47 As arguments about the need for wilderness preservation gained traction throughout the nation, calls for wilderness preservation culminated in 1872, when the federal government protected more than two million acres of land at Yellowstone as the nation’s first national park.84

By the time that the state of New York established a forest reserve in the Adirondack

Mountains in 1890, ideas about the need for the conservation of the nation’s natural resources were gaining ground nationwide. In the 1880s and 1890s organizations like the Sierra Club,

Audubon Society, and the Boone and Crockett Club popularized the need for more restrained uses of the nation’s timber, minerals, and wildlife—whether for use in business or pleasure.85 By the first decade of the twentieth century, fears about declines in natural resources mingled with the tenets of Progressive era reformers to produce a brand of conservation built around more efficiently using the nation’s resources, the power of the federal government to act in the name of the national interest in conservation matters, and the need to prevent the monopolization of resources by individuals or corporate interests.

As the federal government worked to manage the nation’s natural resources with a new scientific efficiency in order to ensure their continual use, longstanding policies that facilitated private uses of the public domain were reversed.86 The federal government acted to protect navigable rivers, prevent pollution of waterways, regulate the hunting of birds, implement programs of irrigation and reclamation in the West, and provided for the protection for large amounts of the public domain. All of these measures were based on ideas about utilitarian conservation, which stressed the need to use the nation’s natural resources efficiently. As Gifford

Pinchot explained in 1908, “Conservation means development not less than saving,” and he coined the term “wise use” to refer to the need to efficiently use the nation’s dwindling national

84 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 108-21. 85 Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History, 142-43. 86 Clayton R. Koppes, “Efficiency/Equity/Esthetics: Towards a Reinterpretation of American Conservation,” Environmental Review 11, No. 2 (Summer 1987): 127-46.

48 resources. As chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Pinchot used the machinery of government to make this ideology a reality on federal lands that were mostly located in the West.87 As will be seen, the doctrine of utilitarian conservation as preached by Pinchot and others was compatible with Southern ideas about economic development, and also spoke to widespread fears that the

South’s resources were being rapidly depleted.

***

Although much of the initial momentum for conservation came from the West,

Southerners actively participated in nationwide efforts to conserve the nation’s natural resources.

As Georgia’s state entomologist explained with only a slight exaggeration in 1910, “the West and the Northwest are not the only sections of the country which are interested in Conservation….I can say that there is a greater demand for systematic Conservation in our section of the country than there is in any other.”88

Decades before George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, antebellum agricultural reformers sought to stem the depletion of the soil fertility throughout the plantation belt resulting from staple crop cultivation. Reformers called for new, less exhaustive methods of cultivation in the hopes that fertility could be restored and slavery saved. These reformers were some of the first—not just in the South, but the nation as a whole—to call attention to the ways that humans were transforming their local environment for the worse. Yet it was not until after the Civil War that Southern reformers began thinking systematically about the need to conserve natural resources, and states and municipal governments took their first steps toward ensuring a more permanent supply of a variety of natural resources. As Steven Hahn suggests, “the perception that a redefinition of traditional use rights was essential for a successful adjustment to

87 Gifford Pinchot, “Why Conservation,” The Citizen [Berea, KY], 29 October 1908: 6; See also Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency; Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington: Island Press, 2001). 88 National Conservation Congress, Addresses and Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington: National Conservation Congress, 1911), 326.

49 free labor gave agricultural reformers and conservationists an increasingly receptive audience.”89

It was not that these issues suddenly sprang up at the end of the Civil War, then, but that they were given greater purchase by the changing political and economic climate of the era, and appealed to people eager to rebuild the region’s economy.

Some of the earliest efforts to conserve Southern resources involved declining stocks of wildlife. Elite Southern planters worried about the continued viability of recreation opportunities through hunting and fishing, especially in Maryland and Virginia, had worked to protect fish and game in a limited way since the 1850s. Yet the expansion of transportation networks facilitated greater market hunting and fishing, further increasing pressure on wildlife populations. This was exacerbated by the effects of the South’s economic development—mostly the destruction of habitats through pollution or deforestation. By the 1870s populations of shad, mountain trout, eastern elk, cougars, timber wolves, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, whooping cranes, and ivory-billed woodpeckers, among others, were in peril throughout parts of the South.90

Fish and game regulations were often defeated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil

War due to opposition from freedpeople and poor whites to restricting their ability to hunt and fish for subsistence as well as Republican control of state governments. As Democrats regained control of state governments in the late 1870s, they implemented a patchwork of regulations aimed at stemming declines of fish and game, though they varied wildly in their effectiveness.

These laws were especially prevalent in the Black Belt, where planter influence was strongest.

Indeed, Black Belt counties throughout Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee,

Mississippi and Virginia enacted a variety of restrictions, including closed seasons, prohibitions against certain methods of hunting or fishing, and prohibitions against killing or capturing certain

89 Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (1982), 45. 90 Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging,” 40; Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 114-15.

50 species of fish and game.91 By the twentieth century, virtually every state in the South had some form of laws regulating the taking of game and fish.

Struggles over resource use and conservation in the 1870s and 1880s were also manifested in efforts to enact stock laws that would close off the Southern commons, and conflicts over stock laws shed light on the terms of debate about conservation in the South throughout the late-nineteenth century. Southerners had traditionally protected community rights to its common land by legal enactments which mandated that all fields be fenced to prevent incursions from roaming livestock. The burden was placed on the farmer, not the stock raiser, to fence their farmland and pay for all damages. This allowed poor farmers to augment their diet and subsistence by raising livestock, which could roam freely and graze on the common lands of the region only to be rounded up and sold or butchered when needed. In the 1870s, these traditional rights to the Southern commons came under attack from the rural landed elite, who sought to curtail the rights of freedpeople and poor whites by cutting off access to the region’s common land and resources. Central to this was the enactment of stock laws, which reversed traditional rights to the commons by making the owner of stock responsible for fencing their stock in rather than forcing the owner of the land to fence their fields. Although Steven Hahn suggests that

“conservation, as well as agricultural improvement” were simply “justifications for curtailing use rights,” these conflicts were shaped by ingrained ideas about the best uses of the region’s resources, which played a more important role than Hahn or other scholars acknowledge.92

The elite planters who were the committed advocates of the new stock laws justified them mostly on the basis of how they would conserve increasingly scarce natural resources. Because

91 Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging,” 46-49; Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 115- 20. 92 Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 243, 239-68. Shawn Kantor provides a very different interpretation of the stock law debates in Georgia. See Shawn Everett Kantor, Politics and Property Rights: The Closing of the Open Range in the Postbellum South (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

51 farmers would only be forced to fence in their livestock rather than all of their fields, the rural elites who were advocating new fence laws argued that they would preserve timber by requiring less fencing. They also argued that these laws would improve the region’s livestock quality and allow farmers to cultivate new lands. For instance, in his annual message to the South Carolina

General Assembly in 1873, Republican Governor Franklin J. Moses claimed that “The very large consumption of timber, for fencing purposes, threatens speedily to exhaust the forest trees in many Counties of the State, and has created the gravest concern among our leading agriculturalists,” necessitating the repeal of the state’s old fence law. Among other justifications,

Moses observed that “Science and experience unite to prove that, in regions where the forests are being exhausted, the fall of rain is proportionally lessened.”93 A farmer from Carroll County,

Georgia, similarly wrote in 1885 that “I speak in behalf of saving the timber for the benefit of the future generation.” Although some people believed that fast-growing timber would be inexhaustible and had little interest in preserving it, this author insisted that “if this county should increase in population for the next fifty years as it has in the last fifty and if the present system of clearing and fencing continue there would not be ten acres of timbered land on an average to every lot of land in the county.” He concluded with an argument that seems as if it were lifted directly from Man and Nature, noting that “There is no doubt but that timber has much to do in the attraction of rain and perhaps is an advantage to health.” Once the railroad came to Carroll

County the timber would be valuable, and this farmer concluded that “the time to economize our timber is while we have got it….Let us act so that the world may be bettered by our having had a living in it.”94

Besides preserving timber, many rural elites hoped that fence and stock laws would promote better types of cattle and allow more farmland to be brought under cultivation, under

93 “Annual Message of His Excellency Gov. F. J. Moses, Jr.,” The Anderson Intelligencer [Anderson, SC], 23 January 1873: 4. 94 J. O. R. W., Carroll Free Press [Carrollton, GA], 12 June 1885: 2.

52 better conditions of farming. J. P. Reese—a farmer from Coweta County, Georgia—claimed that

“the stock law works well and has many advantages connected with it….Much good land can be put in cultivation that would lie out.” Besides helping out the state’s many tenant farmers by freeing them from having to build fences each year, he argued that the laws had “improved the stock, particularly the cattle,” and concluded that “Our people are now raising good blooded stock.”95 Advocates of stock laws also believed that they would be better for the region’s agriculture as a whole, which was being stunted by free-roaming hogs and cattle. A correspondent to the Atlanta Constitution wrote that

Under this system the lands will recuperate twice as fast as where stock is allowed to run at large. The growth along the roads, in the forests and upon the old fields is simply marvelous. The entire face of the country, not in cultivation, is covered with a mass of grass, weeds and shrubbery. The farms present a wonderful appearance as you ride for miles flanked on either side by snowy cotton or yellow corn. It is remarkable how such a result could have been reached in so short a while.96

This was largely true. Cattle and hogs roaming over the land did tend to degrade the quality over time, and farmers were justified in their concerns that this would result in lands that were in poorer condition. In fact, some farmers attributed rising land prices to the enactment of stock laws, and T. J. Ingraham—a farmer from Eatonton, Georgia—claimed that his county’s stock law

“has been the cause of lands of the county increasing in price over twenty-five per cent.”97

Not all rural Southerners saw the effects of stock laws in such a positive light. There were many people who believed that region’s commons should be kept open for their stock, and that traditional rights to these areas should not be infringed upon because they were a key part of a diversified, subsistence economy. For instance, in a letter to the editor of South Carolina’s

Orangeburg Times, a farmer claimed that making farmers fence their stock would only enrich

95 J. P. Reese, “The Stock Law in Coweta,” Atlanta Constitution 29 July 1882: 2. Reprinted from the Marietta Journal. 96“Putnam’s Prosperity,” Atlanta Constitution, 15 October 1882: 10. 97 T.J. Ingraham, “Putnam’s Eatonton,” Atlanta Constitution, 19 June 1884: 2.

53 “the capitalists of the country,” and would disproportionately hurt the area’s poor farmers. The author claimed that “I see no good grounds offered why we should abolish our present fence law, except the scarcity of timber in some sections.” The correspondent charged that other solutions were possible, however, by arguing that in areas suffering from timber scarcity farmers should

“substitute lumber for rails, or write on and get the hedging plant, that is said to make a fence that a rabbit cannot penetrate and will last for ages if properly attended to.”98 The fact that such an ardent opponent of new fence laws even admitted that there was a scarcity of timber—one of the key arguments of the law’s advocates—suggests that ideas about the need for conservation did have some traction in the Reconstruction-era South.

Although Steven Hahn acknowledges that “the concern for conservation and agricultural rehabilitation were quite genuine,” he and other historians still tend to see stock laws primarily as a means of social control targeted at poor white and African American farmers.99 It is true that stock laws disproportionately affected subsistence people on the margins of postbellum society, and were often intended to do just this. Yet viewing them simply as a means of social control misses a key point. The reason that clashes over stock laws were mostly waged in the pages of rural weeklies was that these laws were typically local-option legislation that required a county- wide referendum. The margin of victory or defeat in these elections was often razor-thin. For instance, in an 1891 stock law referendum in the Lowell district of Heard County, Georgia, advocates of stock laws won by only three votes, only to have the election given to their opponents after charges of voting fraud.100 In this context, letters and editorials published in

Southern newspapers were attempts to convince undecided voters about the merits, or lack thereof, of these laws. The prevalence with which supporters of the laws pushed the need to

98 “The Fence Law Question,” Orangeburg Times [Orangeburg, SC], 14 April 1881: 1. 99 Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging,” 46. 100 James C. Bonner, Georgia’s Last Frontier: The Development of Carroll County (1971; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 143.

54 conserve the region’s resources suggests that whether or not the authors themselves believed it was important an important issue, they thought their audience—which was largely made up of small farmers—would. Ideas the need to conserve natural resources were beginning to gain traction in the South, and influenced conflicts over a variety of local issues.

In a broader context, the attempts of landed elites in Georgia and other Southern states to enact stock laws followed established patterns of rural conservation. Throughout the late- nineteenth century regulations on the cutting of timber, fishing, and hunting were imposed on rural communities ranging from white backwoodsmen in Pennsylvania and the Adirondack

Mountains to Native Americans living in Yellowstone and near the Grand Canyon. These measures often intentionally transformed these people’s lives and relationship to the land. Former commons areas were transformed into off-limits reserves for the purposes of conservation, and spikes in illegal burning, squatting, and poaching suggest that many local communities bucked these efforts.101 Although there was certainly a racial and class element in new stock and fence laws, the justifications of conservation can therefore not simply be written off as rhetoric.

Conservation was an issue that Southerners were beginning to confront, and the actions of landed elites reflect how intertwined visions for economic development always were with ideas about resource use and social order.

***

By the twentieth century, these burgeoning local and state efforts were increasingly shaped by a broader regional and national discourse about the merits of the conservation of natural resources. Conservation was discussed in the pages of trade journals, local and regional newspapers, at political gatherings, on state and private demonstration farms, in displays at

101 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See also Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

55 agricultural and industrial fairs, during speeches, and in the halls of state legislatures throughout the South. Ideas about conservation as well as examples from the rest of the world—both positive and negative—mingled with Southern traditions of resource use and shaped region-wide clashes over the best ways to use the region’s natural resources in building a new economy.

Indeed, by the twentieth century many conservationists—both within and outside the region—perceived the South as perhaps the most natural arena for conservation in the United

States. Because the region’s economic development had been delayed by the structure of its antebellum economy and the Civil War, Southerners were dealing with the task of building a new economy much later than the rest of the United States, even the West. Many people believed that this not only spared the region’s resources in a unique way, but also gave Southerners a better chance of implementing ideas about conservation into their programs for economic development.

Perhaps the most outspoken advocate of this perspective within the South was a

Georgian, E. L. Worsham. As the state’s official entomologist, Worsham had participated in some of the first scientific studies of the boll weevil in the region, and had helped to develop a new strain of cotton that was resistant to wilt and the boll weevil. Yet Worsham was perhaps most outspoken about the need to conserve the South’s natural resources, and even earned the nickname “The Crusader for Crops” for his efforts. One newspaper noted that Worsham had “for years been charging up and down the South, sounding in clarion tones the call to farmers and planters to arm against the weevil, the wilt, and the countless other forces of waste, decay and inefficiency,” and linked him with the rise of a new South, suggesting that “His is the incarnate voice of the new South, demanding the elimination of waste, more crops, better crops, the higher uses of the land, intensive cultivation, modern scientific methods—these are the things he has preached.”102

102 “Wins Title of ‘The Crusader for Crops,’” Morning Oregonian, 9 August 1914: 3. See also “Cotton to Combat Boll Weevil Pest,” Charlotte Daily Observer [Charlotte, NC], 29 December 1912: 2.

56 After becoming involved with the first National Conservation Congress in 1909,

Worsham was convinced of the value of conserving resources, and used his position as state entomologist to advocate for a broad program of conservation for the South. While speaking before the Southern Conservation Congress in 1910, he acknowledged that “The South has had many hard struggles,” but argued that “she has succeeded because of her rich gifts in natural resources. She had the privilege to draw upon these to aid her on the road to prosperity.”

Although the South’s “forefathers proceeded with the idea that our vast resources were inexhaustible,” Worsham understood that this path was no longer tenable, especially because

Southern reliance on natural resources was only increasing. Yet he believed that conservation offered Southerners a way to achieve a more long-lasting prosperity than was possible under old regimes of resource use, and declared that “The resources that are still ours can be developed in such a way that will bring the greatest possible good to all the people. With all what nature has done for us this should be one of the richest spots of the earth. The right kind of conservation, conservation that carries with it the right kind of development, will make the south the most prosperous and the most beautiful section of all the world in which to live.”103 Here was a mix of boosterish ideas about abundant natural resources, a George Perkins Marsh-like awareness of resource depletion, and the tenets of utilitarian conservation—all wrapped up into a coherent and appealing vision for the South’s future.

The claims of Worsham and others within the South that the region was well-suited for conservation were echoed by major public figures on the national scene. For instance, while speaking before the Southern Conservation Congress in Atlanta Theodore Roosevelt predicted that “No portion of our country is going to show a greater rate of development, and only one or

103 As quoted in “Southern Conservationists Tell of Needs of the South,” The Lumber Trade Journal, 15 October 1910: 121.

57 two small portions of it are growing at the same rate of development, as the South will show in the course of the next thirty or forty years,” and he implored Southerners

to profit by the mistakes that have been made elsewhere and to see that this marvelous development, this extraordinary growth of the new South, takes place in such fashion that it shall represent not a mere exploitation of territory, not a mere feverish growth in wealth and luxuriousness on a honeycomb foundation of morality and good judgment, but that it represents a solid and abiding and enduring prosperity and growth which shall not only be great but permanent; a growth in business, which shall mean that hand in hand with the increase in business energy goes a growth of business morality; and a growth in the use of natural resources which shall mean that, while you get all possible use out of them in the present, you so handle them that you will leave your land as a heritage to your children, increased and not impaired in permanent value.104

Gifford Pinchot similarly claimed that “The South needs conservation more than any other section of the country, possibly. At the present time she has an abundance of almost everything she needs and so has a chance to save these resources for future generations. In some sections the resources are almost gone and it is almost too late for conservation to play any important part, especially in comparison to what it can do here.”105 Although contemporary scholars often see conservation and Southern development as mutually exclusive, by the twentieth century it was widely regarded as the region perhaps best poised to fully take advantage of ideals of conservation.

By the time that Knoxville’s businessmen were hard at work organizing the nation’s first

Conservation Exposition in 1913, hundreds of the South’s public officials and business leaders had participated in regional and national meetings devoted to conservation. In this context, the

Conservation Exposition was not the beginning, but the product of years of engagement with issues of conservation among a subset of Southerners. Indeed, these meetings gave attendees a chance to learn about the tenets of conservation and discuss their application to their particular

104 “Addresses at the Southern Conservation Congress,” American Lumberman, 15 October 1910: 53. 105 “Need of the South for Practical Conservation,” The Lumber Trade Journal, 15 October 1910: 122.

58 home state. Ultimately, they created a coherent group of public officials and businesspeople within the region who were invested in conservation, and in applying it to the South.

Southern participation in national conservation meetings began with the 1908 Conference of Governors, called to meet at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt and W. J.

McGee—a member of the Inland Waterways Commission. Although initially intended to get feedback on water resources in each state, the agenda of the conference was broadened to focus on the conservation of natural resources writ large. The conference brought together state leaders and representatives from a variety of national organizations to consider “the use and conservation of the mineral resources, the resources of land, and the resources of water in every part of our territory.”106 Southerners were prominent. Over forty representatives from the South actively participated in the conference, including the governors of Virginia, South Carolina, North

Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas and Alabama as well as representatives from a number of trade associations and farmers’ organizations based in the South. The chairman of the conference, Newton Blanchard, was the governor of Louisiana, and another member of the executive committee, Martin F. Ansel, was the governor of South Carolina.107 Just one year later, over twenty percent of the delegates to the National Conservation Commission were from the

South. The Commission emerged out of the suggestions of the White House Conference, and was intended to conduct a comprehensive survey of the nation’s resources and provide suggestions about their management.108 By 1910 Southerners were a fixture at national meetings about conservation, and the president of the National Conservation Congress in St. Paul even commented that “Some of our best support and a number of the largest and most enthusiastic delegations at the conference came from Southern States. The interest which the delegates

106 Proceedings of a Conference of Governors (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), x; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 127-30. 107 Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, xix-xxxi. 108 National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission, February 1909 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), 28-35.

59 manifested in the proceedings was intense, and they gave their hearty co-operation to all the propositions which were made.”109

Groups of Southerners even held regional meetings to deal specifically with the particulars of conservation in the South. Perhaps the best example was the Southern Conservation

Congress, which was first held in New Orleans in 1909. At the behest of Governor Jared Sanders of Louisiana—the state with perhaps the most active interest in conservation—the conference brought together the governors and conservation commissioners from sixteen Southern and

Western states, lumbermen, municipal groups, legislators, and representatives from each parish in

Louisiana to discuss the ins and outs of conservation and to urge legislatures throughout the region to pass laws “uniformly for the preservation and replanting of timber lands.”110 The motto of the conference, “Unless you preserve the timber there will be no rivers,” suggests a focus on forestry, but delegates also discussed the conservation of water, minerals and other natural resources. Although Southern in scope, then, the Southern Conservation Congress had strong ties to the broader national conservation movement, and keynote speakers included Gifford Pinchot, the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of War, and the president of the National Conservation

Congress, among others.111 The following year the Congress met in Atlanta, and the five hundred delegates present heard speeches from Theodore Roosevelt, Hoke Smith, Gifford Pinchot, and

Henry S. Graves, the nation’s Chief Forester.112 Ultimately, the Southern Conservation Congress was short-lived—it seems to have disappeared in 1913 with Knoxville’s National Conservation

Exposition—but it brought together the region’s most ardent advocates of conservation and provided a forum for them to consider the best ways of using Southern resources.

109 ‘“Conservation’ and—What?,” Macon Daily Telegraph [Macon, GA], 22 September 1910: 4. 110 “Southern Conservation” Daily Picayune [New Orleans, LA], 17 October 1909: 9. 111 S. N. D. North, ed. The American Yearbook: A Record of Events and Progress, 1910 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1911), 299; “Conservation of Forests,” Galveston Daily News, 1 November 1909: 7; “One Thousand Delegates for Conservation Congress,” Daily Picayune [New Orleans, LA], 29 October 1909: 4. 112 “Pinchot and T. R. To Speak at South’s Conservation Congress,” Des Moines Daily News [Des Moines, IA], 21 September 1910: 3.

60 By 1911 the tenets of conservation were even being discussed in forums that were organized by developmental groups in the region. The inroads that conservation was making in the South were perhaps most evident in the 1911 meeting of the Southern Commercial

Congress—an organization of businesspeople from civic and municipal organizations throughout the South. Ever since its reorganization in 1908, the Southern Commercial Congress had focused on publicizing the region’s resources in order to attract capitalists and immigrants from outside the region. By their 1911 annual meeting, however, conservation was an important part of their vision for the South’s future. After hearing from speakers about the prospects for conservation in the South, the delegates adopted a resolution calling on “each southern state…to make more ample provisions for investigations looking to the most efficient development in agriculture and mining as its two great foundation industries.”113

As should be evident from the participation of members of the Southern Commercial

Congress, many of the same groups of businesspeople, journalists and public officials calling for the development of Southern resources were also the most vocal in urging their conservation. The attendees at these conferences were overwhelmingly drawn from the region’s middle- and upper- class urban business leaders and public officials. Glancing at the Southern attendees of the White

House Governors’ Conference in 1908 reveals several planters, a textile magnate, insurance agent, state geologist, the secretary of the Appalachian National Forest Association, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, the superintendent of education for the city of

Columbus, Georgia, the president of Kentucky’s St. Bernard Coal Company, a leather merchant, and the Vice President of the Florida East Coast Canal. Also attending was a cotton broker, the clerk of the federal court in Little Rock, a real estate lawyer, a judge from the circuit court of

113 Southern Commercial Congress, A Brief Survey of the Activities of the Southern Commercial Congress (Washington: National Cooperating Committee of the Southern Commercial Congress, 1922), 1-2; “Sectional Meetings of Great Commercial Congress Prolific in Weighty and Far-Reaching Discussions,” The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 11 March 1911: 4.

61 Mississippi, and a bevy of lawyers.114 The composition of other meetings devoted to conservation was similar, reflecting the strong support for conservation measures among the region’s emerging middle- and upper-class business elite.

Women’s groups also provided staunch support and publicity for conservation in the

South. Since the late-nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class women’s organizations throughout the nation had actively participated in efforts to conserve natural resources.115 Civic and literary groups throughout the South frequently organized conservation committees, and reported to their members on both regional and national conservation issues. Women’s groups also helped to spread ideas about conservation throughout the region. Indeed, by 1909 one of

Georgia’s delegates to the second annual Conservation Congress claimed that “I don’t know how it is in the North; but with us the women are the moulders [sic] of sentiment, and they have been fighting in this movement for a number of years.”116 In 1908 the Alabama Federation of

Women’s Clubs helped to convince Enos Mills to tour Alabama and popularize the need for conservation.117 Besides the estimated twenty-five thousand women helping to support the

Southern Conservation Congress, one of the keynote speakers was Mrs. Hoyle Tompkies.

Tompkies was the president of the Women’s National Rivers and Harbors Congress, and her address was met with “enthusiastic favor” by the delegates to the congress.118 Sometimes women even became activists. Perhaps the best example is Helen Dortch Longstreet—the widow of famed Confederate general James Longstreet—who formed the Tallulah Falls Conservation

Association in 1911 to fight the proposed damming of the Tallulah Falls Gorge by the Georgia

114 Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, xix-xxxi. 115 Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1996), 109-36. 116 Addresses and Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington: National Conservation Congress, 1911), 325-26. 117 “Alabama Forests,” The Southern Lumberman LIV, No. 647 (February 15, 1908): 39. 118 “Southern Conservation Congress,” Dallas Morning News [Dallas, TX], 2 November 1909: 11.

62 Power Company.119 By 1921, John S. Holmes—the secretary to the Southern Forestry

Congress—wrote that the region’s women “have shown a large interest in public questions and the subject of the conservation of our natural resources,” and declared that “We are counting upon the club women to take the lead in bringing about better conditions.”120

The enthusiasm of the South’s businesspeople and public officials about conservation was largely because there was little in the doctrine of utilitarian conservation that the region’s business leaders and public officials could find objectionable. To be clear, there were few people in the South—and the nation more broadly—who sought the preservation of natural resources for anything but economic purposes. Yet as Albert Cowdrey has suggested, “there was much in the

Progressive conservation movement that sang sweetly to southern ears,” and the economic arguments frequently used to justify conservation should not detract from the overall message of

Southern conservationists.121 Indeed, Southern representatives frequently spoke out in favor of conservation, but articulated distinctly utilitarian ways of understanding the nation’s resources. In the eyes of businesspeople and policy makers throughout the South, it was not feasible for the

Southern states to pursue widespread programs of resource conservation which limited the ability of these states to promote economic development, and their vision of conservation’s place in the

South was always subject to their understanding of the South’s desperate need for economic development.

To be sure, there was much in the Southern attitude toward economic development that made Southern officials partial to conservation. Boosters were never of one mind when it came to the best ways of using the region’s resources, but few believed that short-term profits should always win out over long-term solutions. Although C. Vann Woodward suggests that the

119 Andrew Beecher McAllister, “’A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride’: Tourism, Industrialization, and Conservation at Tallulah Falls, Georgia, 1820-1915” (M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, 2002), 58-85; E. Merton Coulter, “Tallulah Falls, Georgia’s Natural Wonder, From Creation To Destruction, Part II,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 47, No. 3 (September 1963), 263-71. 120 “Forestry Congress Delegates Names by President Hayes,” Atlanta Constitution, 3 July 1921: 26. 121 Albert Cowdrey, This Land, This South, quote p. 135, 135-41.

63 speeches and writings of Grady and others urging the development about Southern resources were “one long hymn of invocation to preemption and exploitation,” this is actually a caricature.122 Few boosters mentioned conservation in their vision for the South, though they consistently talked about the need to “properly” use the region’s resources. In editorials and speeches throughout the region, they urged the South’s farmers, industrialists, and policy makers to promote “efficient” and “permanent” uses of natural resources. Even during Reconstruction, many Southerners were promoting the need for the South’s resources to “undergo a permanent development.”123 For instance, in 1870 a newspaper in South Carolina claimed that a nation’s

“agricultural resources” would only result in prosperity when these resources were “fully and skillfully developed, economically and judiciously used.” The paper concluded that “however rich it may be in natural resources of an agricultural character, whose people, through ignorance, indolence or any other cause, fail to develop them properly and judiciously, will remain poor, dependent and insignificant, are propositions which the people of the South are beginning to comprehend and appreciate.”124 Even Henry W. Grady suggested that unchecked development was not in the best interests of the region. Grady claimed that “No people ever held larger stewardship than the people of the South….It is theirs to produce and enlarge the crop of their staple that largely clothes the world. It is theirs to conserve and develop the final and fullest supply of coal and iron, and to furnish from their enormous forests the lumber and hard woods to meet the world’s demand until exhausted areas can be recovered.”125

Southern public officials had always been interested in economic efficiency, which translated easily into support for resource conservation. For instance, in 1902 one writer predicted that “the greater efficiency in utilizing raw materials will enlarge the market for them as well as

122 C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, 90. 123 “Missouri,” Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, 20 October 1868: 1. 124 W. H., “The Oconee Agricultural College,” Keowee Courier, 18 November 1870: 1. 125 Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York: Robert Bonner’s Sons, 1890), 144-45.

64 bring an enhanced price both to the manufacturer and the agriculturalist, the miner and the lumberman.”126 Philip Alexander Bruce, the first historian to write about the New South, concluded that although Southern resources were no longer being wasted by sitting idle their development was hamstrung by a lack of local markets for the South’s “coal, minerals, and lumber.” Bruce predicted that “The draft for outside consumption on the resources in these respects is quite sure to diminish them to an extent that will be seriously felt at a future time when the South shall have become, perhaps, the most important manufacturing community on the globe,” and concluded that “This is the only phase of the recent growth of this part of the Union which in the end may lead to injurious consequences. Enormous as are the elements of natural wealth possessed by the South, her wisest economical policy from the point of view of her ultimate needs would seem to be to retain for her own future use a larger proportion of certain of these raw materials than she is doing, or to make greater immediate use of them by the employment of more considerable amounts of foreign capital in extending her present manufactures.”127

Yet ideas about waste were perhaps best outlined by Richard Edmonds—the editor of the popular Manufacturers’ Record—in a 1904 article entitled “The Utilization of Southern Wastes.”

Like others throughout the region, Edmonds claimed that the inefficiency of the plantation system had opened the door for the South, “with its natural resources lying fallow,” to learn from the

“costly industrial experiments” made in other sections. Edmonds predicted that the South’s development would be facilitated by this experience, and noted that the region was “in a position to profit by the experience elsewhere without any great loss of time and money, or waste of energy and material.”128 He listed a number of developing Southern enterprises that he believed

126 “Resources and Progress of the South,” Bankers’ Magazine 65, No. 4 (October 1902): 440. 127 Philip Alexander Bruce, The Rise of the New South (Philadelphia: George Barrie’s Sons, 1905), 462. 128 Richard H. Edmonds, “The Utilization of Southern Wastes,” Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 1 (February 1904), 163-64.

65 were indicative of the region’s future, including the increasing use of cottonseed in the manufacture of commercial fertilizers, less wasteful methods of extracting turpentine from pine trees, and the chemical processing of “dried pine knots, stumps, and the waste of cut-over lands.”

Edmonds’ preference for enterprises that used previously-wasted raw materials translated easily into a rationale for conservation, as is evidenced by his support for land reclamation, scientific forestry, and the use of the South’s waterpowers—all hallmarks of conservationist thinking.

Indeed, he lamented that “the South has not been free from the wasteful methods in handling its timber that have desolated vast regions elsewhere,” but argued that scientific forestry would help use the region’s trees for their long-term uses.129

As utilitarian conservation became compelling to more people throughout the region and nation throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, representatives from the South spoke out forcefully in favor of it. These public officials and businesspeople articulated a vision of conservation that was always built around their perceptions of what would benefit the Southern economy, and what would be the best use of Southern resources. Hoke Smith, the governor of

Georgia and former Secretary of the Interior, provided perhaps the most comprehensive justification for conservation in the South. While speaking before the National Conservation

Commission in February of 1909, Smith argued that conservation was a key component in the

South’s economic development, but claimed that conservation should never be “limited merely to the preservation of what we have.” He argued that “we are not ready in Georgia and Alabama to stop mining just to let Minnesota, which State can not compete with our efforts, have a chance,” and concluded that “ I believe that as speedily as possible the resources of our country should be brought into active use, provided that use is made without waste.” To Smith’s mind, eliminating waste was key, and he hoped that a study of Georgia’s resources along with increasing collaboration between scientists, property-owners, and businesspeople would “stimulate the best

129 Richard H. Edmonds, “The Utilization of Southern Wastes,” 166-67.

66 possible use of our mineral wealth and material resources. Substitutes will be found for things now wasted by their use. Less expensive and less valuable material will be substituted in use for commodities of larger value. The resources of our nation will be conserved by that knowledge and intelligent use which will make them tell for the most when used.” Smith concluded with a reiteration of his entire vision of conservation: “Knowing what we have all over the land, conservation will come, not from a lessening of activity, but from a quickening of those forces in the best possible way, with the best results, due to the knowledge of what we have, and how to use what we have.”130 Although his biographer claims that Smith “talked a great deal [in the field of conservation] but accomplished relatively little” while Secretary of the Interior, he was influential in articulating a distinctly Southern vision for conservation.131

Other Southerners echoed the ideas of Smith. Edmond F. Noel—the governor of

Mississippi—lamented that his state’s natural resources had been used in short-sighted ways for many years. Noel defined “Intelligent and successful farming and stock raising” as “putting land and labor to the most permanently profitable use, profitable in its broadest sense, as affecting both present and future generations.”132 In 1910 William W. Finley—the president of the Southern

Railway and a native of Pass Christian, Mississippi—told the delegates to the second annual

National Conservation Congress that “I am not sure that the expression ‘Conservation of natural resources’ is everywhere understood in its broadest sense. I think to some minds it conveys only the narrow idea of the withdrawal from present use of some part of those resources.” While this might be appropriate in some contexts, Finley claimed that “I do not believe there is much occasion for its application in the part of the United States south of the Ohio and Potomac rivers and east of the Mississippi.” Yet he argued that the “The South is interested in the application of

130 National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission, February 1909 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), 161-62, 169-70. 131 Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 88. 132 National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission, February 1909 , 169-70.

67 Conservation to the wise use to its soils, its timber, and its streams.” Because of his experience with the unique intricacies of Southern development, Finley concluded that “I would define the type of ‘Conservation of natural resources’ that should be applied in that section as being the wise use of those resources. In some cases it may involve a measure of present self-denial….In some cases Conservation may mean the use of resources so as to obtain the maximum present profit, as in the case of soils.”133

Southern public officials and businesspeople even provided crucial support for the use of federal bureaucracy to implement conservation measures, perhaps suggesting more than anything else their commitment to federal programs of conservation. One of the most contentious questions that conservationists and policy makers wrestled with was what the role of the federal government should be. Western representatives often fought against federal attempts to take the lead in conservation measures, claiming that they were a curtailment of state rights.134 Despite over a century of agitation for states’ rights, Southern officials typically supported an active federal presence in conservation. For instance, in 1909 Newton Blanchard—the former governor of Louisiana—spoke out against Western states who were upset that the federal government was trying to regulate their public lands. Blanchard argued that “The natural resources of the United

States belong to all the people, not alone to those who happen to live in the States where what is left of the public domain is principally situated together.” Instead, Blanchard made a claim that conservation transcended regions, and declared that “you and I have just as much concern and interest and proprietorship in the natural resources on and in and springing from the public domain in Wyoming, in Montana, in Idaho, and in other western States, as have the people of

133 Addresses and Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington: National Conservation Congress, 1911), 135. For more on Finley see Burke Davis, The Southern Railway: Road of the Innovators (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 45-52. 134 J. Leonard Bates, “Fulfilling American Democracy: The Conservation Movement, 1907 to 1921,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, No. 1 (June 1957), 42-43, 50-54; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 256-60.

68 those States themselves.” As a result, he concluded that “the power that should lead in this movement is the mighty power of the Federal Government.”135

This support for federal intervention had limits, however, and most Southerners were only willing to support conservation as long as it was divorced from any overt political implications. For instance, in 1910 Bernard N. Baker—the former president of the National

Conservation Congress—told a newspaper that he hoped that conservation would help split apart the Democratic South. Baker claimed that

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the South has manifested such a keen interest in a national policy which has been inaugurated by the Republican party. Hitherto, they have either adopted an indifferent attitude or have shown distinct antagonism….But not that they have seen fit to support this Republican policy, it is not too much to hope and believe that they will support other policies, that their votes will soon be cast on measures and principles, and not in a blind partisan way as now. President Taft did a great deal in his campaign to break the Solid South, but this interest in conservation has done more.136

Yet Southerners found these statements troubling. Perhaps the clearest expression of this came from E. L. Worsham, who directly responded to Baker by claiming that conservation was not political. Although he acknowledged that it emerged from a Republican administration, Worsham claimed that conservation “in its very nature must be, of a non-partisan description.” He instead argued that “Speaking of conservation in a broad sense from the agricultural, mineral, water power and forestry phases, we have as great a stake at issue as the west and east. The south would, I believe favor sensible policies in this matter, whether they originated with a republication, a democrat, a populist or a socialist administration.”137

Ultimately, twentieth-century conservation efforts in the South were very much intertwined with broader ideas about the need for progressive reforms, and reflected many of the traits unique to Southern progressivism. By the 1920s efforts by public officials and

135 National Conservation Congress, Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington: National Conservation Congress, 1911), 122. 136 ‘“Conservation’ and—What?,” Macon Daily Telegraph, 22 September 1910: 4. 137 “Conservation Had No Politics Within It,” Macon Daily Telegraph, 25 September 1910: 1.

69 businesspeople to foster economic growth had become intertwined with the efforts of these same groups to institute various progressive reforms—creating the complex mix of “boosterism and reform” that George Tindall refers to as “business progressivism.” As Tindall explains, “The business progressive philosophy had deep roots in both the progressive movement and the ‘New

South’ creed of economic development,” and James C. Cobb similarly suggests that it emerged from “The all-out devotion to the cause of growth and the unexamined faith in growth as a panacea for all that ailed the South.”138 Throughout the region, progressive politicians supported such diverse goals and good roads, tax reform, the improvement of public health, education, and the conservation of natural resources. All of these initiatives were driven by an overarching emphasis on promoting economic development, and a commitment to the region’s status quo. 139

The conservation of natural resources fit snugly within this tradition of business progressivism.

Not only did it preserve the status quo, but it perhaps exemplified the combination of reform and boosterism that characterized business progressivism. In many ways, the doctrine of utilitarian conservation in the South spoke to all of these issues, and appealed to both industrialists and planters.140 By the 1920s, then, conservation was not only promoted by a smattering of public officials and businesspeople in the region, but was part and parcel of the South’s economic development.

***

These two narratives—one which promoted the South’s inexhaustible resources and one which promoted the nation’s exhaustible resources—were intertwined, and both shaped Southern economic development in important ways. As Southerners sought to determine what the future of the region’s new economy would be, they frequently ranged from one extreme to the other.

138 James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 59. 139 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 233, 223-53; James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 59, 56-60. See also George B. Tindall, “Business Progressivism: Southern Politics in the Twenties,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (Winter 1963). 140 James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 56.

70 Although neither conservation nor development was fully implemented in the region, the tension between abundance and scarcity seen in these two narratives shaped the way that people throughout the South thought about economic development. Yet these two perspectives were never as incompatible as they might seem. The reality is that boosterish claims that the South was home to abundant natural resources and claims that the region was the best arena for conservation were both myths—myths that were both intended to promote Southern economic development. In this context, the embrace of conservation among the South’s public officials and businesspeople was not out of any overt love of “nature,” but instead was a calculated strategy to achieve long- term economic growth in a region that desperately needed it.

Chapter 2

Touring a New South

In the summer of 1908, William W. Finley—president of the Southern Railway—gave the keynote speech at the annual banquet of the Board of Trade in Asheville, North Carolina.

Through his comments, Finley hoped to provide municipal leaders with his vision of the best

“opportunities” for economic development in Asheville and western North Carolina. By 1908, tourism was a major part of the area’s economy, and it is not surprising that he opened by praising its role in local development. In a capital-poor region, tourists provided needed cash, and

Finley—like many other people—believed that the region’s climate, natural resources, and unique scenic attractions made the southern Appalachians particularly suitable for tourism.1

Yet for the majority of his speech, Finley urged Asheville’s leaders not to pursue tourism at the expense of other potentially lucrative opportunities. He argued that the region’s abundant natural resources—the very resources which made it so appealing to tourists—destined the area for an even more expansive industrial and agricultural development, and declared that

the same mild summers and bracing but not rigorous winters that attract the health and pleasure seeker insure the comfort of those engaged in all kinds of activity. The same mountains that are the principal features of your landscapes of entrancing beauty carry on their surfaces vast stores of timber wealth and beneath their soil are practically inexhaustible mineral resources of great variety. The same mountain streams that attract the disciples of Isaak Walton are capable of supplying light and power to this entire region. The same valleys that add variety to your mountain scenery are capable of yielding in abundance most of the agricultural products of the temperate zone. The same climatic conditions and pure drinking water that are favorable to human health make this an ideal region for all varieties of domestic animals, and one in which cattle…sheep, horses, mules, hogs, and poultry thrive.2

1 “Mr. Finley at Asheville,” Charlotte Daily Observer, 7 July 1908: 1. For the full text of Finley’s speech, see William W. Finley, “Reply of W. W. Finley, President, Southern Railway Company, to Toast at a Banquet of the Asheville Board of Trade, at Asheville, N. C., July 6, 1908,” 1-4. 2 “Mr. Finley at Asheville,” 1.

72

Finley was one of the region’s most skilled boosters, but his comments exposed a seeming paradox at the heart of tourist development in the New South. Although tourism relies on many of the same natural resources as other enterprises, it uses them in very different ways, often necessitating difficult decisions about which enterprises should be given priority to these resources.3

At the time, Asheville’s leaders were wrestling with this very dilemma, and Finley’s comments came in the midst of an almost decade-long conflict between tourist boosters and industrialists over how the natural resources of the southern Appalachians should be used.

Advocates of tourism claimed that federal protection in the form of a national park was needed to prevent the destruction of the region’s scenic resources at the hands of corporations engaged in resource extraction. Industrialists argued that federal involvement would hurt their business and stunt the region’s economic growth. Finley’s audience was decidedly in favor of a national park, and Asheville’s Board of Trade had campaigned for federal protection of local forests for years.4

Yet Finley sidestepped this controversy by suggesting that tourism could coexist with these other enterprises. He claimed, for instance, that local farmers “are vitally interested in the increase in the number of tourists and permanent residents” who would create vibrant markets for agricultural products.5 Although Finley understood that there were instances in which “individual interests clash,” ultimately he did not believe that tourism and other forms of economic development were mutually exclusive.”6

3 For instance, Hal Rothman notes that most tourists are attracted by “romanticized visions of the…natural world,” and the tourist industry often promotes ways of using natural resources that embrace their aesthetic, healthful, or recreational aspects. See Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 13. 4 Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 58. 5 William W. Finley, “Reply of W. W. Finley,” 1. 6 William W. Finley, “Reply of W. W. Finley,” 4.

73 Despite Finley’s optimism about the future of Asheville and western North Carolina, his comments suggest that the place of tourism in the New South economy was contingent on decisions about how the region’s natural resources should be used. These questions were unsettled even in the first decades of the twentieth century. Finley was not alone in believing that tourism and other forms of economic development could coexist, however. Like Finley, many tourist promoters throughout the region articulated a vision for the South’s economic development that would allow tourism and other enterprises to share the region’s abundant natural resources.7

***

Tourism has recently taken its place in the historical literature on the South alongside more traditional enterprises, and many scholars would agree with C. Brendan Martin that

“tourism was as much a part of the New South economic development as logging camps, steel factories, textile mills, and mining camps.”8 Despite this recent enthusiasm for tourism, historians have been more interested in how it transformed perceptions of Southerners or Southern culture than its place in the New South economic development.9 Environmental historians have added

7 William W. Finley, “Reply of W. W. Finley,” 4. 8 C. Brendan Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 24. 9 See Elizabeth Atwood, “’Saratoga of the South’: Tourism in Luray, Virginia, 1878-1905,” in The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth Century Virginia, Eds. Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 157-72; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 66-92; John T. Foster, Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster, Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); Larry R. Youngs, “Lifestyle Enclaves: Winter Resorts in the South Atlantic States, 1870-1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2001); Richard D. Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); C. Brendan Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007); Rebecca Cawood McIntyre, Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Tracy J. Revels, Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism

74 new dimensions to work on tourism and the South, but have not made tourism central to their analyses of the South—except when it acted as a brake to development in areas being considered for federal protection.10 Few scholars have assessed the role that tourism played in shaping

Southern discussions of economic development, and most historians simply characterize it as incompatible with—or at least separate from—the rapid agricultural and industrial development that most Southern boosters desired. Tourism is therefore either examined in isolation, or relegated to the margins of the Southern economy—except in popular resort areas like Florida or the southern Appalachians. Most scholars, then, agree with Edward Ayers, who suggests that tourism was important in the New South mainly because it offered “a way for places that had languished for years with unpromising agriculture to finally come into their own.”11

Yet this was not how many Southerners hoped that tourism would function, and divisions between tourism and other enterprises were never as sharp as scholars suggest. Taking a wider

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Karen L. Cox, Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). 10 See Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Mart A. Stewart “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscapes on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 216-24; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Landscape: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Daniel S. Pierce, The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000); Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 11 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 60-61. For a similar view expression of tourism’s place in the New South economy see Elizabeth Atwood, “’Saratoga of the South’: Tourism in Luray, Virginia, 1878-1905,” 157-72. The major exception to this trend is Reiko Margarita Hillyer, who examines the architecture of Southern cities to show how boosters were using tourism to attract northern capital into the region. Hillyer does not examine how debates over natural resource use shaped tourism in the South, however. See Reiko Margarita Hillyer, “Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism and Memory in the New South, 1870-1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2007). See also Stephen Wallace Taylor, The New South’s New Frontier: A Social History of Economic Development in Southwestern North Carolina (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Harvey K. Newman, Southern Hospitality. Jamie Winders, “Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865-1880,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, No. 2 (2005): 400-03.

75 perspective on the place of tourism reveals a more complicated story about how it shaped the

New South economy and affected the choices about economic development that many

Southerners made. Although there were sporadic clashes over whether tourism or other enterprises were more appropriate for the New South, few Southerners saw the issue in such either/or terms until well into the twentieth century. Like William W. Finley, most advocates of tourism in the New South instead believed that tourism was an ends to other means. For these promoters, it offered an opportunity to publicize the South’s latent natural resources and attract the outside capital and expertise needed for successful economic development. As a result, tourist promoters throughout the South hitched tourism to their larger imperatives of agricultural and industrial development, by inviting tourists to participate in the region’s economic reimagining.

To do so, they not only called attention to the region’s climate and scenery, but to latent natural resources that could be used as raw materials for agricultural or industrial production. Part of this appeal involved creating elaborate hotels and resorts that would attract potential investors and make business and pleasure trips into the South comfortable. As Reiko Hillyer suggests, tourist boosters designed the region’s “built environment” to dissociate the South from its plantation and Confederate past, and to create an atmosphere that would attract northern capital investment in the region.12 Yet tourist boosters also focused a great deal of attention on the region’s latent natural resources, and how they could be profitably used. By the twentieth century, however, conflicts over natural resources became more common, as tourism became a stand- alone industry throughout parts of the South.

***

Tourism was not new to the postbellum South. Since the late-eighteenth century, wealthy

Americans had traveled to resorts at the seashore, mountains, and natural springs to escape the diseases that scoured plantations and cities during the summer. Health resorts like Flat Rock,

12 See Reiko Margarita Hillyer, “Designing Dixie.”

76 North Carolina and Aiken, South Carolina became refuges for wealthy planters from Lowcountry

South Carolina and Georgia, and provided opportunities for recreation and social interaction.

Natural wonders like Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave or Virginia’s Natural Bridge were also popular destinations for antebellum travelers North and South, and historian John Sears argues that they were infused with ideas about American nationalism and “played a powerful role in America’s invention of itself as a culture.”13 Travel to health resorts and scenic places was facilitated by the

“transportation revolution” of the early nineteenth century, which provided travelers with more convenient and comfortable ways of visiting resorts and tourist sites—especially in the form of canals, steamships and railroads. By the 1850s tourists were traveling to sites throughout the nation—primarily health resorts or natural wonders—although these opportunities were reserved for the wealthy.14

Tourist travel was completely halted by the Civil War. Although resorts throughout the rest of the nation quickly regained their footing, those located in the South faced serious difficulties rebuilding after Appomattox. Because the Civil War had thrown the region’s finances into disorder, few Southerners had money to spend on recreational pursuits. Even fewer had capital to invest in hotels or transportation infrastructure. The Panic of 1873 and ensuing depression cut short nascent efforts to build up transportation and tourist infrastructure, and further stunted the growth of the industry. Compounding these problems was the uncertain place of tourism in the Southern economy. Because tourism never had a significant enough presence in the antebellum South to ensure its success after the Civil War, it was unclear what role it would

13 John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4. 14 Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15-44; Thomas A. Chambers, Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Lawrence Fay Brewster, Summer Migrations and Resorts of South Carolina Low-Country Planters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1947); C. Brendan Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword, 1-20. For more on the “transportation revolution” see George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951).

77 play in the region’s new economy. Boosters endlessly championed industrialization and agricultural modernization but said relatively little about tourism, and the wealthy planters who had enjoyed the region’s antebellum resorts were in no position to influence the politics of economic development immediately after the war.

As a result, accommodations for tourists and other travelers remained primitive for years following the Civil War, and the South’s poor system of railroads made travel difficult and uncomfortable. The ramshackle nature of the industry was perhaps best described by Edward

Pollard, who complained as late as 1870 that tourists were scarce among the mountain resorts and mineral springs of Virginia—despite the popularity of these sites prior to the Civil War. Pollard lamented that “scenes…once referred to as wonderful and interesting, have fallen into comparative obscurity, and have for years since the war failed to make their appearance, even in the advertisement columns of the newspapers.”15 The scenes that Pollard described in Virginia were repeated at resorts throughout the South, few of which found their economic footing during the Reconstruction era.

By the 1880s, however, tourism had begun to reestablish itself throughout the South. This was due chiefly to the improvement of railroad infrastructure, and the growth of tourism mirrored the expansion of Southern railroad tracks. After 1877 railroad companies in the South entered what one historian calls “a period of record-breaking railroad prosperity and expansion,” which connected previously isolated resorts to national transportation networks.16 Between 1880 and

1890, Southern railroads built 14,485 miles of new track, and they eliminated the largest physical barrier between North and South by switching to standard gauge in 1886. By 1900 Southern

15 Edward A. Pollard, The Virginia Tourist. Sketches of the Springs and Mountains of Virginia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1870), 14. 16 John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1900, 186.

78 railroad companies had added almost six thousand more miles of track—even in the midst of another economic downturn.17

The rapid expansion of Southern railroads created viable ways of reaching the region’s resorts for the first time, and facilitated a boom in Southern tourism. Resorts in places like

Virginia’s White Sulphur Springs, Asheville, North Carolina, and Tallulah Falls, Georgia quickly became hubs for northern tourists as they were connected to regional and national railroad networks.18 In 1875 journalist Edward King reported that Houston’s “railroad depots are everywhere crowded with negroes, immigrants, tourists, and speculators,” and just eight years later another traveler reported that that “They have three crops in Florida…oranges, vegetables and Yankees. The last is the most profitable.”19 By 1890, tourists were a common sight throughout much of the South, and northern clergyman Henry Field even noted that “Migration to the South at the approach of Winter, has become almost as regular as the migration of birds.”20

As resorts began to flourish and become profitable once again, many different groups vied for a say in how tourist traffic would fit into the larger structure of the new Southern economy. Tourist promoters, boardinghouse owners, burgeoning classes of urban professionals, farmers, journalists, state and local officials, businesspeople, travel agents, and tourists themselves all articulated different visions for the South’s tourist economy, and had different ideas about how it should use the South’s natural resources. Yet railroad officials wielded the most significant influence over the place of tourism in the region’s economy. Railroads dictated which resorts would get rail access, and one scholar writes that this was “the most critical factor

17 Southern railroad construction was faster than every other region in the country, except the West. John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1900, 191-94, 275. 18 Cindy Aron, Working at Play, 52. 19 Edward King, The Great South (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1875), 114; Willard McKinstry, Selections of Editorial Miscellanies and Letters (Fredonia, NY: Censor Printing Office, 1894), 221. 20 Henry M. Field, Bright Skies and Dark Shadows (1890; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), i.

79 in the transformation from fashionable antebellum spas to popular postbellum resorts.”21

Railroads invested considerable sums of money in tourist infrastructure, and in places like Luray,

Virginia and Tybee Island, Georgia even purchased or constructed hotels, pavilions, and other infrastructure they hoped would foster passenger travel.22 Most railroad companies also marshaled their considerable resources toward advertising resorts throughout the South, and their advertisements helped to create perhaps the most pervasive images of the late-nineteenth century

South and its natural resources. Because of this multifaceted influence, railroads could call the shots on which areas were incorporated into the South’s new tourist economy with little interference. Railroads were therefore the dominant force shaping the industry until well into the twentieth century, and company officials incorporated tourism into their overall vision for the transformation of the region’s economy.

Because of their unique role as providers of transportation across multiple states, railroad companies had to consider a much greater range of factors than most tourist boosters in decisions about which uses of Southern natural resources were most appropriate for the region. Railroads carried both passengers and freight, and company officials were vitally interested in increasing both types of traffic. Passenger travel was particularly attractive because it provided a way to overcome the problems of supplying transportation to the South, which was chronically short of capital, had a dispersed rural population, and was reliant on a staple crop economy that provided only seasonal freight traffic.23

Yet railroad officials understood that passenger travel would never be their major source of income. The potential profits from carrying freight were simply much greater than they would

21 C. Brendan Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South, 27. 22 Cindy Aron, Working at Play, 49. 23 For an overview of the challenges facing the development of an extensive and effective system of rail transportation in the South see Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 1-20. See also, John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

80 ever be hauling passengers. One manual of railroad management estimated that seventy percent of all revenues came from freight, while only twenty-five percent came from passenger travel, and these figures only became more skewed in favor of freight over time.24 Even if passenger volume ever approached that of freight, passengers offered much lower potential revenues. For example, in 1888 the Louisville & Nashville Railroad grossed around $1.02 per mile on the average passenger train, and $13.16 per mile on the average freight train.25 Freight cars also had less overhead in the way of maintenance than passenger cars, not including the various amenities that had to be constructed for tourists at stations.26 Most railroad officials echoed the sentiments of the General Freight Agent of the Seaboard Air Line, who claimed that “In order to meet competition of other lines, we must strengthen our position by securing additional tonnage in every possible direction. What this road most needs is additional tonnage,” which he claimed would help “build up our business in Florida.”27 Railroad consolidation in the 1880s made it increasingly necessary to transport higher volumes of traffic, and railroads focused mostly on creating new sources of freight by fostering agricultural and industrial enterprises throughout the region.28

Although passenger travel was less profitable, railroad officials did not ignore it. Instead, they hitched it to their larger strategy of developing agriculture and industry by inviting tourists to

24 Thomas Curtis Clarke, et. al., The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management and Appliances (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889), 180; John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 231. Although Clarke was speaking of railroads generally, his figures hold true for most railroad systems in the South. 25 Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the President and Board of Directors of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company (Louisville: John P. Morton & Company, 1888), 15. 26 For instance, in 1905 the Southern Railway had to pay on average $72.86 per freight car as compared with $975.72 per passenger car for upkeep. See Southern Railway Company, Eleventh Annual Report of the Southern Railway Company, Year Ended June 30, 1905, 18-20. 27 J. M. Barr to John Skelton Williams, 16 September 1902, Series I, Box 1, 1902 A-C, John Skelton Williams Papers, Alderman Memorial Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. [hereafter cited at John Skelton Williams Papers] 28 Maury Klein, “The Strategy of Southern Railroads,” American Historical Review 73, No. 4 (April 1968): 1052-68.

81 participate in—and facilitate—the broader economic development they hoped to foster. Tourists had capital to invest in a region that desperately needed it, and railroad agents blended the typical appeals to tourists based on climate, healthfulness, and scenic beauty with other appeals that stressed the lucrative business opportunities available in developing Southern resources. This appeal was also based on the realities of the railway journey itself. Because tracks were generally located as close as possible to business infrastructure, travelers found themselves staring out of their passenger cars at what one historian terms a “metropolitan corridor” of fields, forests, cityscapes and even industrial establishments. Tourists already had a window seat on Southern economic development—or lack thereof—and promoting business opportunities to visitors was a natural outgrowth of railroads’ overall strategy as well as an acknowledgement of the reality of the tourist experience.29

This is not to say that all railroad lines were equally interested in using tourism as a means to other developmental ends, and support for this strategy varied depending on the type of territory that railroads serviced and vision of company executives. Because of their proximity to

Florida and other popular resorts, railroads on the East Coast, such as the Seaboard Air Line,

Atlantic Coast Line, and Plant System, devoted more resources to building up tourist traffic. Even these roads were dependent on freight revenues, however, and most officials agreed with Milton

H. Smith—the president of the Louisville & Nashville—who reputedly declared that “you can’t make a g- d- cent” from passenger travel.30

Most officials hoped to use tourists for other developmental ends, and—along with other tourist boosters—published countless guidebooks, pamphlets, and periodicals in the years following 1877, most of which combined appeals to tourists, investors and settlers. Railroad

29 John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 3. 30 As quoted in John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1900, 231. See also Maury Klein, History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 331.

82 companies threw considerable sums of money into publicizing the South’s natural resources through passenger and publicity departments. Besides their own publications, railroads forged close ties with newspapers—both through advertising and the dispensing of free passes on their railroad lines.

Like good promoters, railroad officials directed tourists to natural wonders, health resorts, and scenic attractions throughout the South. Yet they also pointed travelers to sites with agricultural and industrial importance or potential in the hopes that people who had come into the region as tourists would stay as settlers or investors. The Union Pacific Railroad’s guide, The

Resources and Attractions of the Texas Panhandle for the Home Seeker, Capitalist, and Tourist, was just one of countless pieces of promotional literature directed toward “tourists, invalids, and settlers,” and railroad companies made little distinction between the three.31 Because of this, promotional materials rarely focused solely on resorts, and often included wide-ranging discussions of the South’s history, climate, scenery, geology, population, travel infrastructure, resorts, opportunities for recreation, and natural resources that could be profitably used in agricultural or industrial activities.32 Although some guides did not pander as blatantly to investors, they nevertheless slipped in not-so-subtle hints. For instance, an 1878 guidebook to

Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina prepared for the Atlanta & Charlotte Air-Line

Railway was intended primarily for “all in search of pleasure or health-restoring resorts or waters.” Yet the guide provided descriptions and statistics about agricultural and industrial resources, and after one such recitation even declared that “With these facts glaring us in the face,

31 George M. Barbour, Florida for tourists, invalids, and settlers (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1882); Union Pacific Railroad Company, The Resources and Attractions of the Texas Panhandle for the Home Seeker, Capitalist, and Tourist (St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernen, 1893). 32 For more on promotional literature relating to tourism, see Anne Barber Harris, “The South As Seen By Travelers, 1865-1880,” 6-7

83 it is but reasonable to suppose, that those who come in our midst are sure to reap a rich harvest of gain for all investments made.”33

Although the overall policy of the railroad was often formulated by officials from outside the region, the promotional materials that most people would have seen were generally written by passenger or freight agents—many of whom were native Southerners and were familiar with the region’s resources and opportunities. A good example is Joseph Buckner Killebrew—a native of

Tennessee and the industrial agent for the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, Killebrew had served as a lawyer, the editor of several agricultural periodicals, agricultural agent for the 1880 census, Tennessee’s first commissioner of agriculture, author of several popular handbooks outlining Tennessee’s natural resources, and the head of the mineral and wood department of Atlanta’s 1881 International

Cotton Exposition. In 1894 Killebrew was hired as immigration agent by the Nashville,

Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad, where he drew on all of this previous experience dealing with the South’s resources to entice immigrants to come into the state.34 Although railroads sometimes hired noted writers—as was the case when the Atlantic Coast Line Railway hired the famed poet Sidney Lanier to write a guidebook to Florida in 1875—they more frequently relied on people like Killebrew, who were native Southerners and familiar with the region’s resources and the best ways to promote them.35

Although it rarely reflected reality, railroad publicity provides a window into the vision that railroad executives had for the South’s economic development and the place of tourism in the new Southern economy. Just as railroad guidebooks in the West linked transcontinental travel

33 Barton & Judson, Guide and Biographical Sketch of Northeastern Georgia and the Carolinas (Atlanta: James P. Harrison & Co., Printers and Binders, 1878), 5, 10. 34 William S. Speer, Sketches of Prominent Tennesseans (1888; Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2003), 82-86; Barbara Hahn, “Paradox of Precision: Bright Tobacco as Technology Transfer, 1880- 1937,” Agricultural History 82, No. 2 (Spring, 2008): 223-24. 35 Sidney Lanier, Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876); Anne Barber Harris, “The South As Seen By Travelers, 1865-1880,” 14. See also Lena E. Jackson, “Sidney Lanier in Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 15, No. 2 (October 1936), 119-21.

84 with the principles of Manifest Destiny, Southern guidebooks linked travel into the South with the process of building a New South.36 Railroads directed tourists to see the South not only as a place of recreation and recuperation, but as a place where visitors could watch and participate in the process of rebuilding the Southern economy.

***

Railroad officials focused their efforts on bringing about agricultural modernization and industrialization by advertising the South’s natural resources, and urging tourists, investors, and settlers to use them in new ways. Unlike much of the developing West, it was impossible to deny that the South was not an untouched wilderness, but was predominately agricultural. Promoters of tourism embraced this, and commonly employed romanticized depictions of the region’s agricultural landscape to attract visitors. Although a Seaboard Air Line pamphlet aimed at people considering a trip to Columbia, South Carolina was mostly focused on sites around the city, the author took pains to note that Columbia was “in the heart of the ‘cotton belt,’ and you can scarcely picture anything more interesting or picturesque than the cotton plantations.” African

Americans were an important part of this landscape, and the railroad romanticized the region’s

African American agricultural laborers. Throughout the pamphlet the Seaboard Air Line published photos of “Darkies in a Tobacco Field,” and even argued that cotton fields were the

“natural environment” of African Americans in the South.37 In 1894 a correspondent to Forest and Stream expounded on the virtues of traveling through Atlanta while en route Chattanooga, noting that “You may lose half a day, but you’ve seen the South, or rather a good part of her.”

The correspondent went on to describe the South’s scenery in terms similar to that of railroad officials, declaring that “just now she’s looking beautiful. Tobacco is being cut, cottonfields are

36 Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 20. 37 Seaboard Air Line Railway Company, Passenger Department, Columbia, SC (New York: Street & Finney, n.d.).

85 white, and the darkies are busy saving ‘fodder’ for the cattle in winter, fields of cane from which sorghum will shortly be crushed, melon patches, and scantily clothed darky children, all go to make a trip to Chattanooga, via Atlanta, always a treat to a Northerner, and an experience that time can never efface.”38

The Seaboard Air Line and other tourist boosters did not want to return to a South dominated by plantations, and railroad companies had especially strong financial incentives to promote agricultural diversification. Yet they understood that romantic depictions of staple crop agriculture—especially cotton—were appealing to many of region’s potential visitors. Indeed, in

1880 German traveler Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg observed that “As a rule the tourist sees some of the specimen plantations of the ‘good old days’ of slavery....The ignorant accordingly amuse themselves with dreams of life on the plantation.”39 As Hesse-Wartegg explained, plantations offered a chance to experience something that visitors could not experience in any other part of the country, though he acknowledged that “However eventful they are, even exciting, conditions in the typical agricultural enterprise contradict such fantasies.”40

Yet by including plantation imagery in their promotional materials, railroad companies conjured up images of the Old South, and participated in a broader movement to craft the myth of the Lost Cause. As a number of scholars have suggested, the Lost Cause was a powerful factor motivating travelers.41 Indeed, Nina Silber notes that “every tourist seemed to yearn for an encounter with something that was distinctly southern,” and tourist boosters sought to capitalize on this by facilitating trips to plantations, battlefields, slave markets, and other sites that were

38 “Chattanooga,” Forest and Stream, 29 September 1894: 282. 39 Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Travels on the Lower Mississippi, 1879-1880, Ed. Frederic Trautmann (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 107. 40 Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Travels on the Lower Mississippi, 1879-1880, 107. 41 Reiko Hillyer, “Designing Dixie,” 118-92, 276-332; Rebecca Cawood McIntyre, Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011). Anne Barber Harris suggests that travel literature helped to perpetuate the “tragic legend” interpretation of Reconstruction. See Anne Barber Harris, “The South As Seen By Travelers, 1865-1880,” 256-66.

86 infused with historical—and distinctly Southern—meanings.42 Railroad officials understood that vestiges of the Civil War and antebellum plantation South could not be experienced anywhere else, and mapped the Lost Cause onto the region’s agricultural landscapes in order to attract tourists who wanted to see remnants of the Old South.43

Although romantic portrayals of life and labor in the New South appealed to many travelers eager to glimpse the Old South plantation lifestyle, they served a deeper purpose in justifying the efforts of boosters to modernize the region. Most New South boosters stressed the need for racial peace—not out of any belief in equality or desire to aid newly freed African

Americans. Instead, they recognized that racial unrest was bad for business. In trying to entice northerners to invest in the region, it was necessary that they made overtures towards guaranteeing equality for African American residents. Yet boosters also could not afford to alienate their Southern supporters, who wanted to continue policies of white supremacy.

Romantic portrayals of the South’s African American laborers thus served a dual purpose: they naturalized black poverty and justified the increasing corpus of Jim Crow laws while maintaining a façade of support for African American equality—the very compromise that Southern development hinged upon.44

Imagery of the Old South also provided a foil for boosters in crafting their “myth” of the

New South, further justifying efforts to overhaul the region’s economy.45 Many boosters argued that the Old South, and specifically slavery, were responsible for the poor state of the region’s economy. Promotional materials often called attention to how the Old South was being replaced by a new South, and stressed that visiting the South provided tourists with an opportunity to see

42 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 76-81, quote p. 76. 43 For an overview of the development of the Lost Cause and its role in shaping ideas about the New South Creed see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 142-74. 44 For more on the racial views of New South boosters see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 119-50. 45 Paul Gaston argues that the New South Creed began as a call to action, but eventually evolved into a myth to cover up persistent Southern underdevelopment. See Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed.

87 the rebirth of an entire region. Although historical sites have always been tourist attractions, the

New South offered tourists something they could not experience anywhere else: the ability to witness an entire region being remade in the image of the North. For instance, a guidebook to

Georgia and Alabama funded by the state of Georgia and two railroad companies downplayed the attractiveness of plantation ruins and other vestiges of the Old South, instead claiming that “the most interesting features of this section are found in the energetic industrial development of the new South, rather than in the decaying landmarks of the old regime.”46

Because agricultural products provided much of the freight for Southern railroads, railroad officials juxtaposed romanticized depictions of agriculture with practical appraisals of the potential contained within the South’s soils. While railroad propaganda romanticized agricultural landscapes and harkened back to the Old South, most companies also promoted methods of practical farming that undermined the entire basis of this Lost Cause imagery through agricultural diversification. For example, a guidebook jointly published by several railroads running through the Chattahoochee Valley described farming conditions along their lines—noting the region’s temperate climate and the nature of the soil. The guidebook claimed that the properties of the soil made it good for planting a variety of crops, which could be profitably raised and marketed.

Though cotton was still the major crop grown in this region, the guide claimed that “progressive” farmers were making crops like corn, sugar cane, wheat, rye, barley, clover, and other grasses pay—relegating cotton to a “surplus crop.” The author even calculated expected yields for various crops from past statistics, and included pictures of farm scenery and labor that were far from romanticized.47 Many railroads even organized their own agricultural extension programs,

46 Atlanta & West Point Railroad Company and The Western Railway of Alabama, The Heart of the South: Along the Line of the Atlanta & West Point R.R. and The Western Railway of Alabama (St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing Company, 1898), 3. 47 Atlanta & West Point Railroad Company and The Western Railway of Alabama, The Heart of the South: Along the Line of the Atlanta & West Point R.R. and The Western Railway of Alabama, 60-4.

88 and used tourist propaganda to publicize the results of extension programs to a wider audience.48

Railroads thus drew both on the imagery of Old South plantation agriculture and New South

“progressive” farming in their appeals to tourists and businesspeople, in many ways exhibiting the contradictions that C. Vann Woodward has called “the divided mind of the New South.”49 Yet they understood that this was more than simply two different perspectives on the New South. It was an opportunity for tourists to watch and participate in the transition from the Old South to the

New.

Perhaps even more than agriculture, however, industrialization provided a unique opportunity for tourists to view the region’s transition to the New South. The South’s industrial resources and infrastructure, then, formed the basis of a kind of industrial tourism in which railroad companies directed tourists to sites of industrial or commercial significance. Guidebooks frequently called attention to industrial operations and to resources that could be profitably extracted or used in manufacturing. For instance, an 1881 guidebook published by the Virginia

Midland Railway claimed that “so much needs to be said about the picturesque that there is danger of overlooking the salt works, the marble, the iron works, the coal mines that one notices on his way, and which, long trains of freight cars respectfully waiting on sidings to let him pass, will not allow him to forget.”50 An 1897 Seaboard Air Line guide similarly described the attractions that Charleston, South Carolina offered to sightseers, including “beautiful drives in

48 Roy V. Scott, “American Railroads and Agricultural Extension, 1900-1914: A Study in Railway Developmental Techniques,” The Business History Review 39, No. 1 (Spring 1965): 74-98; Roy V. Scott, Railroad Development Programs in the Twentieth Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985), 34- 51. 49 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 142-74. 50 Virginia Midland Railway, Tourist’s Guide to the Virginia Springs and Summer Resorts on and Reached by the Virginia Midland Railway (Alexandria: Robert Bell’s Sons, 1881), Not Paginated. Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.

89 and around the city,” graves nestled among live oak trees and salt marsh in Magnolia Cemetery, and “the representative phosphate manufactories of the state.”51

The industrial department of the Seaboard Air Line, among many other railways, even issued special “mercantile reviews” of certain cities and towns throughout the South, which provided “An industrial epitome of the vast resources of the Cities and Territories contiguous to the Seaboard Air Line Railway—showing the splendid opportunities for the safe and legitimate investment of capital and the advantages offered for the establishment and development of all lines of Industrial, Commercial and Agricultural Endeavor.” Although intended chiefly for potential investors, these pamphlets also offered “photographic flashes and vivid descriptions of points of interest,” and were difficult to differentiate from prescriptive literature aimed at potential tourists.52

American tourists had long been attracted to sites with industrial or technological importance. By the late-nineteenth century, places like Chicago’s Union Stockyards, Richmond’s

Tredegar Iron Works, coal mines at Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania and waterpower infrastructure at

Niagara Falls had become popular among the traveling public.53 Even sights in cities like New

York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Chicago were enticing travelers in greater numbers than ever before.54 Although most middle- and upper-class tourists were traveling to escape the pressures of urban life, historians have shown that visiting such places offered visitors a way to experience the “technological sublime,” or to help reconcile conflicting ideas about the value of work and the value of leisure.55

51 Seaboard Air Line Railway, Winter Resorts Located on and Reached via the Seaboard Air Line (Richmond, Va.: Everett Wadley Company, 1897), 46. 52 See Industrial Department, Seaboard Air Line Railway, Mercantile and Industrial Review of Columbia and Richland County, South Carolina, John Skelton Williams Papers. 53 See John Sears, Sacred Places, 182-; Cindy Aron, Working at Play, 146-47; William Irwin, The New Niagara, 153-77. 54 See Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 55 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

90 Yet these sites were imbued with very different meanings by both boosters and tourists when located in the South, and Southern railroads used them to publicize the region’s investment opportunities by constructing a master narrative about Southern economic development and New

South progress. To this end, railroad companies infused industrial sites and natural resources with sectional meanings by using them as evidence of the region’s progress and embrace of economic development. For instance, a correspondent to S.A.L.magundi—a Seaboard Air Line magazine about developing Southern resources—described a trip from Norfolk to Atlanta for the 1895

Cotton States Exposition where “everywhere en route are evidences of the on-push toward better conditions—a more thorough development of southern industries and resources.” The author concluded that “The passing panorama of field and forest, orchard and vineyard, factory and workshop confirmed the gathered samples of products seen at Atlanta.”56 Like this correspondent to S.A.L.magundi, other boosters also surveyed the region’s resources and commented on how they might be profitably used for industrial enterprises. In the eyes of railroad executives, these sites were as important to attracting potential tourists as natural springs or mountain scenery because they were evidence of the South’s progress and embrace of economic development, as well as a reminder to northern visitors that there were opportunities for investment in the region—something that visitors could not find throughout the rest of the nation.

Railroad officials did not just note which industrial, commercial or agricultural sites tourists should visit, but stressed that these enterprises offered lucrative prospects. Companies published accounts of tourists who had successfully invested in the region to support their claims that the South offered profits to outsiders. An article published by the Land and Industrial Agent of the Southern Railway in the January 1903 issue of the Railway’s developmental magazine, The

Southern Field, relied on several anecdotes to support the author’s claim that the “great undeveloped South” had overtaken the rest of the country in having the most lucrative, but

56 “Atlanta to Norfolk,” S.A.L.magundi 1, No. 10 (January 1896): 4.

91 unrealized opportunities. One of the anecdotes recounted by the author involved a “sportsman” from outside the region who stumbled across a lumbering operation while hunting in the forests of North Carolina. The intrigued sportsman calculated “every possible element of expense in carrying an investment in old abandoned farm land from the bare ground up to forest trees of commercial size.” This sportsman turned “investigating businessman” happily noted that he could potentially make large profits (of “several hundred per cent.”) in what “on its face appeared to be the safest and most profitable form of investment that had ever come to his notice.” The anecdote concluded with the sportsman’s purchase of land in the region in order to put his plan into practice. Whether or not this ever occurred, it suggests that the railroad saw sportsmen and investors as one and the same. Whether one was hunting for business or for quail, these and other railroad advertisers guaranteed that “the man who is competent to take advantage of genuine opportunities” would always find what he was looking for in the region.57 Sportsmen and tourists were urged not to leave their business acumen behind when they came to the South for vacation, and railroad agents suggested that anyone with an eye to the region’s natural resources could be a successful businessperson.

The goal of calling attention to the South’s latent natural resources was not simply to make them part of every tourist’s agenda, but to make tourists more like the sportsman- businessman above, and more than one-time visitors. Although railroads were opening up travel to classes of people that had never before had this opportunity, visitors to the South remained relatively wealthy even into the twentieth century. Many of these visitors spent months or entire seasons in the region—often to recuperate from urban life or for other medical purposes—and railroads saw these people as especially likely to settle there more permanently.

57 Originally published by Milton V. Richards in The Southern Field. As reprinted in “Opportunities Many,” Montgomery Advertiser, 21 December 1903: 10.

92 Most railroad companies therefore believed that tourism was simply one step toward securing immigration into the South, which was important to their strategy for transforming the territory they serviced. To this end, some companies offered small plots of land to visitors for purchase or rent. For instance, in 1886 the Seaboard Air Line advertised five, ten, twenty, or forty acre plots available for purchase just outside the popular resort town of Southern Pines, in the

Sandhills of North Carolina. The land was intended for visitors who wanted to “locate at Southern

Pines permanently or only for the winter, and desire a sufficient quantity of land on which to establish a fruit orchard (for which the land is specially suited).” The company even claimed that the tracts were “well adapted to all kinds of vegetables” and “very fine…for poultry raising and bee culture.”58 An observer noted in The Western World that these lands were “being sold to farmers from the eastern and middle states in forty-acre tracts” costing two hundred dollars, and claimed that “the settler has a living chance of building a nice and attractive home” there.59

Railroad officials were some of the most ardent proponents of agricultural diversification, and to some extent selling land to outsiders for an orchard reflected a belief that this might help to publicize the fertility of southern soils and their adaptability to many different kinds of crops— ultimately helping the South throw off its devotion to cotton.

Despite the pressing need for capital throughout the region, officials did have distinct preferences for who was welcome to participate in Southern economic development. Indeed, their vision for the region’s development was always subject to broader social considerations. For instance, in 1896 officials from the Seaboard Air Line described the type of settlers that they believed would be best for the South. They suggested that the region had no place for needy settlers, but “will give a royal welcome to the industrious, ambitious and honorable stranger,

58 Seaboard Air Line Railway Company, The Southern Pines: The Best Resort for Those With Lung or Throat Troubles in the United States (N.p.: n.p., 1887), 25. 59 E. P. Woodward, The Western World. As quoted in “North Carolina: Life in the Turpentine Woods— Gardening for Pleasure and Profit,” Southern Planter 46, No. 8 (August 1885): 386.

93 whatever his birth, who has ready money sufficient to invest in land; intelligence enough to cultivate the acres he becomes acquired of, and well developed instincts which shall lead him to recognize the loveliness of the country he makes his own, sparing its natural beauty as far as possible, and adding to, rather than despoiling, the land which nature and God have made so beautiful.”60 Ever since the end of the Civil War, the South’s white business leaders and public officials had been attracted to immigration not simply for the potential capital, but as a way to replace the region’s poor white and African American laborers. Although social and racial concerns were at the heart of this, businesspeople and officials often expressed their preferences in environmental terms by condemning the ways that poor white and African American farmers used their land and resources. By inviting immigrants who would spare the land’s beauty, boosters were not simply expressing ideas about the best uses of the region’s natural resources, but also using code words to express their preference for middle- and upper-class white immigrants.

Although few settlers from outside the region actually settled in the South, the desire to attract wealthy Northern settlers was not simply wishful thinking. Railroads did have a few examples from which to draw in formulating this vision for the region. Indeed, for most officials, the ideal tourist was therefore someone like F. W. Stanyon, who traveled to Southern Pines from his home in Vermont for vacation in 1895.Throughout the course of his trip on the Seaboard Air

Line Railway, Stanyon visited a number of other locations in the South, including Charleston,

Savannah, Raleigh, Columbia, Charlotte, and even dropped by Atlanta to attend the Cotton States

Exposition. He ultimately claimed to be so impressed with “the land and climate” around the resort of Southern Pines that he bought forty-five acres of land there, with the intention of growing strawberries, peaches, and sweet potatoes.61 Stanyon was not the only tourist to purchase

60 “The Kind of Immigrants Wanted,” S.A.L.magundi 1, No. 12 (March 1896): 3. 61 “Pleased with the South,” S.A.L.magundi 1, No. 11 (February 1896): 4.

94 land in the South for permanent residence or hobby purposes. Catherine Ball Ripley, a South

Carolinian who moved to a peach orchard near Pinehurst, North Carolina in 1921, estimated that there were between fifty and one hundred settlers who had purchased peach orchards in the area.

Ripley noted that “Northerners spending a winter in Pinehurst had bought land and planted orchards. Many of them had friends who, like us, were tired of the city and a safe five percent, and the little colony grew.”62 Throughout the New South era, however, the number of immigrants settling in the region fell far short of expectations. Yet the few settlers who did settle in the South stoked optimism that this would turn around, and played an important role in shaping the attitude of railroad executives toward the region’s tourist enterprises.

Railroad officials and other tourist boosters understood that most tourists were visiting the South in order to rest from the enervating effects of urban or industrial life, and continued to stress the healthy and scenic aspects of the region’s natural resources to initially draw potential investors into the region. Yet they argued that these very aspects would appeal to people who were also traveling into the South for business purposes. For instance, in 1882 the Shenandoah

Valley Railroad published a guidebook which claimed that the company’s line through Virginia was “the most desirable route for travel…whether for business or pleasure.” The railroad further claimed that “the traveler on business prefers a pleasurable route, all other things being equal, and the Shenandoah Valley Railroad being as well the Shortest Route to the points reached by its line, the beauty of its scenery must, therefore, commend it to the business traveler in preference to all others.”63 Because business travelers were guided by the same aesthetic sensibilities as others, railroads touted that the region offered all the amenities and attractions that tourists expected, while sacrificing none of the business that they hoped to conduct.

62 Catherine Ball Ripley, Sand in My Shoes (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1931), 8. 63 Shenandoah Valley Railroad Company, Tourists Guide and Descriptive Guide of the Shenandoah Valley Railroad (Philadelphia: National Bureau of Engraving and Manufacturing Co., 1882), 5.

95 Many companies did, however, suggest that the region’s industrial or agricultural infrastructure heightened the significance of a trip into the South for travelers, and used this as a unique selling point for Southern travel—especially given the fierce competition faced by

Southern tourist promoters for national tourist traffic. For instance, a sporting guide published in

1897 by the Southern Railway predicted that Atlanta would become a great city, and noted that

“the abounding reasons for this dauntless confidence the sportsmen’s trained eyes will quickly discern. The fields through which he has hunted the partridge, piping of prosperity, before reaching the city will afford one valid reason. The factories and various agencies of a busy commercial life will suggest others.”64 While discussing sporting opportunities around

Birmingham, the Southern Railway similarly noted that “Alabama is rich in materials for sportsmanship. The same hill produces steel for a gun and game to kill with it. To be sure, there are several intervening processes between pig-iron and partridge, but they are both essentials in sport, and both are found in this singularly-productive state. The ring of the miners pick and the merry whistle of feathered throat are prelude and finales in the music of the hunt.”65 In short, railroad officials argued that businessmen would appreciate both the natural and business-like aspects of the region’s resources, which railroads intertwined in their promotional materials.

***

This intertwining of scenic and business uses of the region’s resources was most evident at conventions and exhibitions held throughout the South during the 1880s and 1890s, which reflected the culmination of the policies of railroad officials and other tourist promoters.66 Events

64 W.A. Turk, Shooting & Fishing in the South, (New York: Frank Presbrey, 1897), 40. 65 W.A. Turk, Shooting & Fishing in the South, 53. 66 Scholars have spent a great deal of time examining the social and racial overtones inherent in expositions, especially in the South, but have given little thought to how these expositions related to natural resources themselves, expressed different visions for these resources, and showed conflicting ideas about economic development. For instance, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72-105; Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

96 like the 1881 International Cotton Exhibition in Atlanta, Louisville’s Southern Exposition of

1883 and Nashville’s Centennial Exposition of 1897 as well as smaller state and local events were organized chiefly to promote the business interests of the South. C. Vann Woodward explains that these expositions acted as “modern engines of propaganda, advertising, and salesmanship geared primarily to the aims of attracting capital and immigration” to the region.67

To this end, expositions provided the South’s leaders with an opportunity to show off their natural resources, promote the South as progressive and patriotic, alleviate widespread concerns about racial unrest, and connect Southern farmers and manufacturers with broader national and international markets.68 For instance, in discussing Charleston’s Inter-State and West Indian

Exposition in 1902, Mrs. J. J. Pluss wrote that this exposition would not only provide an opportunity to display “Southern pride and patriotism,” but would “advertise to visitors from all sections of the United States and tourists from abroad the resources of our State, thereby inducing capitalists to come with their money and help develop these resources.”69 Because larger expositions often ran for months and visitors throughout the nation had an opportunity to see them, they served as extremely effective publicity for the South’s political and business elite.

The overriding theme of Southern expositions was therefore how the region’s natural resources should be used, and in many ways these expositions were simply the pages of tourist propaganda brought to life. Expositions amassed displays of natural resources organized by states, manufacturers, local associations and organizations, railroads, and even the federal government—all intended to attract investors and publicize opportunities in the South. Railroads were critical to the success of Southern expositions, though this was not simply because they provided transportation at reduced rates for fairgoers. As representatives of the largest

67 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 124. 68 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 73-6. 69 J. J. Pluss, “The South Carolina and Inter-State and West Indian Exposition,” The Laurens Advertiser [Laurens, SC], 1 May 1901: 3.

97 corporations in the South, railroad officials also purchased bonds from exposition companies, provided cash loans to organizers, served on organizational committees, and planned and funded exhibits about the territory they serviced. Indeed, while describing the various expositions held around Nashville, Tennessee one visitor even suggested that “the foremost and firmest allies of the expositions were the railroads.”70

Railroad exhibits—often housed in their own elaborate buildings—were ubiquitous throughout these exhibitions. For instance, at the Cotton States and International Exhibition of

1895, the Southern Railroad, Plant system, Louisville & Nashville, Central of Georgia, Western

Railway of Alabama, and the Atlanta & West Point Railroad all had prominent displays, and the

Atlanta City Council even claimed that “the great Railroad Corporations are vieing [sic] with each other in the magnificence of their exhibits. Several of them will have buildings of an imposing character, and this promises to be one of the best features of the great fair.”71 At this exposition, the Plant System even constructed a fifty-foot tall pyramid which was a living illustration of the natural resources of their territory. Each side of the pyramid was constructed of a different type of rock from Florida or the Carolinas, and one account noted that it was “The entire exterior of the building therefore is itself an exhibit of one of the great industries of the

Plant territory.” The interior was filled with exhibits detailing the various resources of the South, and included examples of Florida’s “famous phosphates,” kaolins, ramie weed, hemp, Spanish moss, a “tapestry” of palmetto leaves, various fossils, and representative “agricultural and horticultural resources of the states through which the Plant lines run.”72 Although few companies could match the Plant System’s pyramid, Southern railroads erected less spectacular displays at

70 As quoted in Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 78. One source even reported that the Southern Railroad spent over $100,000 for the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. See “The Atlanta Exposition. Article III—Railway Companies at the Fair,” The Railway Age and Northwestern Railroader 20, No. 42 (October 18,. 1895): 510. 71 Atlanta City Council, A Few Points in 1895 About Atlanta (n.p., n.d.), 22. 72 “The Atlanta Exposition. Article IV—Railway Companies’ Exhibits (Continued),” The Railway Age and Northwestern Railroader 20, No. 43 (October 25, 1895): 525. See also Margaret Severance, Official Guide to Atlanta Including Information of the Cotton States and International Exposition, 75.

98 virtually every exposition throughout the South, and they were regarded by visitors as among the most popular displays in each exposition.

As exemplified by the Plant System’s pyramid, railroad exhibits were mostly composed of samples of the South’s natural resources and were mainly intended to attract potential investments in the territory they described. Because the South’s largest railroads ran through thousands of miles of territory, their displays were frequently the grandest of all, and one visitor to Atlanta in 1882 even commented that “The vast collection of minerals, timber, and products of agriculture surprises even the managers of the railroads by whom they have been hastily gathered.”73 For instance, the Richmond and Danville Railroad Company constructed an impressive display for the International Cotton Exposition in 1881 that included over nine hundred different examples of minerals, timber, crops, and other products made throughout the railroad’s territory. After viewing the Richmond & Danville exhibit, a reporter from the New York

Daily Tribune claimed that it “is the most varied in character, the most scientific in arrangement, and the most complete in detail of all in the Exposition; and that it is well worth the careful scrutiny of every man who is seeking either investment or a home.”74 The Louisville & Nashville

Railroad claimed that its exhibit at Louisville’s 1884 Southern Exposition was intended to “give a true representation of the great and manifold natural resources of Alabama, particularly of those parts of the State contiguous to the Louisville and Nashville Line.” To this end, the company displayed ninety-six types of wood found in Alabama, one hundred and seventy-seven different grasses, fifty-two types of minerals or mineral products, nine different types of coal, nine of iron ore, eight examples of iron ore products, and one hundred and eight different kinds of crops or extracted products, including examples of tobacco, cotton, truck crops, turpentine, Gulf oysters,

73 “Significant Aspects of the Atlanta Cotton Exposition,” Century Illustrated Magazine 23, No. 4 (February 1882): 563. 74 Originally published in New York Daily Tribune, 5 December 1881. As reprinted in Richmond & Danville Railroad Company, Catalogue of Exhibits by the Richmond and Danville Railroad Company Made at the International Cotton Exposition, Atlanta, GA., 1881 (Richmond, VA: Baughman Brothers, Publishers and Printers, 1882), 16.

99 cotton seed and many others—with suggestions about how each of these resources could be profitably used.75

Railroad companies and other tourist boosters often tried to make these exhibits permanent in the hopes that they would be available to tourists did not make it to the respective exposition or fair. For instance, in 1913 a newspaper in South Carolina reported that the exhibit of state resources at the annual state fair “has been gathered together in a building of its own at the fair and will be made permanent for the benefit of winter tourists who come from sections of more or less exhausted resources.”76 Railroad officials with the Louisville & Nashville joined forces with municipal officials from Anniston, Alabama, and organized a similar traveling exhibit of Alabama’s agricultural and industrial resources. The exhibit took up two whole train cars, which traveled through parts of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio, and included “a splendid collection of southern woods” as well as mineral and agricultural products.77

Although mostly intended to attract investors and publicize opportunities in the South, expositions were also a source of entertainment. As a number of scholars have suggested, expositions attracted a mix of tourists and businesspeople. Because there was not clear divide between those who traveled to an exposition for business or for pleasure, organizers blended business and entertainment through displays of technology and natural resources.78 Indeed, in

1885 an employee of the Passenger Department of the Illinois Central Railroad claimed that

75 The L&N even hired botanist Charles Mohr in the hopes of impressing the public with the scientific character of their displays. The railroad therefore touted that Mohr was both an “Agent and Expert on Forestry for the Tenth Census” as well as a “Corresponding Member of the Academy of Natural Sciences” to play up his scientific credentials. See Charles Mohr, The Natural Resources of Alabama Displayed in the Exhibit of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad at the Southern Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky (Mobile, AL: The Daily Register, 1883). 76 “State Fair Opened,” The Watchman and Southron, 29 October 1913: 7. 77 Grace Hooten Gates, The Model City of the New South: Anniston, Alabama, 1872-1900 (1996; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978), 224-26; “Alabama on Wheels,” The Timberman 5, No. 16 (October 20, 1888): 4; Katharine M. Pruett and John D. Fair, “Promoting a New South: Immigration, Racism, and ‘Alabama on Wheels,’” Agricultural History 66, No. 1 (Winter, 1992): 19-41. 78 For instance, see William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776-1917 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 151-77. See also Cindy Aron, Working at Play, 150-53.

100 people would be drawn to the North, Central, and South American Exposition in New Orleans because of the opportunities it offered for “restful anticipation, of patriotic feeling, and a business outlook.”79

Railroad companies hoped that their displays would attract the right kind of investor, but understood that many of the people viewing their exhibits did so simply for entertainment.

Although displays focused mostly on the “representative” natural resources of their territory, railroad companies often threw in a few novelties for entertainment. For instance, the Plant

System’s pyramid displays included various shells and fossils from Florida and elsewhere, including “huge petrified elephants’ tusks and a mastodon’s jaw with the teeth still embedded.”80

Yet railroad exhibits were always oriented around natural resources that could be used for commercial purposes, and novelties were more of an afterthought than a key strategy to attracting visitors.

Railroads also offered planned tours at reduced rates to major expositions that used tourism to promote travel to these expositions. Many of these trips stopped at major Southern resorts, and visited popular natural wonders and attractions in the South. For instance, a number of railroad lines arranged special excursions to Atlanta to participate in the 1895 Cotton States

Exposition, including the Southern Railway, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Louisville, New

Albany and Chicago Railroad and the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad among many others.81 The Reading Railroad even promoted one excursion which lasted twelve days, and stopped not only in Atlanta but also at Lookout Mountain, Natural Bridge, and Luray Caverns while letting its travelers stay at “all the best hotels.”82

79 Lydia Strawn, Ten Points from the American Exposition, Presented by the Illinois Central R.R. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1885), 3. 80 “The Atlanta Exposition. Article IV—Railway Companies’ Exhibits (Continued),” 525. 81 See Southern Railway, Advertisement, Brick, 1 November 1895: 13; “Reduced Rates via Pennsylvania Railroad to the Atlanta Exposition,” Indiana Democrat, 26 September 1895: 3; Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad, Advertisement, Clay Record, 14 November 1895: 30. 82 Reading Railroad, Advertisement, Friends’ Intelligencer 52, No. 44 (2 November 1895): 2.

101 This strategy ultimately had some concrete effects, and some communities throughout the

South did act as stopovers for travelers to expositions. For instance, in 1895 many residents of

Asheville, North Carolina were concerned that the Cotton States Exposition might siphon off the city’s tourist traffic by making Atlanta a more attractive destination for travelers. Yet a correspondent for the Asheville News and Hotel Reporter reported that these fears were

“groundless,” and argued that “Asheville has really been benefitted by the Exposition,” which brought crowds of people to the city on their way to and from Atlanta. The author noted that “the benefit thus accruing to Asheville has been great, for once having seen our beautiful mountain scenery these visitors will experience an uncontrollable desire to return and see more of it, and a great many will do so, and concluded that “Asheville is greatly indebted to the Southern Railway for sending so many of its tourists to Atlanta via this place, and for so extensively advertising us in the North.”83

Southern expositions were therefore perhaps the ultimate combination of tourist and business uses of the region’s resources. Railroad companies drew on the aesthetic qualities of

Southern resources to attract people into the region for events which promoted the development of these very resources through agriculture and industry. At the same time, displays of natural resources intended to attract investors were also targeted at tourists, who could use these products to see evidence of the region’s embrace of economic development along the model of the New

South Creed. Although some companies made a distinction between the “invalid tourist,” the

“pleasure tourist,” and the “business tourist,” they sought to attract them in remarkably similar ways.84

***

83 Asheville News and Hotel Reporter, 26 October 1895: 10. 84 Lydia Strawn, Ten Points from the American Exposition, Presented by the Illinois Central R.R. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1885), 18.

102 Ultimately, many observers credited railroad propaganda with tourism’s success, though some people were wary of its veracity—often for good reason. This was perhaps most evident in

Florida, which was advertised by railroads and other boosters perhaps more than any other section of the South.85 For instance, an observer in Daytona wrote in 1905 that “we believe one cause for so many tourists here is in the influence exerted by printer’s ink, boards of trade and the success of securing palatial trains of cars and magnificence steamship accommodations for those sections.”86 Yet other people were more circumspect about bending the truth to attract tourists.

For instance, in 1903 another observer claimed that most of the tourist traffic to Florida was a result of “flaming and highly colored advertisements of the railroads and hotels.” He commented that they “make a big harvest of money out of the swarms of Northern people who are beguiled here by the overdrawn stories and pictures of this earthly paradise.”87 German traveler Ernst von

Hesse-Wartegg similarly noted that immigrants to Arkansas were having trouble after listening

“to the land agent’s claptrap and the railroad representative’s ballyhoo.”88 Although opinion was mixed about whether this was good or bad, few people could deny how important railroads were to shaping tourists’ perceptions of the South as well as the place of tourism in the region’s economy.

By the twentieth century there was broad agreement throughout the South that tourism was an acceptable strategy for bringing about industrialization and agricultural modernization.

This strategy was initially a product of railroad companies, who had perhaps the most to gain from influxes of tourists into the South. Yet over time, it was increasingly adopted by municipal boosters, government officials, businesspeople, and other advocates of tourism in the South.

85 For an overview of railroad advertising in Florida, see Gregg M. Turner, A Journey into Florida Railroad History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 141-63, 186-206. 86 “Florida The Winter Resort,” Daytona Gazette-News, 18 February 1905: 4. 87 Moses K. Armstrong, Vacation Travels from Northern Snows to Southern Seas (St. Paul: Pioneer Press Co., 1903), 128. 88 Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Travels on the Lower Mississippi, 1879-1880, Ed. Frederic Trautmann (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 116.

103 Ironically, this came at a time when cheaper lodging and transportation were opening up opportunities for middle class travelers who had never before made up a significant proportion of tourists to the region, making it less likely that most tourists would actually be able to invest in

Southern economic development. Yet many boosters still clung to the belief that it would attract investors and publicize regional resources that could be put to use in agriculture or industry.

Tourist promoters, public officials, and journalists frequently discussed the benefits that they expected would result from attracting tourists—benefits that would mostly be evident in hastening Southern agricultural and industrial development. For instance, in the winter of 1914 the Manufacturers’ Record—the South’s flagship trade publication—acknowledged that tourists provided money for hotels and other tourist infrastructure as well as jobs for people living in the

South. Yet the article claimed that this was only “a very small part of the value of the tourist to the South,” and instead pointed to “Splendid winter homes, beautiful grounds, active work of upbuilding, heavy investments in a wide variety of enterprises” as “a few of the easily-seen evidences that have marked the trail of the tourist army wherever it has marched through the land.” Because of this, the author concluded that “The tourist is more than a mere traveler for health or pleasure, more than a liberal money spender. He is a country upbuilder.”89 Just one year later, plans for the construction of a “Hoosierland-to-Dixie highway” between South Bend,

Indiana and Jacksonville, Florida, turned on whether the highway would increase tourist traffic into the region. The route—through Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta—had been proposed “on account of the historic, scenic and industrial importance of all these points,” and many people agreed with the sentiments of one newspaper correspondent, who expressed hope that the highway would attract tourists and ultimately benefit the whole Southern economy. This journalist declared, “The tourist is the prospector; furthermore, he is an advertisement, his good words scatter like wildfire and in his train come the homeseeker and investor. Provide the

89 “The Call of the South to the Winter Tourist,” Manufacturers’ Record, 17 December 1914: 40.

104 inducement for him to look leisurely over the host of good things in scenery and business possibilities and he will spread broadcast the good news which will start this magnificent stream flowing.”90 As the former president of the University of Florida explained, Southern tourism would “spread and emphasize a knowledge of the resources and opportunities of the South,” ultimately acting to “hasten its development both by the introduction of new men and new capital and by arousing the spirit of activity and emulation among the Southern people themselves.”91

In many ways, this was little different than the strategy of railroad companies in other parts of the nation. Earl Pomeroy writes that in the West, “from the 1870’s into the eighties and nineties, the tourist was above all else a potential investor; and even in the later years the wealthy investor was the primary target in much promotional strategy.”92 Southern promoters understood this, and certainly tapped into broader national and international trends in deciding how tourism would fit into the postbellum Southern economy. Yet they also combined this with distinctly

Southern traits, and sought to link tourism in the South to the rebirth of the region’s economy, by inviting tourists to participate in something that they could not witness anywhere else, even the

West.

Indeed, the perceived links between tourism and other forms of economic development were strengthened by Southerners’ assessments of how tourism fit into the economy of other parts of the nation and world. No place was more scrutinized by Southern promoters than the American

West. The Western “tourist boom” occurred in the midst of Reconstruction, and was facilitated by the expansion of railroad infrastructure to the region, especially after the completion of the

90 “Governors Will Meet in April to Consider Plans for ‘Hoosier-Land-to-Dixie’ Highway,” The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 3 January 1915: 8. 91 Andrew Sledd, “The Economic Aspects of the South as a Health and Pleasure Resort,” in The South in the Building of the Nation, Volume VI (Richmond, VA: The Southern Historical Publication Society, 1909), 632. 92 Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 131.

105 transcontinental railroad in 1869.93 Railroad transportation shifted the attention of many tourists away from well-established resorts, and Western railroads transported wealthy tourists to famous sites like Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains in luxurious

Pullman cars.94 Western boosters in the early twentieth century promoted tourism as a form of nationalism, and urged tourists to “see America first,” rather than traveling to sites in Europe.95

Traveling west quickly became popular among elites, and by the time Southern resorts began to regain their footing, the West offered a model for successful tourist development that could be found in few other places.96

Because the West had successfully attracted tourists, many people who were in a place to shape the development of Southern tourism were particularly interested in how Westerners went about the business of tourism, and modeled their own efforts on that of Western boosters. For instance, the keynote speaker at a meeting of the local board of trade in Brownsville, Texas—

Colonel Uriah Lott—based his comments on observations made during a recent trip to California.

Lott commented on the positive role that tourists had played in shaping economic development in

California, claiming that “The monied man, enticed by the balmy climate, came to spend his time in comfort, became interested and eventually invested, and in this way the country [California] reached its present thriving condition.” Just as tourism had shaped California, Lott claimed that hotels in Brownsville “could be filled to overflowing with winter visitors” who “would be shown the immense possibilities of our Southland, and in this way the country would be developed.”97 A

93 Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West,” in Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, Ed. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 45. 94 See Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (1990; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 3-30. 95 Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 96 For an overview of tourism to the West see Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West; Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 97 “Important Meeting,” Brownsville Daily Herald [Brownsville, TX], 13 October 1905: 1.

106 Georgia newspaper similarly claimed in 1923 that Denver, Colorado was a model for Southern tourism. This journalist argued that “The value of motor and rail tourist travel to a state is well illustrated in the case of Colorado….Denver derives a great income from the tourists, it is stated, and it does more, for the thousands who visit Denver on sight-seeing trips are impressed with the city, and many of them make investments and its beauty of scenery attracts people from all parts of the county.” The author concluded that “If every tourist spends $10 a day while stopping over in a city, as the Denver authorities claim, Georgia’s several thousands of tourists are bringing large sums to the state each year. More tourists would mean more money, railroad officials say, and the more who come there would be to see the advantages of Georgia. Ultimately it would do a big boost to Georgia’s growth.”98

Some boosters believed that more than mere profits, or the hastening of agricultural and industrial development was at stake in using tourism to promote a familiarity with the South’s natural resources. As Nina Silber and other scholars have shown, tourism was often seen as a force for reconciliation between North and South in the wake of the Civil War.99 Resorts brought together Northerners and Southerners in amicable settings, and helped to smooth over cultural differences between the two sections. For instance, an Augusta, Georgia newspaper commented in 1896 that “Among other influences…which serve to bring people this way from the colder climates, a potent one has been the opening of winter resort hotels in the South and the coming of many Northern tourists to spend the winter in the Southern States.” The author claimed that

Northern tourists advertise Southern resources and opportunities, and claimed that “As the people, the climate, the resources and the products of the South have become better known, prejudices have been removed.”100 Although the removal of prejudice between North and South

98 “Tourist Travel Means Much Better Business,” Daily Times-Enterprise [Thomasville, GA], 3 November 1923: 2. 99 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 66-92. 100 “They Are Coming South,” Norfolk Virginian, 22 February 1896: 4.

107 was important for social reasons, many Southerners saw it as important for business reasons as well. As early as 1868 Southerners like W. W. Holden of North Carolina lamented that sectional discord was hindering immigration and allowing waters to “run idly to the sea,” while

“agriculture and commerce languish.”101

As the idea that tourism was a means to other developmental ends solidified into a consensus by the early twentieth century, local booster groups and public officials sought to promote tourism to their particular area in the hopes that greater benefits would follow. Tourism was never promoted like industrial or agricultural development, however. Whereas state governments offered financial incentives to locate factories in particular communities, this was rarely the case with tourism. Aside from facilitating the construction of hotels or railroads, the only step that most public officials ever took to foster tourism was advertising. For instance, in his 1907 message to the people of Florida, Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward claimed that advertising was the key to a successful tourist industry, and urged the state’s citizens to allow local governments to “spend a reasonable amount of the public money from time to time in advertising through printed matter and otherwise the advantages and resources of their respective counties and municipalities, with a view to inducing more tourists to come to Florida.” Broward concluded that besides increasing the state’s tourist traffic, this would attract “more permanent settlers to come into our midst and help develop the splendid resources that Florida affords.” 102

Like many boosters, Broward’s comments reflected persistent beliefs in the value of advertising resources, as well as a hesitancy to devote more substantial means to anything besides industrial and agricultural development.

***

101 As quoted in Richard N. Current, Northernizing the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 78. 102 “The Governor’s Message,” Ocala Evening Star, 2 April 1907: 4.

108 The strategy of hitching tourism to other forms of economic development did result in some successes, although it is difficult to gauge just how extensive they were. Anecdotal evidence suggests that northern investors and settlers were attracted by the region’s tourist promoters, though this was generally more prevalent in the twentieth century. For instance, after spending a week traveling through Florida in 1886, Alexander McClure— a prominent

Republican politician and editor of the Philadelphia Times —urged people to take up orange cultivation in the state. Although the Florida orange industry had been marked by a string of recent crop failures, McClure claimed that “the capitalist who mingles pleasure and healthful winter enjoyment with profit, is generally able to select his location and invest wisely.” He noted that “There are a number of such orange plantations on the St. John’s, which pay largely on the investment, besides furnishing beautiful and healthful winter homes for their owners, and the whole line of the railway from Sanford south to Kissimmee City is beautified by attractive winter homes with orange-orchards either beginning to bear or giving promise of early and bountiful crops.”103 In 1896 a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, similarly reported that “testimony” of

Northern tourists “as to what they have seen and experienced in the South has influenced many of those living in the North and Northwest to come here.” The newspaper concluded that “Many who have come as tourists have made Southern investments, and gradually the intercourse between the South and other sections has increased.”104

Newspapers throughout the region were littered with notices like one that appeared in

The Houston Daily Post, which briefly noted in 1903 that a “party of Indiana tourists arrived in

Houston and are investigating the resources of Texas.”105 Local editors in resort towns even kept track of who was visiting, and regularly published the comings and goings of tourists and

103 A.K. McClure, The South: Its Industrial, Financial, and Political Condition (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1886), 161-62. 104 “They Are Coming South,” Norfolk Virginian, 22 February 1896: 4. 105 “Houston,” The Houston Daily Post [Houston, TX], 11 January 1903: 2.

109 prominent businessmen. This should not be surprising, for resort communities promoted a class identity among tourists and became what one historian calls “lifestyle enclaves.”106 Indeed,

Richard Starnes suggests that “many people who invested in Asheville’s development originally came to the city as tourists.”107 Investment was not always relegated to resort towns, however, and just a few years before William Finley’s 1908 address to the Asheville Board of Trade, thousands of acres of land in the southern Appalachians had been bought by northern investors who discovered the region’s timber resources while sightseeing. They organized some of the most active lumbering and tanning operations in the area, and went to work cutting the very resources that had attracted them as tourists.108

Although some Northerners invested or settled in the region, tourism never lived up to the hopes of its promoters. In 1900, the census reported only around four hundred thousand native-born Northerners living in the South. Every Southern state—except for Oklahoma, Florida, and Virginia—actually lost residents to the North, and by 1900 there were 2.5 million native-born

Southerners living in the North.109 As C. Vann Woodward suggests, “The railroads were a path of emigration as well as immigration.”110

Yet railroad officials and other tourist boosters did shape how many tourists viewed the

South. Many tourists actually experienced the South in the ways suggested by railroad officials, and visitors’ comments about their trips into the South were often remarkably similar to the rhetoric of railroad and other tourist boosters. Although tourists continued to visit resorts, natural wonders, and hot springs, they also visited industrial establishments, farms, and other places

106 See Larry R. Youngs, “Lifestyle Enclaves: Winter Resorts in the South Atlantic States, 1870-1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2001). 107 Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 72. 108 In his study of industrialization in Appalachia, Ronald D. Eller argues that “the sudden growth of tourism around Asheville in the 1890s directly enhanced the growth of the timber industry in Buncombe and Transylvania counties.” For an overview of outside investment in the Appalachian region around Asheville, see Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 102-03. 109 Richard N. Current, Northernizing the South, 89; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 299. 110 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 299.

110 where the region’s resources were put to use for commercial purposes. Whether they invested or not, visitors frequently used their trip into the South as a way to experience New South economic development, and linked what they saw to the broader fortunes of New South programs. In doing so, tourists and outside visitors traveling through the region became powerful promoters of the

New South Creed.

As they traveled to sites of industrial or agricultural importance, visitors frequently commented on the region’s resources and commercial possibilities. As early as 1867 naturalist

John Muir incorporated sites from the region’s industrial and agricultural infrastructure into his travels during a trip through parts of the South. As he traveled through Kentucky, Tennessee,

North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Muir not only described the natural flora and fauna of the

South, but also visited a cotton plantation, grist mill, quartz mill, and even a gold mine.111 After arriving at Dallas from his home in Providence, Rhode Island in 1897, J. E. C. Farnham noted that street cars took him to “visit many interesting interior sections of the city, and also penetrate into its rural retreats. Our rides into the suburban districts show to us a broad expanse of territory, but sparsely occupied, representing residences and various industries. Cotton fields, with their blooms, and with their white woolly heads, interspersing here and there, gives fine effect to the beauty of the out-lying country.”112 Farnham even visited a cotton gin, stock-yard, and meat- packing plant, and commented that “New scenes and experiences, pleasurable and instructive, are constantly coming to our view.”113 Farnham and Muir were not unusual, and other visitors to the

South also sought to experience similar sights.

Indeed, many tourists interpreted what they saw in the South as evidence of the progress or potential of the building of a New South. For instance, in 1892 one visitor to the piney woods parts of the South claimed that “On our way through Virginia and North Carolina we were

111 John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 21, 35-7, 112 J. E. C. Farnham, A Brief Trip to the Southwest (Providence, RI: Snow and Farnham, 1897), 132. 113 J. E. C. Farnham, A Brief Trip to the Southwest, 130.

111 impressed by improvement here and there exhibited in many of the towns, some of them having taken on a phase of development that confirms what we have been hearing of late concerning

Southern growth.”114 During a trip into the South in the 1880s Mary Hardy noted that “The South of to-day is not the South of the yesterdays….Now it is awake., it has unsealed its eyes, shaken off the luxurious flowery chain that has held it like links of iron, stretched its limbs, and, as a sleeping army springs to life at the sound of the trumpet, it is up and doing.” Hardy claimed that this new South was active in “developing its marvellous resources on the earth and under the earth, building factories, opening mines, and utilizing its wonderful water power—forcing the quiet river out of its accustomed way, lashing it till, after much foaming, flashing, and groaning, it grinds the corn, crushes the rough ore, and labours at the world’s work like a sentient being.”115

Ideas about the New South were especially evident with a visit to Atlanta. Trips to

Atlanta provided an opportunity to witness the New South on a smaller scale—a “brave and beautiful” city literally rising “from the ashes,” and Henry Grady later claimed.116 As Reiko

Hillyer suggests, the built landscape in Atlanta was purposely crafted to mirror the North’s urban, business landscape, and the city “became a propagandistic tool of the New South, soothing

Northerners’ bitterness and inviting Northerners’ business.”117 Northerners flocked to Atlanta, and in just the three years after 1913 over 250 thousand travelers visited the city.118 Many commented on how the city showed off the region’s economic development, and interpreted their experiences in Atlanta as evidence of the rise of a New South. For instance, Henry Field explained that one of the attractions of Atlanta was that it “is a new city, risen from the ashes in which it was consumed a quarter of a century ago.”119 Stephen Nye similarly noted that Atlanta

114 “A Run Southward,” The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, No. 6 (June 1892): 286. 115 Mary Duffus Hardy, Down South (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883), 101-02. 116 Henry W. Grady, “The New South,” in The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady, Ed. Edwin DuBois Shurter (New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1910), 14. 117 Reiko Hillyer, “Designing Dixie,” 194. 118 Reiko Hiller, “Designing Dixie,” 225. 119 Henry M. Field, Bright Skies and Dark Shadows, 101.

112 provided an opportunity to witness the reconciliation of North and South through the city’s economic development. Nye claimed that “What is true of Atlanta is equally true in all the centers of Southern commerce. Birmingham, Meridian, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville have risen from their slumbers….They smite the mountains and tunnel the earth, and tardily they yield their generous treasure.”120

Railroad companies played the most active role in linking tourism with New South economic development, but tourists limited how far railroads could go. Because railroads did need passenger travel, their promotional strategy could never stray too far from what they knew would attract tourists to the region. As consumers, tourists had a great deal of influence over what their experience in the South would be. The success of railroad officials in linking tourism and other forms of development therefore suggests that many tourists were enthusiastic about the possibility of watching the New South unfold before their eyes.

Not everyone interpreted what they saw in the South as evidence of progress, however.

Tourists encountering the vestiges of Southern economic development might just as easily conclude that the South’s development was not living up to the claims of its most vocal boosters.

After returning from a trip to Asheville and Hot Springs, North Carolina, Edward Everett Hale—a prominent Unitarian minister from Massachusetts—did just this. Although Hale noted that he

“was charmed with Carolina, and should be glad to repeat the pleasure,” he touched off a firestorm of criticism when he told a Boston reporter that “People talk of a boom in the South; I saw nothing of it. To me all seemed as wretched as poverty. I did not see a man at work, except convicts on the road.”121 Hale was attacked by the Southern press, and one Asheville newspaper called Hale a “cranky Yankee,” and declared that “He could not and should not have expected to

120 Stephen Girard Nye and Alfred Bourne Nye, Addresses and Letters of Travel (San Francisco: Stanley- Taylor Company, 1908), 174. 121 Initially printed in the Philadelphia Record. As reprinted in “A Cranky Yankee,” The Asheville News and Hotel Reporter 1, No. 12 (April 20, 1895): 8.

113 see much of the boom in the South, of which he speaks. It is one of those quiet things which gets there in the end and will no doubt eventually astonish him….The Rev. Doctor at 73 is a crank, there is no question about it. It is fortunate that all of our Northern visitors are not like him.”122

Given the slow progress of the South’s development, it is perhaps surprising that more visitors did not express thoughts similar to Hale. Yet by the twentieth century, the New South Creed had shifted from acting as a “program of action” to a myth that was intended to distract from continued Southern underdevelopment. As the gap between rhetoric and reality widened, however, the character of tourism in the South was changing and the influence of railroad companies was waning. When Southern tourism became a stand-alone industry in the twentieth century, boosters saw less need to make it the handmaiden of agricultural and industrial development.123

***

Indeed, even as the developmental strategy of railroad officials became more widespread in the twentieth century, conflicts between tourist boosters and others over how the region’s resources should be used also became more prevalent. In large part this was due to the increasing number of tourists traveling by automobile in the early decades of the twentieth century, which impeded the ability of railroad officials to call the shots on the region’s tourist development.

Indeed, in 1930 one Alabama newspaper complained that “Hurrying through the State in automobiles does not give tourists from other parts of the country sufficient acquaintance with

Alabama to impress them with the many possibilities to be found here for industry and business.”

Although cars gave them “an impression of the beauty of Alabama scenery and…delights of

Alabama’s climate,” the newspaper correspondent concluded that “they can gain only a fleeting

122 “A Cranky Yankee,” The Asheville News and Hotel Reporter 1, No. 12 (April 20, 1895): 8. 123 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 190, 189-214.

114 impression of the advantages offered for business, agriculture and industrial enterprises.”124 As railroads—which had regional as opposed to local interests at heart—lost their monopoly over

Southern tourism, municipal officials began vying for tourist dollars, which exacerbated conflicts over how tourist enterprises would use the region’s resources.

Conflicts between tourism and other types of enterprise were also fueled by the nation’s burgeoning conservation movement. Ideas about the preservation of natural resources and unique landscapes had always been intertwined with ideas about the potential of these places for recreation. As conservation became more popular nationwide and in the South, tourism was increasingly seen as a way to continue economic development in parts of the South while avoiding the environmental problems caused by other enterprises. Although recreation often provided an impetus for arguments about preservation, the twentieth century conservation movement redefined the role of tourism by assigning it an economic value. Rather than providing an impetus for agricultural and industrial development, conservationists gave tourism meaning as a profitable industry of its own. As the industry gained a foothold in the New South in the early decades of the twentieth century, conservation gave tourism economic and environmental legitimacy, and public officials sometimes prioritized its use of natural resources above other enterprises for the first time.125

Over time, railroad officials found that the implementation of their vision was more difficult than expected because of the complex relationship between tourism, agriculture, industry, natural resources, and the preferences of tourists. Not everyone agreed that tourism should facilitate other forms of development, and their voices became louder as the foothold that railroad companies had over the region’s tourist economy was challenged. Although tourists enjoyed visiting sites of agricultural or industrial importance, many were less enthusiastic about

124 “Bring in the Tourists And Then Keep Them Here,” Anniston Star [Anniston, AL], 27 June 1930: 4. 125 See Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

115 staying near these sites—a fact that few tourist promoters ever admitted. For instance, William St.

John—a businessman from Atlanta—told a newspaper reporter that “You hear a great deal about the magnificence of the Kimball House,” but claimed that “It is so close to the railroads that the cinders and smoke prove a serious annoyance, and it is destitute of the airy galleries that once formed one of the chief attractions of this hotel.”126 The owner of Atlanta’s Peachtree Inn also believed that tourists did not want to stay near business infrastructure, and in 1910 he advertised that his hotel offered a chance to stay “away from the smoke and noise of the business center where the other large hotels are located.”127

Throughout the region, many communities moved to separate tourist sites from industrial or agricultural infrastructure, and local officials sometimes concluded that tourism was more desirable than other forms of development. A major challenge to railroads’ strategy of development therefore came from officials who believed that tourism was the highest type of development that they could pursue. As they worked to safeguard the scenic resources that drew many tourists, communities throughout the South often made decisions that hindered industrial or agricultural uses of these same resources. Though there was widespread agreement that tourists who invested in regional development were desirable, divergent ideas about how to attract these tourists played a key role in shaping natural resources use and access by other enterprises.

Aiken, South Carolina provides a good example. Located in the piney woods in the western part of the state, Aiken had been a popular antebellum resort for South Carolina’s planter elite.128 Despite a brief flirtation with other forms of development, Aiken’s municipal leaders evidently decided by the twentieth century that tourism was perhaps their best hope for continued

126 “The Times’ Hotel Column,” The Roanoke Times [Roanoke, VA], 1 September 1892: 1. 127 “Important Hotel Change,” Savannah Tribune, April 2, 1910: 7. 128 Lawrence Fay Brewster, Summer Migrations and Resorts of South Carolina Low-Country Planters, 49- 51.

116 prosperity.129 Indeed, in 1905 a local journalist declared that “Aiken’s asset of greatest value is her beauty,” and urged that this “beauty” should be preserved. This resident claimed that

“Aiken’s loveliness is not alone of the present. It will be preserved as an asset. No tall chimneys will mar the beauty of this city of parks, and the blue of the sky will never be made vile with the smoke of sordid industry.” This was possible because Aiken was not likely to become a center of manufacturing, and this journalist noted that “Aiken’s asset of greatest value is not her manufacturing interests, not her fine farm lands in the back country, not her kaolins and other mineral clays which are being developed and will some day make this a distinctive industry.

Aiken is proudest of her beauty.” The author later claimed that tourists who settled in Aiken as colonists were “worth more to Aiken than cotton mills or other enterprises would be. In addition to investing $1,500,000 in homes in the pine barrens, the cottagers often visit the shops and the stores and spend money freely, though not in a prodigal manner to be sure.”130 By claiming that tourism and other forms of development could not coexist, this newspaperman expressed emerging ideas about the place of tourism in the New South economy as well as ideas that were prevalent throughout Aiken itself.

Although some places like Aiken concluded that tourism was the best path for their future development, other communities believed that tourism was actually stunting better opportunities for economic growth by tying up resources that could be more profitably used in other ways. For instance, some officials agreed with one Florida newspaper correspondent who wrote in 1906 that

“this State has for many year catered to the tourist, to the neglect of almost everything else” while the state’s “wonderful resources were lost to view.”131 In 1915 North Carolina’s Jackson County

Journal similarly declared that “We of this section have very naturally fallen into the habit of developing [scenic resources] to the partial exclusion of others that are equally, if not more,

129 For instance, see Aiken, South Carolina (New York: J. C. Derby, 1870). 130 William Banks, “Aiken as a Winter Resort,” The State [Columbia, SC], 26 March 1905: 17. 131 “What Can We Offer,” St. Lucie County Tribune [Fort Pierce, FL], 9 November 1906: 4.

117 important….It is in harnessing the never failing and everabounding supply of power that flows ceaselessly down the mountainsides and through the valleys, and turning with it the busy wheel of industry…that our towns are to become industrial centers.”132 Over time, these opposing viewpoints grew increasingly disparate, and gave rise to conflicts over natural resources, economic development, and the role of tourism in the Southern economy.

As communities were forced to decide which path they would take, clashes between promoters of tourism and promoters of other enterprises became more common. By the early twentieth century the consensus that railroad officials helped to forge was falling apart. The region’s economic development was increasingly marked by conflicts between advocates of these different paths, who saw economic development as a one-dimensional choice between tourism and other forms of development.

Perhaps the most documented example of the increasing conflict between tourism and other enterprises was the clash between lumber barons and tourist boosters over the creation of a forest preserve in the Asheville region in the early decades of the twentieth century. Southern public officials took note of how federal protection had fostered a booming tourist business at national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many hoped to use this same model to promote tourism to points in the South. This was especially true of the southern Appalachians, whose climate, scenery, and purported health traits had long made it the center of the South’s most vibrant tourist trade. The expansion of commercial logging in the area in the 1880s, however, threatened the very aspects that drew tourists there. By the turn of the twentieth century, tourist boosters and other groups concerned about declines in the region’s timber resources called on Congress to act. The Appalachian National Park Association (ANPA) was the most vocal booster for tourism, and asked Congress to investigate the possibility of federal protection for

132 Jackson County Journal, 29 January 1915. As quoted in Stephen Wallace Taylor, The New South’s New Frontier, 33.

118 timberlands in the southern Appalachians in 1899. Although ANPA officials hoped that

“scientific forestry” would allow lumbermen to continue harvesting timber, it was clear that tourism would be king.133

Park advocates took a cue from tourist promoters, and their arguments in favor of the park were virtually the same as those used to attract visitors to the region’s resorts. George S.

Powell, president of the ANPA, noted that the area was “one of the most deservedly popular health resorts of the world” and suggested that the region’s climate made it “a place of favorite resort” that could be visited year-round. Like most tourist boosters, he concluded that the South’s proximity to places like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis would allow visitors to quickly travel to the region without regard to season. Because of these conditions, Powell believed that the southern Appalachian region was particularly well-suited for tourism—a claim he saw borne out in the success of Asheville’s resorts. Yet Powell argued that federal involvement was ultimately necessary to preserve the “rare natural beauty of the Southern Appalachian Region.” This—in combination with climate and healthy surroundings—would make up a park that would be visited by large numbers of tourists annually.134

Powell and his fellow park advocates claimed that they had been driven to act mostly by the exploitation of forests by timber companies. Forests were critical to boosters’ construction of the South as a wilderness, and those around Asheville were especially valuable as scenery.

Promoters of the national park were galled by the prospect of losing these forests, which in many ways were their livelihood. In his petition to Congress, Powell argued that “there is but one such forest in America, and neglect of the opportunity now presented of saving it may work irretrievable loss. The forest once destroyed can not be restored.” He mostly blamed lumber

133 Theodore Roosevelt, Message from the President of the United States Transmitting a Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 159-64. 134 Theodore Roosevelt, Message from the President of the United States Transmitting a Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region, 159-64.

119 companies, claiming that “the increasing scarcity of timber is causing large areas of forest in this part of our country to be rapidly acquired by those whose one thought will be immediate returns from a system of lumbering utterly reckless and ruinous,” and predicted that “in a few years this forest will be a thing of the past.” Powell wanted an immediate solution because he found reforestation to be “a slow process: it is for subsequent generations.” He concluded that only way to preserve the forests of the southern Appalachians from destruction at the hands of lumber companies was through federal involvement.135 As a number of scholars have noted, Powell and his industrialist adversaries were not that different. Both wanted to use the region’s trees, whether that meant transforming them into board-feet of lumber or scenic mountain vistas.136

Many other groups supported the plans of the ANPA, including the American Forestry

Association, the National Board of Trade and commercial organizations from a number of

Southern cities. Yet plans for the establishment of a park in the southern Appalachians ultimately ran headlong into powerful opposition on the federal and local level. For instance, Joseph J.

Cannon—the Speaker of the House—claimed that the federal government should spend “not one scent for scenery,” and marshaled Congressional opposition against federal protection of timberlands in the southern Appalachians.137 The staunchest opposition came not from politicians outside the region, however, but from Southern industrialists extracting the very timber Powell wanted to preserve. These entrepreneurs had a significant financial stake in the region’s timberlands—either through land ownership or other agreements that allowed them to cut timber.

None were more outspoken than Champion Fibre Company, a large paper mill constructed in

Canton, North Carolina in 1906. Champion’s president, Reuben B. Robertson, argued that the creation of a national park in the area would tie the hands of timber companies and would not be

135 Theodore Roosevelt, Message from the President of the United States, 161. 136 For instance, Hal K. Rothman and Edward Abbey use the term “industrial tourism,” which Rothman defines as “the packaging and marketing of experience as commodity within the boundaries of the accepted level of convenience to the public.” See Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 13. 137 As quoted in Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 117.

120 in the best economic interests of the area’s residents. He declared that the “program for the future progress of Western North Carolina can not be complete or well-balanced if it considers only the tourist business.” Instead, Robertson promoted the organization of a national forest, which he believed would allow access to timber for industry, while having little effect on tourism.138

Although debates over the extension of federal protection in the southern Appalachians continued for almost two decades, the final result was mixed. Promoters of tourism achieved progress with the passage of the Weeks Act of 1911, the creation of Pisgah National Forest in

1916, and finally the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1930. Yet the region’s resources were still exploited by lumber companies and other extractive enterprises—even in federally-protected areas.

Scholars have used debates between business interests and tourist promoters such as this as evidence of the fundamental incompatibility between tourism and enterprises that use resources for the production of physical objects. For instance, one scholar characterizes this struggle over forest conservation in the southern Appalachians as “a struggle between industry and tourism over the economic future of western North Carolina.”139 Another uses this to suggest that “tourism was a primary justification for this environmental preservation movement.”140

Although similar clashes occurred in places like Georgia’s Tallulah Falls, the divisions between tourism and other enterprises were never as sharp as these and other historians have suggested.141

Despite clashing visions about whether tourism or industry was more appropriate in the new

Southern economy, not all Southerners saw the issue in such absolute terms. It was only with the

138 As quoted in Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 60-61. 139 Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 60. 140 C. Brendan Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South, 74-75 141 For more on Tallulah see Andrew Beecher McCallister, “’A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride’: Tourism, Industrialization, and Conservation at Tallulah Falls, Georgia, 1820-1915” (M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, 2002); E. Merton Coulter, “Tallulah Falls, Georgia’s Natural Wonder From Creation To Destruction, Part I,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 47, No. 2 (June 1963): 121-57.

121 advent of conservation in the twentieth century that tourism began to be perceived as its own developmental end, rather than a means to other forms of economic development.

Ultimately, conflicts over the development of a national park in the southern

Appalachians convinced some Southern communities that tourism was perhaps the “highest” form of development that they could pursue, and one that would not deplete local resources. For instance, in 1930 a Florida journalist urged supported proposed plans for a national park in

Wakulla County because “no development could be more lasting or profitable than the making of it into a great national park and tourist resort.” Clearly influenced by federal action in the southern Appalachians, the author concluded that “resort centers are [the] greatest means of permanent development and that for real and abiding prosperity resort cities excel industrial ones.

Asheville, N.C., away up in the mountains, is a striking example of this.”142

***

By 1930 tourism was a well-established industry throughout much of the South, and was no longer primarily seen as a means to agricultural and industrial ends. Railroad boosters had effectively linked tourism, latent natural resources, agriculture, industrialization, and the promise of the South’s economic development together into a coherent vision for the region—at least for a moment. Although this strategy never brought about the wholesale investment, immigration, and economic transformation that most railroad officials were hoping for, it did shape nationwide perceptions of the state of the South. Many tourists did experience the South as they had been prompted to by railroad agents, and some even settled or invested in the region.

Over time, however, the region’s economy continued to stagnate and the promises of

New South boosters proved hollow, which made it more difficult to attract tourists with this strategy. Tourists increasingly turned to new amusements offered by resorts, including golf,

142 Initially published in the Tallahassee Daily Democrat. As quoted in “A National Park at Our Door,” Thomasville Times Enterprise [Thomasville, GA], 17 September 1930: 2.

122 tennis, fishing, hunting and boating. Automobiles gave tourists mobility that they could not get with railroads, and gave them a greater hand in what they traveled to see. These changes ultimately revolutionized the role of tourism in the Southern economy. Although railroad officials had initially intended tourism to be an aid to industrial and agricultural development, by the twentieth century it was clear that tourism offered immense profits that were difficult to foresee in 1865. Between 1865 and 1930, then, tourism shifted from being a tool used to promote the development of the South’s commercial resources, to one that provided an impetus for the conservation of these same resources.

Chapter 3

Waste and Efficiency

In 1926 Robert W. Griffith—the president of the Champion Fibre Company in Canton,

North Carolina—wrote a long article for an Asheville newspaper justifying the place of his company in the economy of western North Carolina. Griffith predicted that the future Southern economy would not be founded on lumbering or other extractive industries, but on enterprises that could use waste products as raw materials—like his company’s efforts to manufacture paper out of wood pulp. Enterprises like pulp and paper provided new markets for the region’s small farmers and lumbermen and gave value to items that had previously been regarded as waste by allowing them to sell wood that could not be used as timber. Although the region was past the stage of development in which extraction was ideal, Griffith remained hopeful that the South’s forest industries could thrive, and he claimed that pulp and paper created “sound values…where none had existed.”1

Besides creating markets for formerly useless products, Griffith argued that his company was also eliminating waste by reforesting its more than one hundred thousand acres of timberland. As one of the pioneers of industrial forestry in the United States, Champion had poured money into hiring trained foresters and implementing programs to secure a perpetual supply of timber for the mill. Griffith argued that these programs were based on “sound forestry principles,” and claimed that Champion’s efforts were “evidence of the company’s faith in the practice of sound conservation of forest resources.” Ultimately, though, he suggested that the company’s record both in providing new markets for waste products and eliminating waste on

1 Robert W. Griffith, “Industrial Development of Western North Carolina,” The Southern Tourist (March, 1926): 100-06.

124 their own timberlands stemmed from the same impulse, and were evidence of the company’s

“expectation of conducting a permanent industry in this location…with the purpose of obtaining a continuous supply of raw material.”2

Although Griffith’s article seemed benign on the surface, it was a thinly-veiled plea for keeping the forests of the southern Appalachians free from regulation and open to industrial exploitation. At the time he was writing, Griffith was one of the key players in a clash between industrialists and a conglomeration of businesspeople, tourist promoters, preservationists, and federal officials over whether the federal government should create a national park in the southern

Appalachians.3 Because most of the company’s timber fell within the potential boundaries of what would later become Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the stakes were particularly high. Griffith’s focus on waste, then, was an attempt to justify his company’s continued claim to the region’s forests, and to otherwise show how Champion benefitted the southern Appalachian region as a whole. As he explained, Champion opposed the creation of a national park because it removed too many of the region’s valuable resources from use, “which will inevitably handicap its future development.” Instead, Griffith claimed that a national forest was more appropriate because it would “conserve” the area’s “attractions for both the tourist and industrialist.”4

Although Griffith’s vision of a national forest in which industrialists and tourists could coexist did not sit well with the many advocates of a national park, it was based on longstanding ideas about resource use and the best paths to economic development. By 1926, his reasoning would have been familiar to many of the South’s businesspeople, and tapped into a widespread

2 Robert W. Griffith, “Industrial Development of Western North Carolina,” 100-06. For more on Champion see “Carroll E. Williams, “A Well Rounded Out Paper-Making Industry in Western North Carolina—A Marvel of Efficiency,” Manufacturers’ Record, 29 March 1923; E. Kaye Lanning, “Champion Fibre Company: Industry in Western North Carolina” (M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1980), 35-45. 3 For more on conflicts over the establishment of a national park in the southern Appalachians see Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 78-103. 4 Robert W. Griffith, “Industrial Development of Western North Carolina,” 106.

125 belief that the region’s future economic development would lean on industries that could process previously wasted raw materials. Indeed, Griffith called attention to the contrast between

Champion’s “efficient” operations with that of regional lumbermen, who had no plans for

“conducting a permanent industry.” In Griffith’s view, then, conservation of timber and the use of waste products were both products of the impulse to achieve efficiency. By arguing that

Champion’s pulp and paper operations were “permanent,” Griffith distinguished his company from the cut out and get out loggers that were prevalent in the southern Appalachians, while also drawing on the emerging belief in conservation and efficient development held by many of the region’s businesspeople and public officials.

***

Ever since C. Vann Woodward characterized the Southern economy as “colonial” over six decades ago, historians have focused much attention on extractive enterprises. Most scholars conclude that the region’s cheap labor and distinct labor market, lack of technological and industrial expertise, proximity to natural resources, high freight costs, and the enthusiasm of

Southern leaders for any profitable enterprise fueled the growth of labor-intensive, low-paying industries focused on resource extraction and dependent on capital and labor from outside the

South.5 For the most part, Woodward’s characterization of the postbellum Southern economy as

“colonial” has remained unchallenged, and historians have given resource extraction such prominence that it has become emblematic of the New South itself.6 Because of this, most

5 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Sheldon Hackney, “Origins of the New South in Retrospect,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1972); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 156-98. 6 Those parts of the South caught up in extractive enterprises are perhaps overrepresented in the scholarly literature. For instance, there have been a number of monographs which examine how extractive industries shaped specific parts of the South. For instance, see Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Thomas D. Clark, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest (1984; Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Robert S. Weise, Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850-1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

126 scholars conclude that the New South era was a time of unparalleled exploitation of the region’s environment and natural resources. Scholarship on the South’s environmental history is overwhelmingly focused on communities and ecosystems that were bound up in the region’s extractive economy.7 Because of their prevalence throughout the region, and the fact that they were closely associated with environmental degradation and social injustice, extractive industries are regarded as the quintessential New South enterprise.

Extractive industries were responsible for many of the worst environmental problems in the postbellum South, but this one-dimensional tale of degradation is not the whole story. While some people welcomed lumber, turpentine, and mining companies for their profits and jobs, many others believed that these enterprises were destroying the South’s natural resources and guarantee of prosperity. Southerners cared deeply about how their timber and mineral resources were being used, and many concluded that an economy built on the extraction of these resources for export was not ideal. As a result, there was a strong push to limit the region’s dependence on resource extraction, believing that producing raw materials for export was not the best or “highest” use of

Press, 2001); Lawrence S. Early, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), among others. 7 For instance, see Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Thomas D. Clark, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 14-72; Mark V. Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 193-242; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Robert S. Weise, Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850-1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001); Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and The Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 122-62; Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 165-220; Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 87-195. Although Duncan Maysilles examines debates over industrial pollution from manufacturing facilities, the Ducktown area is still a part of the Appalachian South most noted for its resource extraction. See Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

127 the region’s resources. Although public officials and business leaders were mostly unsuccessful in freeing the South from the grip of extractive industries, they created a climate of opinion that fostered the growth of “waste industries” and lent itself to resource conservation and permanent growth.

As Griffith’s argument about the benefits of Champion makes clear, the terms of debate about the place of extractive industries in the Southern economy revolved around competing visions about the concepts of waste and efficient use. Although Southerners were desperate to rebuild their economy as quickly as possible, efficiency was always a key component shaping different visions for the postbellum South. As they began to realize that the region’s resources were not inexhaustible, many Southerners based their visions for the South’s future on what they believed would be the best way to avoid wasting these resources, whether this meant using or preserving them. Ultimately, ideas about what would be a waste of the region’s resources generally fell into two categories. Some Southerners believed that resources were wasted when sitting idle, while others believed that resources were wasted when used incorrectly, and used this concept to promote what they believed would be more permanent ways of using the South’s natural resources. The place of the region’s extractive industries in the Southern economy was worked out in the context of clashes between these conflicting viewpoints.

***

Conflicting visions for how to use the region’s timber and mineral resources first emerged during the early years of Reconstruction, as federal politicians worked through different visions for a post-emancipation South. Although public officials had experimented with providing land to freedpeople during the war itself, these questions became more pressing after

Appomattox. This is perhaps most evident in conflicts over how to divvy up over forty-seven million acres of public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Because the South was reputed to have abundant natural resources, many people believed that the disposal

128 of the region’s public lands would set a precedent for the region’s future economic development, and the stakes were therefore high. Ultimately, attempts to determine the best uses of the South’s public lands shed light on different visions about who should benefit from economic development during Reconstruction and the New South, and the extent to which economic development was bound up with broader social issues.

Radical Republicans in Congress and African Americans saw the region’s public lands as a key part of larger goals of distributing land to freedpeople for their own subsistence use. At the urging of radical Republican Congressmen like George W. Julian of Indiana and John H. Rice of

Maine, in February of 1866 Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, which opened up public lands in these five states for settlement by homesteaders in parcels of eighty acres, and was contingent upon taking a loyalty oath to the United States. The Southern Homestead Act was intended to address the failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and radical Republicans hoped it would punish the South for the war, prevent speculation in Southern public lands, allow freedpeople to set up independent homesteads, and demonstrate the viability of free labor in the

South.8

Yet this vision clashed with that of white public officials in the South, who generally opposed efforts to distribute land to freedpeople. Opposition to the Southern Homestead Act was mostly spearheaded by public officials from the five states involved, who felt that they had the most to lose from federal distribution of lands in their states. Led by Powell Clayton, a

Republican senator from Arkansas, these politicians articulated a vision for the use of the South’s public lands that was dependent on industrialization and extraction. They claimed that the

Homestead Act inhibited industrial development by keeping these resources off-limits to all but

8 Paul W. Gates, “Federal Land Policy in the South, 1866-1888,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 6, No. 3 (August 1940): 303-30. See also Warren Hoffnagle, “The Southern Homestead Act: Its Origins and Operation,” Historian, Vol. 32, No. 4 (August 1970): 612-29; Paul W. Gates, “Federal Land Policies in the Southern Public Land States,” Agricultural History, Vol. 53, No. 1 (January, 1979): 206-27; Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 111-114.

129 small farmers—ultimately subjecting the South to a regulation of public lands that did not apply to the rest of the nation. In short, they argued that the future of the region’s public lands and the natural resources on these lands should not be decided in Washington, but by the states themselves. This opposition also seems to be driven by the fear that independent homesteads for freedpeople would be subsistence based, and would not contribute to the region’s economic growth in the way that industries would. Although they claimed that giving the South’s public lands to freedpeople would stunt the region’s economic development, the reality was simply that radical Republicans had a very different vision for the postbellum South—one that revolved around allowing freedpeople to set up independent homesteads on their own land.

Visions for how these lands should be used, then, revolved around different ideas about what would constitute the biggest waste of the lands and the natural resources that they contained.

Congressional debates about the topic mostly boiled down to whether they were best suited for agricultural or industrial development, and which path would be best for the region. Powell

Clayton and his allies argued that it would be a waste to allow the abundant timber and minerals located on public lands to locked up by reserving these lands for only agricultural purposes. The only proper way of using these lands would be to open them to industries that utilized timber or minerals. Clayton estimated that “nine-tenths” of the lands in Arkansas “are unfit for agricultural purposes. They are only valuable for the timber upon them.” He concluded that “These lands in question are timber lands, and must always remain so” because putting them to use as anything else might “destroy the equilibrium existing between the agricultural and timber resources.”9

To bolster their claims that using public lands in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi for anything but industrial development would be a waste, Southern public officials marshaled arguments about “wise use” and efficient development that closely mirrored those made later by conservationists. For instance, Clayton argued that giving these lands to

9 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 815.

130 individuals and corporations would help to “prevent the destruction of the timber by fire and otherwise.”10 Senator James L. Alcorn—a Republican from Mississippi—similarly claimed that timber thieves were unchecked in taking timber from public lands, which resulted in “hundreds of acres perhaps…being denuded each year.”11 Alcorn concluded that repealing the act would result in the sale of these lands for their timber and provide the federal government with needed cash,

“whereas if the present law remains the timber will be taken, the land will be stripped, and will be valueless upon the hands of the Government.”12 For Clayton and his allies, then, it was not enough to simply use natural resources, but to use them for the best possible purposes. They considered agricultural uses of these lands a waste—most likely because they were geared toward

African Americans—and urged federal officials to support their efforts to open up the region to industry, who they claimed could use these lands most responsibly.

Undergirding these arguments were contradictory visions for the South’s economic development and use of natural resources. Supporters of repealing the Homestead Act believed that the region could never be prosperous by focusing small subsistence farming, and believed that this policy would take productive lands out of commercial use by reserving them for non- market purposes. For instance, Democratic Congressman Lewis V. Bogy of Missouri lamented that capitalists had not been able to acquire land in Arkansas for mining, and concluded that

“persons who desire to become purchasers for the purpose of going into mining operations and of developing the resources of that State are precluded; and this keeps these States in a sad condition all the time.”13 William Windom, a Republican from Minnesota, similarly argued that “if these lands are open to honest sale by persons desiring to manufacture, the increased business which will result in those States will be of vastly greater benefit to the poor people residing there by

10 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 816. 11 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 850. 12 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 850-51. 13 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 849.

131 giving them employment in the manufacture of lumber than they will ever receive under the existing restriction.”14 In short, repealing the law would “add to the wealth of the citizens of the

States; furnish productive labor to their citizens; bring immigration to these States; open up a means of supplying the vast prairie land west of us with lumber, and allow these States the privilege of levying a tax on these lands, which are now of no benefit to them, but rather an obstacle in the way of their development.”15 Opponents of the Homestead Act therefore believed that the region’s lands would be wasted if used for subsistence purposes, and would only obtain their highest and best development if open to industrial activities. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, however, this was a vision for the region’s future that had little room for African Americans.

Indeed, opposition to the Homestead Act was also shaped by the desire of Southern leaders to uphold the racial status quo and head off radical Republican attempts to distribute land to freedpeople.

In fact, opposition to non-commercial agricultural uses of the region’s public lands was only one facet of broader region-wide ideas about the best paths for the South’s future economic development. Throughout the nation, public officials and businesspeople were calling attention to the region’s abundant natural resources in order to attract the capital and expertise needed for successful economic development. Clayton and his allies were very much a part of this broader movement. In many cases they had direct ties to enterprises like railroads, manufacturing, or extractive industries, and the prospect of financial gain likely played a role in their opposition to the Southern Homestead Act. Whether or not they had direct ties to the South’s emerging industries, all stood to benefit from any economic growth in these areas. As a result, they joined

14 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 852. 15 Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st Sess., 816

132 hands with white public officials throughout the South in urging that the region’s public lands be thrown open to companies that would not waste them in agricultural, and non-market, pursuits.16

Southern timber and mineral resources were a key selling point for industrial boosters, and they fueled a widespread optimism that the region’s economy could prosper in the wake of the Civil War by industrializing. Public officials and businesspeople in the South argued that it would be a terrible waste to leave these resources idle—either by putting Southern lands to other uses or leaving them unused. In speeches, editorials, advertisements, trade journals, pamphlets, and exhibition displays businesspeople and public officials called attention to the South’s latent timber and mineral resources in order to attract capital investment from outside the region. As early as 1866 an article in DeBow’s Review called attention to the South’s timber which “grows not in the world as is found in Southwest Georgia and all over the State of Florida,” and concluded that “the lumber business of the South” was “deserving of the gravest consideration by capitalists who desire to invest in Southern lands.” 17 Benjamin H. Hill complained in 1871 that

“Mines in other counties have been developed, while the rich abundant ores and mineral wealth of our Southern land, have been undisturbed by the hand of enterprise,” and asked “Why has God filled the earth with iron and coal, if he did not intend us for a mechanical people?”18 Yet no one advocated putting the region’s timber and mineral resources to work more than Henry W. Grady.

In an 1889 speech, Grady famously described a funeral he had attended in Georgia, where

they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn't

16 Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics, 55-56. 17 “The Lumber Business of the South,” DeBow’s Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (August 1866), 201. 18 “University of Georgia,” Atlanta Constitution, 2 August 1871: 2.

133 furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground.19

Grady’s speech was a powerful call to Southerners to draw on their natural advantages and build a productive economy. Because these advantages were widely believed to be the few assets left in the wake of the Civil War, letting any resource waste away by remaining undeveloped was simply not a tenable solution for industrial boosters like Grady.

Public officials worked to make the region’s timber and mineral resources productive as quickly as possible. State and municipal governments offered significant inducements for companies to locate within their borders, sold public lands for little more than a song, subsidized railroads in the hopes that they would promote development of resources, and chartered surveys of timber and mineral resources to provide potential investors with needed information.20 Many corporate charters passed by state governments even had deadlines for using the land and resources granted to the company, and included clauses by which the charter could be revoked if the company did not follow through with what it had promised. Through these efforts, public officials hoped to put the South on the path to a new industrial economy as quickly as possible, and believed that simply offering the region’s resources up to outsiders would ultimately bring about much-needed economic growth.

By 1876 debates in Congress about the fate of the Southern Homestead Act had come to a head, and it was repealed in July. Although claims that the South was wasting valuable resources likely played some role in this abrupt change, it is no coincidence that this occurred just as Reconstruction was ending and Democrats were retaking state political machinery throughout the South—perhaps suggesting a weakened commitment to the ideals of Reconstruction more generally. Even before the ink was dry on the repeal, speculators and corporations began to

19 Henry W. Grady, “Plymouth Rock and Democracy,” in The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady, Ed. Edwin DuBois Shurter (New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1910), 229-230. 20 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1-22.

134 acquire huge tracts of timber and mineral lands in these states—especially as these resources became scarce in other parts of the nation.21 In the decade following the repeal of the Southern

Homestead Act, more than 5.5 million acres of public land in the South were sold to speculators and various lumber and mining enterprises, paving the way for what one scholar calls the

“irresponsible exploitation of southern timber.”22 While opening up the South’s public lands to speculators and companies engaged in resource extraction did promote the “irresponsible exploitation” of these resources, it ultimately made many of the South’s public officials and businesspeople more hesitant to become involved with extractive industries, and set up later arguments that would be used against extraction.

***

In fact, Southerners had long been concerned about the role of extractive industries in the region’s economy. Advocates of manufacturing in the antebellum era based their arguments at least partially on the belief that the region needed to industrialize in order to free itself from a problematic dependence on the North. Concerns about extraction remained muted until later in the nineteenth century because of the need to build a new economy for the South as well as the fact that many of the effects had not yet become clear. Yet early conflicts over extraction established the terms on which these conflicts would play out in the future. Indeed, Clayton and other opponents justified opening up the South’s public lands to exploitation by timber and mining corporations by claiming that this constituted the best possible use of these lands and the resources they contained. As the effects of resource extraction become clear, however, this same justification would be employed against extractive industries.

One way to understand clashing visions for resource use is by examining conflicts over taxation. Because Southern states frequently relied on resources for tax revenue, struggles over

21 Paul W. Gates, “Federal Land Policy in the South,” 313. 22 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 117; Paul W. Gates, “U.S. Land Policies in the South,” Agricultural History, Vol. 53, No. 1 (January 1979): 221.

135 how resources should be managed were prevalent throughout the South. These conflicts shed light on clashing ideas about the best uses of the region’s resources. Although most of the South’s leaders wanted to see their resources used, reaping the most tax revenue for the longest time provided a strong incentive to maximize the efficiency of how these resources were used. Perhaps the best example was South Carolina’s postbellum phosphate boom, which forced the state’s public officials to determine the best ways to use and manage their phosphate resources. Since

1837 scientists had known about the presence of phosphate beds—mostly located in the beds of

Lowcountry rivers and streams—but it was only in 1867 that the first attempt to mine them occurred.23 Because navigable rivers were state-owned resources, public officials regulated how these resources were used by forcing companies to apply for a license to mine phosphates.

Mining began during Reconstruction, when the state’s Republican government granted mining rights to eight companies for twenty-one years, contingent upon the payment of one dollar for every ton of phosphate mined to the state. Companies had to post a fifty thousand dollar bond to ensure that they would pay all royalties owed.24

The industry boomed in the early 1870s, and royalties paid to the state increased almost fifty-fold between 1870 and 1878. As early as 1873 Governor F. J. Moses told the state’s General

Assembly that “the phosphate deposits lying in the beds of our navigable streams and waters form the only source of revenue to the state of any importance exclusive of taxation,” and by 1887 over two hundred thousand dollars a year was pouring into South Carolina’s treasury from phosphates

23 Tom W. Shick and Don H. Doyle, “The South Carolina Phosphate Boom and the Stillbirth of the New South, 1867-1920,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 86, No. 1 (January 1985): 1-8. 24 This bill was passed on March 1, 1870 over the objections of Republican Governor Robert K. Scott, who refused to sign it. See South Carolina General Assembly, “An act to grant certain persons named therein, and their associates, the right to dig and mine in the beds of the navigable streams and waters of the State of South Carolina, for phosphate rocks and phosphatic deposits,” in Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: John W. Denny, 1870), 513-17.

136 alone.25 As revenue from phosphates increased, questions about how to manage this resource to reap the largest financial return became an important political issue in South Carolina.

There was a consensus throughout South Carolina that phosphates should not be left idle.

Many of the state’s leaders agreed with one official from the South Carolina Department of

Agriculture, who commented that “they ought to give a man a territory and let him work it out until it is exhausted.”26 Within this broad consensus, however, was a diversity of opinion as to the best way to go about this.27 The most intense conflicts were therefore not over whether these resources should be used, but whether companies should be granted general or exclusive rights to mine the state’s phosphates. Under the system of general rights, the General Assembly granted charters to phosphate companies at their leisure, rather than assigning each company a particular area in which they were authorized to mine. Supporters of giving one company an exclusive right to mine a certain tract believed that this would prevent monopoly and wasteful mining practices.

For instance, Samuel Lord—director of the Charleston Mining Company—contended that

I consider the system of general rights ruinous to the State; precisely as if you rented out your ground to a man and allowed him to cultivate only the good parts, having no interest in the soil. My objection is this: where a miner has exclusive rights and a long term of years, the longer the better, the property becomes practically his property, and he works it thoroughly and economically, and the State gets out of it the most it can, because his interests and those of the State are one. While the man with general rights takes the best and leaves the worst for those who come after him.28

25 “Annual Message of his Excellency Governor F.J. Moses, Jr.,” Aiken Tribune 18 January 1873: 3; United States Commissioner of Labor, The Phosphate Industry of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 105. 26 South Carolina Phosphate Commission, Testimony Taken Before the Phosphate Commissioners at Sundry Meetings Held in Charleston, S.C. (Columbia: Charles A. Calvo, Jr., State Printer, 1887), 584. 27 The range of opinion on whether phosphate resources were being used up too quickly, and the best way to regulate their use was most clear during testimony before the Board of Phosphate Commissioners in October of 1887. This testimony was taken under the Phosphate Board while under the charge of the Department of Agriculture. The Board was made independent and strengthened by Governor Ben Tillman three years later. Much of the testimony dealt with specific aspects of the phosphate industry, such as the price of phosphate lands, the amount of capital invested, or the methods of extraction used. However, the Commissioners also questioned their witnesses about the extent of depletion of the phosphate beds and the best way to go about regulation. 28 South Carolina Phosphate Commission, Testimony Taken Before the Phosphate Commissioners at Sundry Meetings Held in Charleston, S.C., 672.

137

Lord essentially outlined what scholars call the “Tragedy of the Commons,” where in a system that relies on common resources it is rational for users to maximize their profit without thinking about the long-term implications of their efforts to do so. In this system, there is no mechanism to limit their exploitation of the resource, because someone else is always waiting to step in and take what has been left.29 Supporters of exclusive rights believed that phosphate miners sought the best quality mineral deposits, which destroyed or degraded others in the process, and that granting exclusive rights to these companies for a longer period of time would give them a stronger sense of ownership and stewardship for their resources. This point was made perhaps most explicitly by

Moses Lopez, the superintendent of the Coosaw Mining Company. Lopez argued that under the system of general rights “the miners are very apt to exhaust the best deposits and pass over the bad. They would make the territory undesirable to others.”30

By the 1880s, these arguments had been co-opted by Benjamin Ryan Tillman—a politician from Edgefield, South Carolina. In 1887, Tillman sought to secure election as governor, and used phosphate royalties as one of the issues he frequently discussed on the stump. Tillman believed that phosphate resources would help provide cheap fertilizers for the state’s white farmers, and likely saw phosphate management as a way to take a swipe at large corporations and

Lowcountry political power at the same time. Tillman called for the doubling of phosphate royalties and advocated using assertive State power to regulate the industry.31 During testimony before the state’s Board of Phosphate Examiners, he explained that royalties on phosphates needed to be raised because “the State needs all the money it can obtain from any legitimate

29 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, No. 3859 (13 December 1968): 1243-48. Arthur McEvoy’s examination of West Coast fisheries adds much-needed nuance to Hardin’s analysis. See Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 30 South Carolina Phosphate Commission, Testimony Taken Before the Phosphate Commissioners at Sundry Meetings Held in Charleston, S.C., 653. 31 Walter Edgar South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 430-39; Wallace, 618-23. For more on the platform of the Tillmanites see “Farmers Are in Revolt,” Macon Telegraph 28 March 1890: 1; “Triumphant Tillmanites,” Macon Telegraph 12 September 1890: 1.

138 source, in order to lessen the burden of taxation.” He argued that phosphate resources were limited, and should be used wisely. Tillman noted that

the phosphate interests of the state are the largest interests she owns, their value is unknown, their quantity is unknown…it seems to me that we are wasting an inheritance placed here by the Almighty, by selling at a price below its real value, in our greed to get money into the Treasury. We are in a manner killing the goose that lays the golden egg, and we may be wasting fertilizing materials that may be absolutely essential to the future prosperity of South Carolina.32

Tillman concluded, “I think it as a statesmanlike act for something to be done to see that these phosphates be not wasted, and that the State receive every dollar which is legitimate, and to see that the royalty, whatever it may be, is fully calculated in whole.”33

Tillman’s criticism of the management of phosphate resources was not based on any concern about the harm that mining companies were doing to environmental quality and river ecology. Yet he, like many other public officials, realized that phosphate resources were an important source of revenue, and sought to get as much money as possible of out these deposits. For state officials money was a powerful incentive to using their resources more efficiently. Although there was rarely any agreement about what was most efficient, state houses throughout the region were forced to consider long-term ways of managing resources in order to bring in the most revenue.

***

By the 1880s the concept of waste was shifting, however, and that the idea that

Southerners simply threw the region’s forest and mineral lands open to outsiders for exploitation is overblown. Although Grady’s comments about the Georgia funeral he attended called attention to the South’s failure to properly use its resources, his vision for the future was not based on extraction but on the production of items like coffins, nails and wool bands from Southern raw

32 South Carolina Phosphate Commission, Testimony Taken Before the Phosphate Commissioners at Sundry Meetings Held in Charleston, S.C., 569-70. 33 South Carolina Phosphate Commission, Testimony Taken Before the Phosphate Commissioners at Sundry Meetings Held in Charleston, S.C., 569-70.

139 materials. Like Grady, many other Southerners believed that resource extraction did not suit the region and articulated other ways of using Southern resources. In large part, this was a result of changing conceptions of what constituted waste. Although Southern public officials had long considered it a waste to leave timber and minerals idle, by the time Grady was speaking many people believed that it was not enough to simply use the region’s resources, but to use them in the right way—though there were still conflicts over exactly what this meant. Changes in the meaning of waste were due to several factors, including the realization that the region’s resources were becoming depleted, Southern ideas about boosterism and economic development, and influences from the burgeoning national conservation movement. These changes culminated in conflicts over which industries were best for the region.

As the effects of timber and mining industries became noticeable, many Southerners expressed concern that the region’s resources were being used too rapidly and began to consider whether these industries served their best interests. As early as 1872 the Memphis Daily Appeal complained that “even if the destruction of the forests in the United States had not produced any apparent evils, the experience of the countries of Europe would be sufficient to warn us of the danger of denuding our country of timber.”34 By 1883 Georgia’s Hinesville Gazette reported that

“Much of the timber near the water course has been denuded of every tree….But if the ring of the timber cutter’s ax is not heard so often, the blazed face of the turpentine tree is seen everywhere,” and concluded that “Cutting timber as an industry has seen its best days in Tattnall county.”35 Just a few years later, the Charlotte Daily News reported that “immense tracts of hard-wood timber lands in the mountains of East Tennessee have been bought by English companies, which are sweeping away the lumber at an alarming rate. The pine belt of Southern Georgia is being cleared

34 “The Forests,” Memphis Daily Appeal [Memphis, TN], 20 May 1872: 2. 35 As reprinted in “Georgia News,” Columbus Daily Enquirer-Sun [Columbus, GA], 20 April 1883: 3. The author of this particular article was not necessarily concerned about timber depletion, noting that “When the timber men, the turpentine men and the mill men are done, the people will make farming pay, notwithstanding the fact that no railroad touches the borders of Tattnall.”

140 off at the rate of two hundred square miles a year, and the net result of the slaughter is increasing damage by floods and prolonged droughts.”36 Georgia’s Wiregrass Watchman noted in 1880 that extractive industries would mean “good-bye timber, good-bye cow range, and finally it will be good-bye to our once boasted and beautiful pine forests.”37 Similar descriptions appeared in newspapers throughout the region, and spread an awareness of the effects that extractive industries had on the Southern environment even to people who did not witness it first-hand.

As logging and mining became more visible throughout the 1880s, a few businesspeople and journalists began to challenge claims that the region’s resources were “inexhaustible.” For instance, in 1891 a Kentucky lumber dealer lamented declines in timber near the Tennessee and

Cumberland rivers, and declared that “The supply of everything is exhaustable [sic]. The slaughter of timber in Kentucky and Tennessee is something awful.”38 In 1909 a special correspondent for the Richmond Times-Dispatch similarly noted that “That the supply of valuable timber in this section is becoming exhausted to an unwarranted extent, is beginning to be realized by the people….A few years since the supply of timber in this section was considered practically inexhaustible, but the great activity in lumber production has shown what can be done in a decade.”39 The growing awareness that Southern resources were not unlimited caused many

Southerners to question how these resources should be used—whether in extraction or for other purposes.

As Southerners were becoming aware that timber and minerals were not inexhaustible, ideas about the conservation of natural resources were making their way into the region and reshaping the prevailing understandings of waste and economic development. Although few

Southerners are credited with having any interest in conservation until the New Deal, it was not

36 Charlotte Daily News, 17 December 1888: 2. 37 Wiregrass Watchman quoted in Darien Timber Gazette, 14 May 1880. As quoted in Mark V. Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 152. 38 “Awful Slaughter of Timber,” The Shenandoah Herald [Woodstock, VA], 8 May 1891: 1. 39 “Forest Supply Being Depleted,” The Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 28 March 1909: 6.

141 ignored in the region.40 As has been demonstrated, many of the South’s journalists, public officials, and businesspeople found conservation programs compelling. By the twentieth century they were at the forefront of growing attempts to implement conservation measures as well as shape governmental policy to make conservation more widespread.

Southern leaders were initially attracted to conservation because they had long understood the importance of minimizing waste in economic development. As scholars have suggested, the “gospel of efficiency” was a key aspect of national conservation campaigns.

Although local communities often enacted conservation measures on their own terms, the national trajectory of conservation was more visibly shaped by the actions of government scientists and bureaucrats who increasingly sought to manage federal lands and resources so that they were used in “rational” ways. Scholars are moving past the idea of a strict divide between

“utilitarian conservationists” like Gifford Pinchot and preservationists like John Muir, but it is difficult to deny that concerns about increasing the efficient use of the nation’s natural resources dominated federal-level discussions of policy and were the public face of the conservation movement. Because they were desperate to develop an economy that would ensure prosperity, the

South’s leaders were never as averse to these concepts as many scholars have claimed, even if there was no consensus about how to realize efficient development.41

Southern leaders were also more inclined to support measures of resource conservation because they had ready examples of other American regions that had failed to conserve resources.

Outsiders counseled Southerners to heed the lessons taught by economic development in other parts of the nation. For instance, in 1879 agricultural writer Solon Robinson condemned the migratory naval stores industry for destroying the South’s pine forests. Robinson observed that

40 For example, see Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, ; Frank Bedingfield Vinson, “Conservation and the South, 1890-1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1971). 41 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1974).

142 Now Georgia, Florida and Alabama are engaged in the great work of the destruction of pine forests, which, immense as they appear at present, will at last disappear, just as the white pines of the Connecticut and tributaries in New- Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts have done; and also the Delaware and Susquehanna in New-York and Pennsylvania, and as will soon be the case in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Maine, over all of which the white pine destroyer stalks, axe in hand, sweeping these beautiful trees from the face of the earth, and so he will sweep away the vast pitch pine forests of the South.42

In 1902 the New York Times similarly noted that “Until the timber supply of the West began to fail that of the South was neglected….They were, and still are, the great National reserve of available timber, and extensive as are the lumbering operations now in progress in the South, the supply will not fail unless all the lessons of Western experience are forgotten or disregarded.”43

These lessons were eagerly reprinted by newspaper staffs throughout the South, who urged their readers not to repeat the earlier mistakes made in other parts of the nation.

Many public officials and businesspeople wrongly believed that the South would not follow in the path of other regions because the region’s unique ecology particularly suited it for conservation. This was especially true of timber, and the Southern climate was widely credited for allowing trees to grow quickly on forestlands that had just been cut. This was an asset for conservationists. For instance, in 1908 Gifford Pinchot claimed that the South’s farmers could either “waste and dissipate their privately owned forests, or they can develop and perpetuate them.” Yet Pinchot claimed that

For them the task of development is easier than for some of the regions North and West, where trees grow slowly or not at all unless planted and cared for during many years. Land in the South naturally goes to forest. Cleared spaces grow up again if left alone for a few years. Trees increase rapidly in size, and most of the species come up of themselves in valuable woods and will amply repay the small expense and slight care necessary to grow a good crop of timber.44

42 Solon Robinson, “Southern Agriculture,” New York Daily Tribune, 23 August 1879: 3. 43 As reprinted in “Forestry in the South,” Banner-Democrat [Lake Providence, LA], 22 February 1902: 4. 44 Gifford Pinchot, “Practical Forestry for Southern Farms,” Modern Farming, Vol. 21, No. 5 (May 1908), 10.

143 Although he hoped that the region would focus on cotton and sugarcane, Missouri lumberman J.

B. White argued that “the Southern States have localities where timber can be grown at a great advantage, because of the soil being better adapted to tree growth than to other crops, and having plenty of moisture which trees require for rapid growth.”45 Rather than being a detriment to conservation, many public officials, businesspeople, and conservationists actually believed that the same characteristics that made the region so appealing to timber and mining barons suited it for conservation as well.

Like Gifford Pinchot and other conservationists, many people in the South found it relatively easy to make the leap from economic efficiency to resource conservation. For instance, as early as 1883 a Salisbury, North Carolina newspaper declared that “The time has passed in this country when a man may buy a few hundred acres of land and go upon it with his ax-men and fell the trees and roll up great heaps and burn them. It has already come to pass that the timber on an acre of land is equal or more valuable than any crop the land can produce.” The author concluded that “The word now, and it comes from a thousand pens throughout the South, is—take care of your timber and set your old fields in timber trees.”46 Indeed, the South’s conservation leaders consistently repeated this “gospel of efficiency” promoted by federal officials. For instance, in

1911 speech before the Southern Commercial Congress Henry Hardtner—a lumberman, noted conservationist, and president of the Louisiana Conservation Commission—claimed that “There should be no worthless or waste lands. Every acre should produce a revenue.”47 Hardtner was no exception, and ideas about conservation from outside the region were disseminated throughout the South through the region’s newspapers, public officials, scientists and university professors.

45 J.B. White, “Conservation in Relation to Lumbering,” 8. 46 Initially printed in the Carolina Watchman [Salisbury, NC]. As reprinted in “The Value of Timber Lands,” Statesville Landmark, 21 November 1883: 1. 47 Henry E. Hardtner, “Conservation of Southern Forests,” in Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention of the Southern Commercial Congress, Ed. LeRoy Hodges (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1911), 744.

144 Southern politicians often made the link between conservation, efficiency and waste most fully. Indeed, many Southern politicians latched onto the ideals of conservation and sought to use them for political gain—though this has gone unnoticed by most historians of the American

South. This was especially true during the first decades of the twentieth century, and politicians who advocated progressive reforms often supported conservation as well. For instance, in 1909

Georgia’s governor, Hoke Smith, told the National Conservation Congress that “Assisted by the study of our resources, we will find substitutes for many things now used less expensive than those now used. We will learn how to use in the best possible way what we have. Knowing what we have all over the land, conservation will come, not from a lessening of activity, but from a quickening of those forces in the best possible way, with the best results, due to the knowledge of what we have, and how to use what we have.” Smith provided many examples of this phenomenon, including the manufacture of Portland cement from Georgia slate and lime “which must…largely relieve the pressure upon our iron-ore beds.”48

J. R. Domengeaux of Louisiana similarly urged delegates to the 1920 state Constitutional

Convention to include conservation of minerals and timber in their reforms. Domengeaux noted that “Louisiana…has been blessed by many of nature’s most valuable gifts, but heretofore they have not been used or developed to the best advantage of the state. Within a few years our great timber forests will be denuded, unless steps are taken to check the wanton waste. It will not be long before some of our mineral resources, such as oils, gas, etc., will be exhausted unless they are properly conserved.” Domengeaux concluded that “Ways and means should be devised by the

Constitutional Convention to not only conserve this natural wealth, but to provide methods whereby the state can get more revenue out of it. These are gifts to the people and the state is entitled to even a larger proportion of revenue than it is getting through the efforts of Governor

48 National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission, February 1909 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), 162.

145 Parker.”49 In 1919 John Hughes Cooper—a little-known candidate for Congress in South

Carolina—similarly declared that conservation was a key part of his platform. In one of his campaign advertisements, Cooper claimed that “I believe the natural resources of this nation belong to the people of this nation. I am opposed to monopolistic ownership, or control which, in effect, constitutes a special or privileged ownership of our water powers and other natural resources.” He argued that “it behooves us as a nation to practice a more frugal use of our forests.

From the practice of such an economy two benefits will result; first, we will save a waste in timber consumption, which, under our present system of cutting, means at no far distant period a depletion of our lumber supply, and, second, the high water floods with their attendant damage to property which result from the denudation of forests at our river sources, will be decreased.”50As these comments suggest, political uses of conservation in Southern states were often intertwined with the politics of taxation or attempts to legislate against large corporations, and conservation was frequently a way to paint these efforts as an attempt to get what was rightfully owed to the state and public. Although these statements should be read critically, political uses of conservation indicate that these ideas were gaining purchase in the region. Whether or not they were simply rhetoric, the use of conservation by politicians who needed public support suggests some broader interest in these ideas among the voting public. These efforts often did not sit well with conservationists like Henry Hardtner, however, who claimed that politicians were “using forestry and conservation and reciprocity to gull the voters” leaving “the conservation of forests…in a bad way.”51 Yet the fact that so many people turned to conservation to justify a variety of actions suggests that the ideals of efficient use were becoming compelling to a much wider group of Southerners than ever before.

49 “Steps to Protect Resources Urged,” Rice Belt Journal, 4 December 1920: 4. 50 “To the Democratic Voters of Sumter County,” The Watchman and Southron [Columbia, SC], 13 August 1919: 6. 51 Henry E. Hardtner, “Conservation of Southern Forests,” 743.

146 Throughout the region were scattered attempts to implement conservation measures, though the majority proved incapable of restraining resource exploitation. Ultimately, most of the region’s conservation agencies were under-staffed and under-funded, and could not effectively implement mandatory conservation measures. Most of the region’s timber and mineral land was privately owned, and there were few incentives to enact conservation measures for all but a select few Southerners.

Although Southern conservation programs never halted the high levels of resource exploitation on the region’s timber and mineral lands, they did shape the New South’s economic development in important ways. As conservation and visible resource degradation pushed

Southerners to understand waste in new ways, many public officials and businesspeople argued that extractive industries were wasting Southern resources, and concluded that they were not ideal for the region’s economic development and their vision of the future. Increasingly, Southern public officials and businesspeople sought to find paths of development that would allow for continued economic expansion while easing pressure on the region’s most-used resources.

***

Changing conceptions of what constituted a waste of the South’s resources forced many

Southerners to reconsider the place of extractive industries in the Southern economy, and culminated in region-wide struggles over what industrial enterprises were best for the Southern states. Many people throughout the region questioned whether extractive industries used resources wisely or wasted them. This change was signaled by the region’s abrupt shift in policy on the subject of the South’s public lands. Following the 1876 repeal of the Southern Homestead

Act, public lands in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi had been open to development by anyone, allowing speculators and corporate interests to purchase large portions of the Southern public domain. By 1889, however, public officials in the South were concerned that resources were slipping out of their hands and being used up too quickly by extractive

147 industries from outside the region. The South’s white public officials soon reversed course and urged Congress to halt the rush for timber and minerals by again making the region’s public lands subject to the provisions of the Southern Homestead Act. By the time Congress prohibited the cash sale of public lands in 1889, however, much of the damage was already done.52

Ideas about waste, conservation, environmental degradation, and the unsuitability of resource extraction found their fullest expression in struggles over which types of enterprise would be best for the New South. This was driven by a climate of opinion about the need for

“wise use” of resources, the desire for continued economic expansion, and new technological processes that made different industrial uses of natural resources possible. By 1903 the

Baltimore-based Manufacturers’ Record reported that throughout the South was “an ever- increasing interest in plans for the economic utilization of what has long been regarded as the waste of the lumber trade.”53 This was manifested in struggles over the suitability of different enterprises for the New South economy that frequently hinged on conflicting visions for the use of the region’s resources. Although many different groups of Southerners clearly felt that extractive industries were not the best choice for the region’s economic development, there was also a general belief that some types of extraction that were inherently better for the South than others, or that certain types of extraction could be made compatible with Southerners’ visions for how to use their resources. As this correspondent from the Manufacturers’ Record suggested, conflicting visions for the South’s extractive economy most frequently revolved around the region’s timber resources, which were perhaps the most visibly exploited resources in the South.

Perhaps the most frequent conflicts occurred over whether lumbering and naval stores— the two major forms of extraction—were still the ideal uses of timber. Some people had no problems with selling the region’s resources to timber cutters or naval stores operators. For

52 Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 112. 53 “Southern Progress,” Montgomery Advertiser, 7 March 1903: 10.

148 instance, in 1902 a newspaper correspondent from Tazewell—a small community in Virginia’s

Appalachian Mountains—defended the right of its residents to sell their resources to outsiders. He noted that although “There is a vast amount of money in the county,” it was mainly a result of

“the sales of lumber and of coal and other mineral lands. For some years the county has been greatly enlarged by sales of timber and lumber, and lately the amount of money has been greatly added to by the sale of coal lands.” Yet the author noted that “The timber has about been exhausted and nearly all the coal lands owned by citizens of the county have been sold to foreign purchasers. These two sources of revenue are practically exhausted and our people must begin to look for other means of keeping the volume of money healthy and large in the county.” He advocated making Tazewell “more nearly self-sustaining,” especially through agriculture.54

In1939 Isabel Barnwell—a farmer from New Hope Plantation, Florida—similarly told a WPA interviewer that “My land is all being turpentine, under contract to Powell and Shave. Mr. Powell lives in Jacksonville, and Mr. Shave, in Fernandina. They pay ten cents a tree, which brings in around five hundred dollars per year. In six or seven years, the turpentine will be exhausted, and

I’ll have the trees back, either all dead or fit only for pulpwood.”55 Like residents of Tazewell

County and New Hope Plantation, many Southerners from depressed areas had little choice about whether they participated in extraction or not, despite knowing what it was doing to the region’s timber.

Other people claimed that extraction was not simply a necessary choice in desperate times, but would actually provide benefits for Southerners by clearing more land for farms. This would buoy real estate prices and provide increased tax revenues for state and local government projects. For instance, in 1915 the New Orleans Item argued the lumber industry provided benefits to the surrounding area mostly by providing higher wages for employees, and claimed

54 “More Farm Products,” The Tazewell Republican [Tazewell, VA], 9 January 1902: 2. 55 Works Progress Administration, “Nueva Esperanza Plantation,” Life Histories Project, Library of Congress, Available at:

149 that “the lumbermen of Louisiana and Mississippi are among the leaders in usefulness in their communities. They have had a rather tough pull.” The author urged that state governments provide relief for lumber interests, primarily by exempting forest resources from taxation. He noted that “we hope that with part of the profits of their business, they will clear their lands for settlement and begin to colonize good farmers in our section,” and claimed that “Every acre of land they clear should be worth more than the land covered with trees. It rests with them to bring this result about.” Ultimately, the author suggested that “It might not be a bad scheme for

Louisiana and Mississippi to exempt from state taxation for a number of years all cut over time land which the owners will clear and settle with good farmers. This would bring about a much needed process. The state could well afford to extend the state tax exempt scheme to all owners of wet lands who drain them and put them under cultivation.” Not surprisingly, the editor of the

Bogalusa Enterprise agreed, and argued that “the suggestion should be followed until it becomes a realization and you will then see Louisiana develop as she never did before.”56

Thomas Gamble—the managing editor of the Weekly Naval Stores Review—provided perhaps the most complete explanation of the benefits of timber extraction. In 1912 Gamble wrote that

The pine trees of Georgia and Florida and Alabama brought fortunes to many among the factors and operators. There is a feeling, more sentimental than practical, that this section gave away its heritage in the sacrifice of its forests and the sale of its timber and lumber and naval stores at low value. It is true that in some reasons the financial returns were unsatisfactory. But the states in question could not remain a wilderness of pines. The advancing wave of humanity demanded homes and the fact that while the lands were being cleared thousands and tens of thousands derived a livelihood from turpentining and saw milling, while many acquired a comfortable competence and some large fortunes, and that the wealth thus derived was used for the upbuilding of this section in railroad construction and in agriculture and industrial development, compensated for this passing of the pine.57

56 “Why Not Exempt Them?,” Bogalusa Enterprise [Bogalusa, LA], 18 November 1915: 4. 57 “At Other Naval Stores Ports of the South,” Weekly Naval Stores Review 22 (27 June 1912), 66. As quoted in Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines, 209.

150 The words of Gamble and others suggest that supporters of lumbering and naval stores were not irrational, or blind to the environmental consequences of their actions. After weighing their options, they believed that the benefits of extractive industries—higher tax revenues for state governments, and infusions of cash in a capital-poor region—outweighed the costs.

Given that attracting capital-toting immigrants to the region was an interest of state governments throughout the South, it is not surprising that some people did see benefits in clear- cutting. For instance, in 1893 the Governor of Alabama told the Conference of Southern

Governors that “The agriculture home-seeker of small means, whether from the colder States of this country or from Europe, will find this region worthy of his careful attention. Large areas of these pine lands are still in the hands of the government awaiting the ownership of him who will come and take them, while vast stretches of forest, as they yearly go down before the march of the great sawmill and turpentine companies, leave lands available to the settler at a song’s cost.”58

As this suggests, many Southern public officials, journalists, and businesspeople worked hard to attract outside capital, expertise, and settlers into the region, and some believed that resource extraction would aid this by clearing land for cultivation.

By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, however, many people were starting to believe that extraction was simply too destructive and promised too little for people living in the South. For instance, in a 1908 article with the ominous title “Florida An Arid Waste In A Few

Years,” the editor of the Panama City Pilot claimed that “unless the forests of Florida can be preserved from the destruction which threatens them a few years will see the state arid waste and the great naval stores industry a thing of the past.” He claimed that “comparatively a short time ago the great bulk of Florida’s natural resources was absolutely untouched, and among these, one of the most important was her virgin forests of pine,” but that the development of the lumber and naval stores industries had altered the state’s environment. Yet the author was quick to free “the

58 Proceedings of the Convention of Southern Governors (Richmond: C.N. Williams, Printer, 1893), 39.

151 lumberman” from blame for this state of affairs by incorrectly claiming that “while his ravages take away much of the picturesqueness and grandeur of the woods, they are not fatal, for only the largest trees are taken.” This was not the case of turpentine producers, who were “not constrained by the same necessity. No tree is too small to yield its quota of stores; large and small alike feel the stroke of the tapper’s axe, and millions of pines are destroyed every year.”59 Not everyone agreed, however, and Solon Robinson claimed that “it is the lumber business far more than the manufacture of turpentine that is denuding the country of pine trees.”60

Regardless of which was most destructive, perhaps the most damning charge leveled at both naval stores and lumber producers was that these industries were migratory and contributed little to the region’s overall economic development. There were a few significant counterexamples—Bogalusa, Louisiana, for instance—but most lumbermen and turpentine producers were forced to move their operations when an area’s timber supply ran out. Because these migrations were caused by using up local timber supplies, the link between underdevelopment and deforestation was all too clear. For instance, in the 1920s an official from a Southern sawmill characterized sawmill operators as “temporary establishments,” and explained that “a sawmill operation can last only as long as it has a timber supply. When this supply of raw material is exhausted there is little left to a sawmill operation that can be classified as much better than junk.” He concluded that

In view of those conditions…it is always a foregone conclusion when starting a sawmill operation that there is only a limited number of years during which it can be operated. Consequently, the program of constructions and development is governed accordingly. Therefore, you can readily realize that a sawmill operation having only a short life cannot very well construct expensive dwellings for its employees, or expend too much in the way of recreational work.61

59 “Florida An Arid Waste In A Few Years,” Panama City Pilot [Panama City, FL], 13 February 1908: 3. 60 Solon Robinson, “Southern Agriculture,” New York Daily Tribune, 23 August 1879: 3. 61 As quoted in Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 161.

152 While discussing the increase of cutover lands in the region, a lumber trade journal similarly noted that “The time is coming when large lumber companies will be a novelty, and when that time does come hundreds of communities now dependent upon lumber operations for their existence will be wiped from the maps unless they take steps to assure their further existence through agriculture or some other form of industrial development.”62 In short, extractive industries relied on exhaustible resources, and could not contribute to the more permanent forms of development prized throughout the region.

By the twentieth century, Southern newspapers were publishing countless examples of mills and mines exhausting their supply and being forced to close, and the social effects of these decisions were often all too clear. Ultimately, this turned many Southerners against such transient enterprises. For instance, the Southern States Lumber Company in Millview, Florida was forced to end operation in 1907 “due to the lack of timber in that section.” One newspaper noted that

“For nearly thirty years, this mill has been in operation, being fed by the adjacent territory, and nothing but small timber now stands on the land controlled or owned by the ‘Southern States.’”

Aside from laying off many of its 250 employees, the company sold its railroad line, pulled up the track, and shipped it to Alabama. Although some employees would move to the new company site, the Pensacola Journal concluded that “The loss of the plant will prove a heavy one to

Millview, as it afforded employment to a large number of the residents, and will leave the place with only the new Brent mill.”63 This example was repeated in communities located close to timber supplies throughout the South, and created a climate in which fear of timber depletion was always present.

***

62 “Cut-Over Land Conference,” The Lumber Trade Journal 7, No. 6 (September 15, 1917), 13. 63 “Millview Machinery and Equipment to be Moved,” Pensacola Journal, 8 June 1907: 1. There were countless examples of notices like this published in Southern newspapers. For a Virginia example see “General Local News,” Shenandoah Herald [Woodstock, VA], 4 October 1907: 3.

153 In a region so desperate for industry and short of capital, only a few people could conceive of completely halting extractive industries like lumbering and turpentine extraction— even if their unsavory environmental record was clear. Instead, many Southern leaders and businesspeople sought to find ways that would allow for continued extraction with less severe environmental effects. Like resource conservation, this trend was driven by ideas about resource waste. Southerners looked for any way possible to prolong timber stocks so that extractive industries could continue operating. Although these solutions were often technological, they sometimes became stand-alone industries, and took their place in discussions of Southern economic development. For instance, Southerners eagerly took up the production of Masonite from “sawmill waste by the use of saturated steam at high temperature and pressure.” The pioneer in this field, the Mason Fibre Company was located close to the Wausau Lumber Company, and the two companies thrived in symbiosis.64 Another good example was the creosote industry, which preserved timber by treating it with creosote. The industry set down roots in Louisiana in

1875 in response to declining timber stocks and the need to better preserve wood for many uses, and one railroad journal called it “an important factor in conserving the timber supply of the world.” The creosote process became widespread—though not just in the South—and treated lumber played many important roles in a developing economy, which included being used for railroad ties and material for wooden bridges, among others.65

Yet perhaps the best example of how the elimination of waste shaped discussions about extractive industries can be seen in attempts to improve the methods of turpentine operators throughout the region. Naval stores operators relied on the same methods for collecting resin that they had for over two centuries. To obtain resin from pine trees, turpentine workers cut v-shaped

“boxes” in tree trunks as well as holes at the base of the tree to store the resin. Workers had to cut

64 “Useful Products from Sawmill Waste,” The Southern Field 18 (1928), 16. 65 “Wood Preservation a Factor in Conservation,” The Southern Field, No. 18 (1928), 15.

154 multiple boxes in each tree to keep a continuous flow of resin, and these trees usually died within five to seven years.66 Critics and supporters of the industry alike looked for ways to improve the techniques used by naval stores operators in order to and allow them to continue operating in a more sustainable manner.

Industry representatives were staunch proponents of finding a technological solution in order to prolong their livelihood, and one newspaper reported in 1901 that “factors and producers desires to invent a better method, if possible, by which the owner may derive a permanent, in place of a temporary, revenue therefore.” One of the major proponents of this search for better methods was the Savannah-based National Tank and Export Company, and it was reported that they were trying to both “introduce better processes of manufacture” as well as “enlist the co- operation of the government in the preservation of the yellow pine forests of the south, which have heretofore been cut down without any thought to the future, thereby making it probably that the next few years may find the forests completely devastated by producers without their having received due compensation therefor.” This newspaper even claimed that turpentiners had been trying to get government involved, but lamented that “it is impossible to get legislation through the state legislatures of southern states, for the reason that there appears to be no desire to enact laws that will interfere with the wholesale slaughtering of timber.”67

In labs and experiment stations throughout the South scientists and industry representatives tried to devise new methods of obtaining resin from pine trees that was both more efficient, but also gentler to the trees. The most successful of these measures was the invention of a cup-and-gutter system by Georgia native and Johns Hopkins-trained chemist Charles Holmes

Herty in the early twentieth century. By 1901 Herty had left his job teaching at the University of

66 Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines, 67-69. See also Percival Perry, “Naval Stores,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture & Industry, Volume 11 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 309-10. 67 “The Southern Naval Stores Industry,” Times Picayune, 12 August 1901: 4.

155 Georgia to experiment with ways to improve the efficiency of naval stores production while preserving the trees used in the process. His ideas about naval stores reform were shaped while traveling through Europe in 1899, where he observed more sustainable European methods of naval stores production. Herty later recounted a conversation with a German chemist, who responded to a query about the naval stores industry of the United States by declaring “Industry?

You have no turpentine industry. It’s a butchery.”68 Herty agreed, and claimed that by using such destructive methods of producing turpentine “We are not only killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, we are actually failing to pick up all of the wealth during the process.”69 Herty’s belief in the need for reform was not simply a product of his travels, however, but also of his belief in New South economic development, and he was an ardent promoter of Southern industrialization. His devotion to boosterism and conservation ultimately came together in his experiments with naval stores production.70

Herty modified European methods of resin collection to develop a system that used iron gutters placed into the bark of the tree and directed resin into a pottery cup hanging from the bark of the tree. Throughout the South, Herty’s discovery was hailed not simply as a more efficient way to harvest resin, but as a key step in preventing the destruction of the South’s pine forests.

For instance, in 1903 the Biloxi Daily Herald noted that “the superiority of the new method of turpentining is so evident that many operators who are acquainted with Dr. Herty’s experiments are eager to adopt it,” and claimed that among its advantages was that it “does away with the

68 “Would Preserve Pine Forests,” Atlanta Constitution, 2 June 1901: 7. As quoted in Gerry Reed, “Saving the Naval Stores Industry: Charles Holmes Herty’s Cup-and-Gutter Experiments, 1900-1905,” Journal of Forest History, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1982), 169. 69 As quoted in Gerry Reed, “Saving the Naval Stores Industry,” 170. 70 For more on Herty’s promotion of Southern industrial development along the booster model, see Germaine M. Reed, “Charles Holmes Herty and the Promotion of Southern Economic Development,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 82, No. 4 (Autumn, 1983): 424-36. For more on Herty’s professional career see Germaine M. Reed, Crusading for Chemistry: The Professional Career of Charles Holmes Herty (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines, 216-24.

156 injurious box and thus lessens greatly the damage done to the trees.”71 Later that same year the

Montgomery Advertiser commented that “Every one knows that trees from which turpentine has been extracted by the old method—‘boxed’ timber it is called—soon die from the wounds inflicted upon them,” and declared the money saved by Herty’s process was “enormous.” The newspaper argued that “It not only causes a great increase in the amount of turpentine produced, but it is a most important factor in saving the pine forests of the South….The cup and gutter system on the other hand, is not fatal to the life of the trees, and does very little damage to the timber.”72 Herty’s work was also endorsed by a diverse array of influential groups throughout the region, including the editorial staff of the Manufacturers’ Record and the American Forestry

Association.73

In the aftermath of Herty’s discoveries, there were further discussions about the industry and whether the new methods of extracting turpentine would be successful in allowing the continuance of the industry. Not everyone agreed that Herty’s new system was ideal, although voices criticizing his system were few and far between. One such voice was that of Robert F.

Wright—U.S. Assistant Commissioner of Agriculture—who claimed that “Dr. Herty’s energies to replenish the waste places in Georgia are commendable, but that they are apt to be lost on the south Georgia people.” Wright believed that naval stores industry employees were “not likely to engage in tree planting to any large extent” because “that is not his business. He converts the denuded forests into farm lands.” Although many people believed that “the class more concerned about the replanting of these forests seem to be the turpentine men themselves,” Wright blamed

Georgia’s farmers for stunting the replanting of the region’s pine forests. He claimed that “the south Georgia farmer is not going to do any replanting for the prospective benefit of the turpentine man, but is going to convert the depleted forests into furrow fields, that he may draw

71 “Turpentine,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 23 January 1903: 1. 72 “Turpentine Industry,” Montgomery Advertiser, 1 December 1903: 2. 73 “Industrial Notes,” Times Picayune, 28 October 1901: 11.

157 more benefit from his lands by the culture of cereals than he did in selling the trees of his forests for a mere song.”74 Ultimately, Wright was wrong. As Herty’s invention was implemented throughout the region, it muted discussions about the end of the naval stores industry by providing a technological solution to declining stocks of timber.

***

Attempts to temper the destructiveness of lumbering and naval stores were never completely effective. After continuing problems many people concluded that extractive industries were not ideal for the region. Like a newspaper correspondent from Greenville, Alabama who in

1898 predicted that “in a few years at most the various mills contiguous to Greenville will have consumed all the timber in their territory and will have to seek other fields,” many Southern public officials and businesspeople believed that “It is time to be looking out for something to take the place of these industries.”75 Unlike this correspondent, however, some people began to argue that the region needed to replace extractive industries with other enterprises before the

South’s valuable timber had all been drained.

Concerns about resource extraction were correlated with preferences for higher-order types of manufacturing. Industrial boosters frequently argued that the South was best suited for manufacturing products rather than simply extracting raw materials to be manufactured elsewhere. For instance, one official with the Southern Railway commented in that “the tendency of industrial development in the South” was “in the direction of putting raw materials through all the processes of manufacture to the completely finished product.”76 Richard Edmonds claimed that this “general tendency of manufacturing capital to get as close as possible to the sources of raw material” was “exemplified most notably, in a cotton mill built by New England

74 “To Preserve Pine Forests,” Augusta Chronicle, 18 October 1901: 5. 75 The Advocate [Greenville, AL], 16 March 1898. As quoted in Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 62. 76 “Complete Manufacturing,” The Southern Field 4 (1925), 7.

158 manufacturers in the cotton field of Alabama, using as fuel coal from a vein which was struck in digging the foundations of the mill.”77 This not only increased the South’s share of the profits, but set up other tangible benefits because “The development of one industry paves the way to the building up of a line of industries in which the products of the first are used as raw materials for others.”78

There were many ideas about what enterprises should take the place of lumbering and mining. Although some of these visions were realistic, many were not. Perhaps the best example of an enterprise that many Southerners felt should replace traditional lumber and turpentine production was the manufacture of furniture, which developed into a vibrant industry in

Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia and especially North Carolina.79 The growth of furniture manufacturing was directly related to its proximity to forested parts of the South, and many communities sold manufacturers by arguing that they would be closer to the raw materials and timber supplies.80 Although C. Vann Woodward suggests that “only rarely did the South develop an industry, such as furniture manufacturing in North Carolina, which finished goods for the ultimate consumer,” this industry was the ideal to which many Southerners aspired.81 Not only did furniture manufacturing offer higher prices for finished goods, but it was widely believed that the industry was a more permanent way to use the region’s forest resources.

Rather than shipping out the region’s timber, and any profits along with it, Southerners believed that the furniture industry contributed more fully to the region’s development. For instance, in an article penned for the New York Tribune Henry W. Grady argued that naval stores were less profitable than other forms of enterprise which manufactured the raw materials from longleaf pines into usable commodities. Grady estimated that “the long-leafed pine, now standing

77 Richard H. Edmonds, “The Utilization of Southern Wastes,” 166. 78 “Correlated Manufacturing,” The Southern Field 4 (1925), 13. 79 “Furniture Industry at High Point,” The Southern Field 24 (1930), 9. 80 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 107. 81 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 310.

159 in Southern forests, would yield, at $10 a thousand feet—the crudest form in which it can be rendered—$500,000,000 in excess of the total taxable value of the South, including cities, farms, personal property, everything,” and exclaimed that these forests were “an enormous possession!”

Yet Grady believed that it would be more profitable to manufacture them into finished products because extraction “does not satisfy the New South.” Instead, he claimed that “made into furniture, that pine would bring $50 instead of $10 a thousand feet. And so, in something over four hundred and fifty factories, she is turning it into furniture.”82

Although Grady’s justification was based primarily on the potential for more profit, many other business leaders believed that furniture would promote long-term ways of using the region’s resources. Since it relied on varieties of timber that were not as stressed as the typical pine or hardwoods used by naval stores and lumbering, furniture manufacturing eased pressure on the certain forests. Yet there was also a prevalent belief that furniture manufacturers would be able to better enact programs of reforestation, which would help secure a permanent supply of timber.

For instance, in 1901 George T. Winston—President of the North Carolina Agricultural and

Mechanical College—noted in an address to that state’s Agricultural Society that “the furniture factories of High Point are changing half a cord of fire wood into $70 worth of furniture” and predicted that “we shall change a small portion of our forests into beautiful and costly furniture worth more than all the lumber now sold in the State.” Winston concluded that the industry’s record of conservation would “reserve enough trees to renew the forests forever.”83

After reviewing the progress of North Carolina in attracting furniture factories, in 1927 the South Carolina Department of Agriculture concluded that their state needed to seek out this kind of industry. Although South Carolina earned a significant amount of money supplying North

Carolina’s furniture factories with timber, this was not ideal. Instead, “furniture factories” were

82 The New South: Writings and Speeches of Henry Grady (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1971), 149. As quoted in Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines, 1. 83 “President Winston’s Talk,” Charlotte Daily Observer, 26 October 1901: 14.

160 needed “to work up our lumber and supply our citizens with furniture, shipping the surplus to other states instead of the rough lumber.” South Carolina officials claimed that “Our vast area of hardwoods insures a continuous supply for a long time, and with selective cutting a permanent supply could be had….our factories could compete successfully with factories in other parts of the United States.” They concluded that “This would add to the prosperity of the state by keeping the money which now goes away for furniture, and at the same time this industry would enable

South Carolina to send out manufactured goods, thus bringing into our treasury much more money than now.”84 These officials believed that the furniture industry would not only bring more profits than lumbering or naval stores, but the capital invested it would also mandate that forestry would always be an important industry strategy for protecting this substantial investment.

As Robert Griffith’s justification of Champion Fibre suggests, the pulp and paper industry was another enterprise which many Southerners claimed would better use the region’s timber resources than lumbering and naval stores. The process for making kraft paper out of the pulp of yellow pine trees by the sulfate process was pioneered by James Lide Coker and his son in Hartsville, South Carolina in the mid-1880s.85 Building on concerns about traditional extractive industries, the industry quickly expanded throughout forested areas of the South. By the time

Champion located in Canton, many paper mills were advocates of reforestation, and one contemporary scholar notes that “industry executives…were terribly concerned about forest depletion.” Champion Fibre was a good example of these concerns. After locating in Canton in

1906, the company obtained wood for pulp from nearly one hundred thousand acres of forestland owned by a subsidiary corporation. The company did enact programs of reforestation, however, and one railroad developmental magazine even described the Champion Fibre Company as “a

84 South Carolina Department of Agriculture, South Carolina: A Handbook (Columbia, SC: Department of Agriculture, 1927), 72-73. 85 Thomas D. Clark, The Greening of the South, 52-3.

161 pioneer in conservative forestry.”86 Champion’s “forestry policy” involved “waste prevention, fire protection, scientific cutting, an educational campaign and the artificial planting of trees,” and was intended to provide a permanent supply of wood as raw material for the company’s operations. Champion Fibre was especially concerned about the elimination of waste, and one observer explained that “Waste, both in the forest and in the mill, is guarded against by reducing the height of stumps to a minimum, cutting as far into the tree tops as possible, keeping down the period of wood storage so as to prevent rot and securing the highest possible yield of pulp per cord of wood in mill operation.”87 In short, Champion had bought into the efficiency of what one historian calls “Taylor-made forests.”88

Because pulp and paper enterprises relied on a continuous supply of raw materials to protect their investment, there was widespread support for the industry based on perceptions that it would ensure a permanent supply of trees. Robert Griffith was not alone in believing that

Champion, and pulp and paper more broadly, offered possibilities that simple extraction did not.

For instance, in 1908 a Florida newspaper noted that paper manufacturers and publishers were up in arms about drastic increases in the cost of making paper. The author noted that this was mostly because stocks of spruce, popular, hemlock and cottonwood—of which much of the nation’s paper supply was manufactured—were becoming scarce. He suggested that “Our southern forests with their quick growth present the only probable solution of the pulp problem. There are found here woods such as cypress, some pine, and much other timber, as well as palmetto, that are particularly adapted to the manufacture of pulp” along with other requirements for manufacturing. Because “lands in this favored region can be reforested in much less time than anywhere else in the United States,” the author concluded that “The lower South offers to the

86 Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 60; “A Pioneer in Conservative Forestry,” The Southern Field, 12. 87 “A Pioneer in Conservative Forestry,” The Southern Field, 12. 88 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth, 141.

162 publishers of this country and undeveloped field wherein can be procured a plentiful supply of wood pulp.”89 A United States Forest Service pamphlet similarly argued that the Southern states held an advantage over other regions in the production of pulp and paper because their forests could regenerate so quickly. The pamphlet suggested that “Here is the opportunity for producing material of pulp-wood size in very short rotations. Fifteen to twenty years in the South will produce large yields of thinning, which can be repeated periodically until it is desirable to remove the remaining stand for either lumber or pulp wood, or for both.”90

By 1929 the Southern forest economy was undergoing significant transformations— developments which were surveyed by Carlile Winslow, the director of the United States Forest

Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. Winslow noted that the fate of the South’s forests had not yet been decided, and wondered what would happen to the region’s forestland and timber-using industries. This was a question which merited national attention, because “what is good or bad for the Southern States is also good or bad for the United States.” 91 Winslow claimed that “the essential problem is to determine how to make the growing of trees profitable. This means fundamentally the full development of the present and potential values inherent in southern woods. It will require an enlargement of the merchantable yields per acre per year, an improvement in the quality of the raw product, and a closer and better utilization including the development of new uses for and from wood.” Although there was still a long way to go,

Winslow provided an overview of the progress that had been made up to 1929, and described new ways of determining which trees to cut, ways to use waste products from sawmill operation, and improvements in the grading of lumber that take advantage of many different species of wood. He even noted continued improvements in resin harvesting and turpentine production, which were

89 “Wood Pulp,” Panama City Pilot, 16 January 1908: 2. 90 As quoted in “Wood Pulp and Paper,” The Southern Field 7 (1925), 13. 91 Carlile P. Winslow, “Creating New Values From Southern Woods,” 1-2.

163 “welcomed by the industry.”92 Although Winslow’s vision for the region was based on substantial changes in how the South used its forest resources, his ideas about the best paths to economic development were shaped by forces that had been at work since the 1880s. Winslow’s comments suggest how ingrained ideas about the elimination of waste were throughout the South, and how much of the region’s program of economic development had been built around this approach.

***

Conflicts over the South’s mineral resources were never as widespread as conflicts over its timber resources, though they sometimes covered similar ground. This was largely a result of the difference in visibility between minerals and timber. It was easy to measure the number of cutover acres resulting from timber-using industries, but it was more difficult to estimate and publicize the amount of coal and iron ore remaining in veins throughout the region—especially when so many veins remained undiscovered. Indeed, as late as 1928 the secretary of the

American Mining Congress commented that “The South has been thoroughly aware of its industrial advantages, but not of its mineral possibilities.”93 Although many Southerners understood that deforestation had broader ramifications in terms of flooding, soil fertility, and climatic control, the same was not true of depletion of mineral resources. There was no George

Perkins Marsh speaking for the nation’s minerals. Conflicts over the management of Southern mineral resources did occur when the resources in questions were state-owned—as in the case of

South Carolina’s phosphates—but most Southerners were much less vocal about the need to check the use of the region’s mineral resources.

This is not to say that public officials did not see mineral development as something that would contribute to the region’s development in all the right ways. Many agreed with J. F.

Callbreath—secretary of the American Mining Congress—who suggested that mineral

92 Carlile P. Winslow, “Creating New Values From Southern Woods,” 1-7. 93 J.F. Callbreath, “Foreword,” in The Undeveloped Mineral Resources of the South, Henry Mace Payne (Washington, DC: American Mining Congress, 1928), iv.

164 development would bring with it a host of benefits to the South. He declared that “no greater service can be rendered the great farming industry of the South than to create local markets for farm products by the recovery of Southern mineral wealth and its home manufacture into marketable products.” He listed a number of benefits that would accrue to the region from mineral development, including “increasing its [the South’s] taxable property, and thus making possible better schools, better roads and better public institutions, all of which are supported by taxation and by increasing business earnings and the more prosperous citizenship which makes possible higher development of religious and charitable organizations.”94 Although Callbreath was speaking for the official trade group of mining professionals, efforts to tap into the region’s mineral wealth since the very end of the Civil War suggest that Southerners widely perceived mineral development as a solution to many of the region’s problems.

This is perhaps most evident in discussions of the development of Birmingham, Alabama which was dependent on coal, iron and steel production. Indeed, the relative success of the city that many people called the “Magic City” or “Pittsburgh of the South” likely quieted any potential concerns about a mineral economy leading to continued underdevelopment in ways that never happened for the region’s timber economy. For many Southerners, Birmingham came to symbolize everything they wanted for the New South. After reviewing progress made in Southern mineral development Henry W. Grady exclaimed that “it is an axiom in our new iron region that

‘An iron furnace is like godliness. Have that, and all the rest shall be added unto you!’” Grady continued, “From this theory the ‘magic cities’ of the South have spring. Of the growth of these, let the story of Birmingham give proof.” Grady claimed that Birmingham’s “mountains of iron and acres of coal” were the city’s guarantee of prosperity and noted that “the iron furnaces, better than building cities, have opened the way to collateral industries.” As a result, he argued that

“such a tremendous hive of industry as Birmingham is can hardly be found elsewhere in

94 J.F. Callbreath, “Foreword,” iv-v.

165 America,” and specifically attributed its success to its resources and the Southern-ness of the city’s builders.95 A correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution who visited Birmingham in the fall of 1887 similarly declared that “I am not only astounded and amazed—I am enthralled— overwhelmed—at the progress everywhere visible and nowhere lacking. That man who does not have faith in the future of Birmingham is either a demagogue or a fool, for there is nothing here that does not appeal with double force to human reason and common sense.”96

Because Birmingham had a successfully constructed an urban society around a mineral economy, many industrial boosters and municipal officials hoped to replicate this success in other towns throughout the region. Virtually every mineral area was billed as the next Birmingham. For instance, in 1883 one observer wrote that the rapid development of Roanoke, Virginia was due to the abundance of minerals in the surrounding territory. The correspondent wrote that “Being right in the heart of a magnificent mineral section, where iron and coal abound in practically inexhaustible quantities, it presented an opportunity for a city somewhat similar to that which necessitated the building of Birmingham, Alabama.”97 A newspaper in New Orleans even claimed that it was commonplace for promoters to favorably compare their “boom towns” with

Birmingham, and commented that “The usual way in which a boom town was started was first to enlarge on the solid prosperity of Birmingham, and then to set forth that the locality to be boomed was in all respects as rich as Birmingham.” This was often done through “False reports of the mineral wealth, certified to by professed mining experts” that “were handed around and advertised until an excitement was started.”98

Some Southern communities valued mineral resources enough to enact legislation that targeted the elimination of wastes in mining and mineral development, though these measures

95 Reprinted in Henry W. Grady, The New South: Writings and Speeches of Henry Grady (Savannah, GA: The Beehive Press, 1971), 124-25. 96 “Birmingham,” Atlanta Constitution, 18 September 1887: 2. 97 “The Growth of a Town,” Augusta Chronicle, 21 October 1883: A5. 98 "Why the South is Better Off," Daily Picayune, 2 January 1894: 4.

166 were limited. For instance, in 1903 the Commonwealth of Kentucky indicted two men for boring six natural gas wells and allowing natural gas to escape from wells “under the pretense of manufacturing lampblack, but really with the unlawful purpose to waste the gas and destroy the gas territory in Meade county, Ky.” The State had solid ground for this prosecution, for the

General Assembly had passed legislation in 1899 which prohibited “wasting” petroleum, natural gas, or salt water “as a protection of the natural resources of the State.” The defendants claimed that the General Assembly “did not mean to make criminal the use by the citizen of his own property, even though that use brought him no pecuniary profit or was unwise.” Although the case was initially dismissed by the county court, the appeals court remanded the case for further judicial proceedings, and the presiding judge concluded that “The Legislature may protect from waste the natural resources of the state, which are the common heritage of all. The right of the owner of property to do with at as he please is subject to the limitation that he must have due regard for the rights of others. To allow the storehouse of nature to be exhausted by the waste of the gas would be to deprive the state and its citizens of the many advantages incident to its use.”99

There were only a few people who looked past idealized images of Birmingham to see how extraction was keeping large parts of the South underdeveloped, and hurting local communities and ecosystems. After moving to the Appalachians in 1908 to conduct a sociological study of the area’s residents for the Russell Sage Foundation—an organization of social reformers—John C. Campbell claimed that coal mining did not always bring direct benefits to

“highlanders.” Campbell argued that “the returns to the mountain people from the opening of the coal mines are, and probably will be for some time to come, indirect returns from the sale of produce from their farms and from business undertakings other than mining that spring up as a result of the opening up of new territory.” He noted that “The many problems connected with the betterment of conditions in mining communities in the mountains are primarily those of an

99 Commonwealth v. Trent & Others, 1903 Ky. LEXIS 276.

167 industrial development, but they cannot be viewed entirely apart from the rural mountain problem, for mountain life in the vicinity of mines has already been greatly affected from a social as well as an economic standpoint.” Campbell concluded that “How to fit the Highlander to take his place in this development, and how to equalize the reaction of industrial conditions upon rural regions adjacent and entirely unprepared for such changes, are questions which must concern all who are interested in the Highlander and his homeland.”100 Although Campbell clearly articulated concerns about the development of a mining economy, voices like his were simply too few to have much effect on the region’s mineral development.

***

Ultimately, some people in the region believed that the Southern crusade to eliminate the waste of natural resources was going too far, and was not having the intended results. For instance, R. D. Forbes—the state forester of Louisiana—wrote in 1917 that “Today, the high stump, at least the very high stump, is a thing of the past, and more and more attention is being given to the close utilization of tops, the more careful measurement of log lengths to eliminate crook and raise the grade of the log, and all methods to conserve our timber supply.” Although

Forbes noted that “This is fine,” he expressed concern that “the conservation of our forests, unlike the conservation of our minerals, our petroleum and our natural gas, includes a great deal more than a mere negative effort—the elimination of waste.” Although miners could only prolong their existence by eliminating waste in their operations, lumbermen—who worked with renewable resources—could go further in ensuring a steady supply of trees for their operations. He concluded that “What we need today in the forests of the South is a new conception of our forest wealth. The forest is not a mine, but a crop. It is not something that, once utilized, can never within human time be used again. It is something that used with foresight and wisdom will

100 John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), 238.

168 constantly renew itself, giving a livelihood not only to us of this generation, but to our sons, and our sons’ sons forever.”101

Forbes’s comments get at the heart of the Southern experience with timber and mineral resources during the New South era. By the time he was speaking, ideas about what constituted a waste of Southern resources had changed significantly. Although the South’s business and political leaders had long believed that leaving timber and minerals idle was the most glaring waste of these resources, this viewpoint began to be challenged in the 1880s by the burgeoning conservation movement, a growing awareness that extractive industries were depleting the

South’s supplies of timber and minerals, and boosterish ideas about the best need for economic efficiency. Although virtually all Southerners still wanted to see the South’s timber and minerals being used—and quickly—they began to value other uses of these resources, and to distance themselves from extractive industries that used resources unsustainably. This process was often manifested in the development of enterprises like pulp and paper, furniture making, or improved resin extraction for turpentine. Although industry replacements or technical solutions for lumber and mining enterprises often had poor environmental records of their own, at the time many public officials and businesspeople saw this as a way to promote long-term uses of exhaustible

Southern resources.

Most scholars agree with Albert Cowdrey’s contention that conservation “originated in the industrial North and the water-poor West,” and that the South “played its most important role as an arena of conservation battles directed from elsewhere.”102 Yet changes in how many

Southerners viewed what constituted a waste of the region’s resources suggest that Cowdrey may have misunderstood the ways that the South was immersed in the broader current of American conservation. Southerners’ concept of waste was to some extent shaped by ideas about

101 R.D. Forbes, “Lessons To Be Learned From Practical Forestry As Applied To Logging Operations,” The Lumber Trade Journal 7, No. 9 (November 1, 1917), 31. 102 Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 103.

169 conservation from outside the region, and they consistently searched for industries and methods of production that would use the region’s resources in the ways that they thought were best. Ideas about conservation were ineffectively administered and unable to stem the tide of widespread resource depletion, but they shaped the region’s economy by facilitating the growth of industries like furniture manufacturing, pulp and paper, and even the resurgence of a more permanent turpentine industry made possible by Charles H. Herty’s cup-and-gutter system. All of these industries were given room to grow and use the South’s timber supplies because they were seen as workable solutions to declines in resource availability brought about by the exploitation of extractive industries.

In this regard, the South was not unlike the rest of the nation, which also prized efficient use of resources. Although historians are beginning to shed light on the role of ordinary people in conservation programs, they have always believed that the “gospel of efficiency” was essentially limited to elite bureaucrats and scientists promoting resource conservation at the federal level.103

Yet many Southerners found the concept of efficient use of the region’s resources compelling, and the region’s discussions of economic development were perhaps most shaped by this changing idea of resource waste. The understanding that extractive industries did not fully contribute to the region’s economy and used resources in wasteful ways found its fullest expression, however, in the search for new enterprises that would supplant extraction, or at least tone down the effects of resources extraction. Conservation in the South was therefore not manifested in the usual places. Rather than productive reforestation programs, governmental regulations and forest reserves, the impulse of many Southerners toward conservation can better be seen in creosote plants, furniture factories, “Herty boxes,” and pulp and paper mills.

103 The best statement of this viewpoint is Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency.

Chapter 4

Balancing Tests

In early 1873, a farmer near Anderson, South Carolina wrote a series of letters to his local newspaper about what he believed was impeding the development of prosperous agriculture in the South. Writing under the pseudonym “Reform,” he advocated draining South Carolina’s wetlands to open up large tracts of fertile land for agriculture. The need for new farmland was more pressing because of the irresponsible use of existing agricultural lands. The author described hills that were “scarred and washed with gullies—their natural fertility exhausted” and claimed that the state’s “virgin forest lands” had been felled by the “woodman’s axe.” Without reclamation, he feared that South Carolinians “must also surrender thousands of acres of our fertile bottom lands to frog ponds and malarious pools and lakes,” making the state “most pitiable.” Yet Reform understood that implementing a system of drainage would not be easy because of the state’s many mill dams, which “cause the flooding of lands for miles above, thus, abstracting from the productive resources some of the most valuable lands of our country.”

Although the author clearly believed that the future of the South was in agriculture, he acknowledged that a solution was needed that would do no “injustice” to the property rights of mill dam owners.1

Reform had an ambitious vision for how drainage and property rights could coexist, which he believed would solve the state’s land problems and slow the exodus of jobseekers.

Drawing on laws passed by the Scottish government as well as earlier Southern laws pertaining to the drainage of swamp lands, he urged the South Carolina General Assembly to allow the Circuit

Court to appoint a commission to look into all complaints about mill dams, provided that two-

1 Anderson Intelligencer [Anderson, SC], 16 January 1873: 2.

171 thirds of the landowners living above the dam petitioned for removal. This commission would determine whether these concerns were well-founded and use this to decide the fate of the dam.

Reform acknowledged that the owner of the dam must be compensated for removal—as in any case involving eminent domain—and advocated spreading this payment out among affected landowners. Ultimately, he believed that this strategy offered concessions to all parties involved, and claimed that “the owner of the property cannot complain, because he is compensated for any damage he may sustain. The public convenience will not be jeopardized, because steam power will very soon supercede water power, if the public necessities require it.”2

Although the proposals of Reform seemed far-fetched in the 1870s, by the twentieth century many Southern states had enacted similar legislation to mediate conflicts over mill dams, though for different reasons. Like Reform, many Southerners were troubled by the ways that the region’s new manufacturing industries were using resources and the effects of their operations on the environment or their own property. Not everyone believed that the South’s resources were best used for industrial purposes, and there was no general consensus about what types of industry were preferable. Southerners frequently articulated different ways of using the region’s resources, or at least tried to modify industrial operations to better accord with their overall vision for the region’s future. Yet like Reform, most Southerners sought ways to address these issues that would allow manufacturing and other enterprises to coexist.

Historians have spent a great deal of time examining the social, economic, political and environmental effects of the South’s industrialization, which began in earnest during the New

South era. Yet they have spent considerably less time understanding the voices of people like

Reform—voices that expressed concern about the wrenching changes brought about by this process and sought alternate paths of development. Although some scholars show that struggles between management and labor over wages, working conditions, and unionization shaped the

2 Anderson Intelligencer [Anderson, SC], 23 January 1873: 2.

172 region’s economic development in important ways, many still tend to characterize critics of New

South industrialization as “the bookish kind whom practical men could easily ignore.”3 Yet just as Southern workers did not silently accept the often-exploitative conditions of industrial labor, neither did many Southerners fully embrace boosters’ often-exploitative vision for resource use and labor in an industrializing economy.

Despite the preference of most public officials, businesspeople, and journalists for manufacturing, the scholarship on the South is overwhelmingly focused on resource extraction.

Countless studies chart the environmental degradation wrought by mining and lumbering, so that this narrative of declension has become emblematic of the New South itself.4 Although parts of the South were tied up in this extractive economy—such as the Appalachian region—this was

3 For instance, see Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) among countless others. Quote from George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 109-110. Tindall claims that “Lost in the hubbub of the market places and the din of factories were a few voices of dissent and a few flurries of disquietude at the New South Triumphant, but they came mostly from the bookish kind whom practical men could easily ignore…for the time being the Atlanta spirit reigned supreme in the Babbitt warrens of the New South. Later reports of its death would be highly exaggerated.” 4 For instance, see Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Thomas D. Clark, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 14-72; Mark V. Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 193-242; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Robert S. Weise, Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850-1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001); Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and The Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 122-62; Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 165-220; Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 87-195. Although Duncan Maysilles examines debates over industrial pollution from manufacturing facilities, the Ducktown area is still a part of the Appalachian South most noted for its resource extraction. See Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

173 never the experience of most Southerners. The New South economy was considerably more diverse, and looking at those parts of the region shaped by manufacturing tells a very different story. Southerners were active participants in their economic development. Rather than simply accepting or even facilitating environmental degradation, many fought the growing power of corporations over the region’s resources and articulated different ways of using these resources.

In doing so, they sparked conflicts over the place of manufacturing in their society and the most desirable forms of economic development—conflicts that were influenced by competing ideas about how to use the region’s resources. Although these struggles rarely challenged the overall logic of industrial development, they reshaped the South’s manufacturing economy and relationship to the natural environment in profound ways.

***

In 1907, Richard H. Edmonds—editor of the South’s premiere trade journal—surveyed over four decades of Southern economic development and concluded that the region was on the right path to prosperity. Edmonds claimed that “the trend of the world’s economic development is toward the South, for, as Andrew Carnegie has recently well said, in the past capital could draw raw materials to it, and thus industry centered where capital was most abundant, but now raw material draws the capital and dominates the development of industrial centers.”5 Edmonds was wrong in thinking that the South had completely surpassed the industrialized North as the preferred destination for manufacturing by 1907. Yet the region’s economy was moving rapidly in this direction, and he spoke for many Southern businessmen and public officials who hoped that abundant natural resources would overcome the South’s lack of capital and make it home to a vibrant manufacturing sector.

5 Richard H. Edmonds, Facts About the South: Promise of Its Prosperity In Light of the Past Based on Limitless Resources (Baltimore, MD: Manufacturers’ Record Publishing Company, 1907), 63.

174 Although there was no question that agriculture would remain an important component of the region’s economy, Southerners like Edmonds favored an economy composed of diverse manufacturing interests. Staple crop agriculture and extractive industries mired the South in a colonial relationship with the rest of the nation, and were common scapegoats for what was keeping the region’s economy from peak performance. In fact, this was an old sentiment.

Prominent industrial boosters like William Gregg, J. D. B. DeBow, and James Henry Hammond had advocated manufacturing as a way to promote regional independence decades before the

Civil War. They claimed that it would open up foreign markets, promote Southern nationalism, and provide a modicum of economic independence, with the ultimate goal of insuring the continuance of the institution of slavery. For instance, in his 1844 Essays on Domestic Industry

Gregg expressed a widely-held conviction that “No nation ever became wealthy by raising the raw material and then exchanging it for the manufactured article. The manufacturing people always have the advantage.”6

There was little industrial growth until 1880, but even during the Reconstruction era a new group of journalists, politicians, and businesspeople had resumed agitation for industrialization. Like their antebellum predecessors, they argued that factories would promote new enterprises and aid existing ones, diversifying the region’s economy and freeing the South from its colonial bonds. Although most wanted to mimic the industrial North, boosters believed that the South had unique advantages which would attract manufacturers to the region. Chief among these was proximity to raw materials. Like Richard Edmonds, many industrial boosters believed that “it is manifestly better to work up a raw material into its finished form near where it is produced,” and by 1908 the president of the Southern Railway even referred to this a “law of

6 William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, in Daniel A. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features (Charlotte: Press Observer Printing House, 1899), 230. As quoted in Patrick J. Hearden, Independence and Empire: The New South’s Cotton Mill Campaign, 1865-1901 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), 11. See also Weymouth T. Jordan, “Cotton Planters Conventions in the Old South,” The Journal of Southern History 19, No. 3 (August 1953): 321-45; Weymouth T. Jordan, Ante-bellum Alabama: Town and Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1957).

175 economics.”7 By locating near abundant supplies of cotton, timber, and other raw materials, advocates of industrialization claimed that manufacturers could save on transportation costs and open up new markets for finished goods and raw materials within the South, which would also aid struggling farmers.

Industrial boosters therefore advocated “home industry” as a way to ensure the economic independence and prosperity of the South by attracting factories to the region’s raw materials.

They publicized the South’s latent natural resources, and many manufacturers even advertised the purchase of their wares as a way to “encourage home industry and Southern enterprise and keep your money at home.”8 Perhaps the most vivid example of the benefits of “home industry” and the alignment of agricultural and industrial interests occurred during a demonstration at the 1881

Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. At an evening banquet, the governors of Georgia and

Connecticut were both attired in new suits “made from cotton that at sunrise dangled from the stalks.” Cotton for the suits was picked early in the morning just outside of Atlanta, ginned, spun into thread, woven into cloth, dyed black, and made into suits at a local factory in just a few hours.9 Industrial boosters believed that this and similar examples proved that “home industry” would benefit all parts of the Southern economy by providing local markets for raw materials as well as finished products that could be made quickly and cheaply, and would not pose any challenge to the South’s racial status quo.

Because industrial boosters believed that economic development favored places in close proximity to natural resources, enthusiasm for Southern industrialization and manufacturing was

7 E. W. Myers, “Influence of the Water-Powers of the South on Its Development,” in Manufacturer’s Record’s Baltimore-Southern Supplement (Baltimore: Manufacturer’s Record, 1899), 29-34; William W. Finley, “Reply of W.W. Finley, President, Southern Railway Company, to Toast at a Banquet of the Asheville Board of Trade, at Asheville, N. C., July 6, 1908.” 8 In this case, the Concord Woolen Mills in Cobb County, Georgia urged consumers to purchase their jean and cassimere goods. Advertisement, The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 8 April 1876: 1. 9 The suits were made by the Willimantic Linen Company of Connecticut, but using machinery on the Exposition grounds. “Rapid Suit Making at the Atlanta Exposition,” Gazette of Fashion (1 February 1882): 80-81; Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, 31 October 1881: 2.

176 mostly a result of the region’s abundant resources. Historian Paul M. Gaston even claims that

New South leaders believed that “resources alone would automatically ensure the industrial revolution” that they wanted for the region.10 Editors like Henry Grady and Richard Edmonds, along with lesser-known journalists and public officials consistently stressed that the South had unique natural advantages, including unharnessed water power, a mild climate, fertile soils, abundant timber, minerals, and agricultural goods—all in close proximity. Like one Tennessean writing in 1874, most observers believed that “we have the water power, the coal, the iron ore, the wood, the wool and the cotton at our doors. If we do not rival the Northern States in manufactures, it is attributable largely to our lack of foresight and enterprise.”11 Although this abundance of natural resources was partially to blame for the influx of extractive industries, many

Southerners and outside observers had an abiding, but unwarranted, faith that these same resources would attract manufacturers. One observer admitted in 1881, “True, we are an agricultural people in soil, climate and the leading staple of the world,” but argued that “we are also a manufacturing people in climate, materials, water powers and other facilities.” The author claimed that “the Southern States are almost a world within themselves, possessing such a variety of soil, climate and natural resources as to enable them to grow profitably all the cereals, cotton, rice and tobacco, peaches, apples, grapes and other fruits, and equally capable of manufacturing them into cloth, wine, flour or other valuable articles of commerce.”12

Like this journalist, Southern businesspeople, speculators, public officials, and journalists surveyed the region’s natural resources and had a variety of ideas about what kinds of manufacturing were desirable, although certain visions were more consistent and realistic than others. Many were especially enthusiastic about refining raw materials and making them into

10 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 69. 11 The Advocate [Greenville, AL], 16 March 1898. As quoted in Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 62. 12 “The Cotton Exposition—Our Duties and Privileges,” Keowee Courier, 21 July 1881: 2.

177 finished products entirely within the South, and believed that the region could attract industries as diverse as furniture factories, vineyards, and brick-making enterprises. Yet because of the region’s large crops of cotton and abundant supplies of iron ore, the most popular types of industry by far were textile and iron manufacturing. Because Southern mills would be located in the midst of the cotton fields or iron mines, as advocates of industrialization liked to say, they would pay less in shipping costs and could produce the same items cheaper than factories located elsewhere. Along with abundant sources of raw materials, the South’s labor supply formed a key part of the appeal to industry made throughout the New South era. Industrial boosters characterized the region’s African American and poor white laborers as a sort of natural resource, and claimed that they would work for low wages as docile labor for Southern mills.

Because natural resources were critical to fueling a manufacturing economy, public officials facilitated industrial access to these resources through any means possible. Republican

Reconstruction governments encouraged the construction of railroads, promoted immigration of capitalists and laborers to the region, and provided corporations with sweeping rights to natural resources, as well as the power of eminent domain.13 As Southern states fell into Democratic hands in the 1870s, the pro-business policies of Reconstruction governments were often adopted by Democrats, whose ranks included many former Whigs predisposed to favor state efforts to promote economic development.14

These efforts ultimately paid off, and Southern boosters were reasonably effective in triggering an industrial transformation throughout large parts of the South beginning in the 1880s.

Between 1880 and 1920 capital invested in Southern manufacturing increased by almost two hundred percent each decade, and amounted to around five billion dollars in 1920. The value of

13 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 1988), 210-216. 14 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, 1-2. See also Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

178 manufactured products increased from 285 million dollars to over eight billion dollars between

1880 and 1920. During this same period, the region had a sustained value-added economic growth of six percent for fifty years—a rate of growth consistently higher than the rest of the nation.15 The South’s manufacture of textiles, iron and steel, and furniture overcame significant challenges to achieve national and international significance, and by 1927 the Southern textile industry had even surpassed New England in total production. Even these figures understate just how much manufacturing shaped the lives of people living in the South. Edward Ayers rightly suggests that “whether or not Southern industry in the aggregate measured up to standards achieved elsewhere under more favorable circumstances, it touched the lives of a million people” and “shaped the histories of hundreds of counties.”16 Yet Ayers might have also noted that the environmental problems associated with manufacturing affected far more people than just those working in Southern mills, and a majority of Southerners were at some point exposed to the byproducts of manufacturing.

Although Southern boosters sometimes recognized that industrialization had undesirable elements, they generally painted them as evidence of progress or the price of doing business. For instance, in 1905 Isaac Avery—editor of the Charlotte Observer—described the view from the fourteenth story of the D. A. Tompkins Company building in Charlotte, North Carolina. Avery was “struck with the oddity of the roof effect of Charlotte, and next with the intensified volume of the roar of traffic….The clatter of horses' hoofs and the exhaust of steam engines come up with piercing keenness.” Yet Avery suggested that “the charm of the view…is the picture of moving life, the living current of people and vehicles, the smoke from the factories and the exhaust of the railroad engines on the four sides of the town….In whatever direction one looks, the horizon is

15 Value-added growth reflects the value of products with the value of materials subtracted. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 60-64. 16 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 105.

179 blotted with factory smoke. Closer in on the north, south, east and west the black puffs from railroad engines is pierced by the ascending columns of exhaust steam.” He concluded that “A beautiful picture of a busy and thrifty city is framed in the white and black of the steam and smoke of industry.”17

Not everyone, however, bought into this vision for the South’s future. What people like

Avery saw as a sign of progress, many others saw as a harmful nuisance. Although New South boosters often portrayed manufacturing as a better alternative to extractive industry, it was undeniable that the South’s new manufacturing economy came with a bevy of environmental problems. By 1900 most Southerners could not escape smoke, chemical waste, or other byproducts from factories. They frequently challenged industrial uses of resources that seemed to violate the long-established legal principle of sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas.18 Because it often had a significant impact on their own use of resources, their quality of life, and their health, virtually every southern county directly affected by this wave of manufacturing—and many of those downstream and upwind of new industrial centers—witnessed a protest of one sort or another in the years following the Civil War.

***

The South’s waterways offer the best vantage point to view the clashing visions for economic development and resource use that emerged as the South industrialized. The effects of the region’s new factories showed up most starkly in rivers and streams, and extended far beyond industrial centers. Although similar conflicts certainly occurred over the region’s lands and skies, they were never as widespread or affected as many people as struggles over water resources.19

The industrialization of the South frequently threatened traditional ways of using water resources,

17 Isaac Erwin Avery, Idle Comments (Charlotte, NC: The Avery Publishing Company, 1905), 21-23. 18 “So use your own as not to injure another’s property” 19 For instance, see M.L. Quinn, “Industry and Environment in the Appalachian Copper Basin, 1890-1930,” Technology and Culture 34, No. 3 (July 1993): 575-612; Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke.

180 sparking perhaps the most intense conflicts in the New South. It is in these debates, then, that we can clearly see how ideas about the “proper use” of natural resources shaped the process of economic development in the postbellum South.20

The South’s rivers and streams had long provided a route for transporting staple crops, a place where Southerners of every class could fish for subsistence or pleasure, and power for small sawmills, cotton gins and gristmills. Southerners occasionally clashed over water rights in the antebellum era as communities were incorporated into the market economy, but these conflicts were limited by the seasonal nature of the South’s water-powered mills and the agricultural orientation of the region’s economy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, lawmakers throughout the South favored unobstructed rivers and used legislation to preserve traditional access to the region’s waterways, though navigable waterways still depended on human intervention to keep them that way.21 Despite the presence of a few significant manufacturing complexes in the antebellum South—Prattville, Alabama and Graniteville, South Carolina, for example—most Southerners had never encountered anything like the textile mill villages of the antebellum Northeast.22

20 Several scholars have looked at how water resources were used in New Orleans, but their focus is generally on how residents of the Crescent City responded to the unique challenges presented by their local environment, such as flooding and river control, rather than how urban areas responded to the challenge of increasing amounts of industrial runoff. See Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 21 Harry Watson, “’The Common Rights of Mankind’: Subsistence, Shad, and Commerce in the Early Republican South,” The Journal of American History 83, No. 1 (June 1996): 13-43. 22 For the most comprehensive overview of waterpower in the United States see Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930, Volume I: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). For more on how water rights and traditional uses of waterways were changed by the industrialization of the northeast in the antebellum period, see Ted Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 25–50.

181 Following the Civil War, industrialists, real estate promoters, and public officials commissioned surveys of the region’s waterways that were used to publicize the potential uses of

Southern water resources for industrial power, raw material, or sewerage in newspapers, periodicals, speeches, and exhibits at fairs and expositions. The South’s rivers and streams were made even more attractive by the region’s mild climate, and advocates of manufacturing claimed that factories would not have to cease operating in winter—as they frequently had to do in the northeast. Because many people thought that “the hum of manufactories along…rushing streams sound the note of progress,” industrial boosters were appalled that the South’s rivers were being wasted.23 In the words of one journalist from the Palmetto state, “the people of South Carolina have little realization of the almost limitless power at hand—the power that is literally running to waste.”24

By comparing the South with industrialized places throughout the nation, Southern advocates of manufacturing predicted that factories would positively transform the region’s economy. For instance, a Georgia newspaper correspondent recited a litany of statistics about rivers in the Northeast, and lamented that “it is mortifying to know that while their inferior water- power has done so much for the cities and towns above named, the almost incalculable water- power of Columbus and the country on the river just above it has done so little for Georgia and

Alabama.” He complained that “the whole available water-power of some of these Northern cities has been appropriated, while that of the Chattahoochee river is only partially brought into use at two or three of its many fine falls, the great mass of its falling water being yet left in its natural freedom and wildness.” Wilderness rivers had no attraction for this observer, who called Southern waterpower “a great resource held in reserve” and concluded that

23 Georgia Department of Agriculture, Georgia: Her Resources and Possibilities (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1895), 43. 24 August Kohn, The Water Powers of South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., 1911), 5.

182 now is the propitious time for bringing it into use—now, while we so much need an influx of thrifty and intelligent white laborers—now, while our old plantation system is deranged, probably beyond restoration to its former importance and profit. Let our people—and especially those in the immediate neighborhood of fine water-power—reflect upon what that power has done for New England cities, and resolve that the resources of wealth and power at their own doors shall no longer remain undeveloped and unappropriated.25

Like this observer, most public officials and businesspeople in the region believed that Southern waterways were the key to attracting manufacturers and starting a much-needed economic overhaul.

Not all parts of the South were equally suitable for industrial development, however.

Although officials often stressed the benefits of their particular locale, the “Piedmont Crescent of

Industry” was widely acknowledged as having the brightest future for manufacturing. The

Piedmont region comprises approximately fifty thousand square miles of land between the

Appalachian highlands and the coastal plain, running from Birmingham to Danville, Virginia.26

Because they were just above the fall line, Piedmont rivers flowed swiftly and were well-suited for generating industrial power. As the James B. Duke Power Company accurately noted in one of their promotional tracts, “Piedmont streams and rivers flow rapidly, tumbling along over shoals and water falls in their hurry to reach the seas….And it is here that mills and factories have come to settle close to their supplies of raw materials.”27 This water was useful for other tasks as well, including washing iron ores, as a raw material in manufacturing operations, and for sewerage in mill villages. Because of these natural attributes, Georgia, South Carolina, and North

Carolina became the hub of Southern manufacturing, and by 1935 sociologist Rupert Vance even claimed that parts of the Piedmont “have seen Henry W. Grady’s dreams come true.”28

25 “The Value of Water Power,” Daily Columbus Enquirer [Columbus, GA], 29 January 1870: 2. 26 Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 275. 27 Duke Power Company, Piedmont Carolinas: Where Wealth Awaits You (Charlotte, NC: Duke Power Company, n.d.), 4. 28 Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 275-315. This quote is from Rupert B. Vance,

183 Ultimately, industrial promoters were fairly effective in calling attention to the water resources of the South, and their efforts to use these resources more intensively proved remarkably successful. By 1880 the region was home to twenty-two thousand industrial establishments which used over two hundred thousand horsepower generated by some fifteen thousand waterwheels and mill dams.29 By 1900 few of the region’s rivers would be left untouched by some form of industrial development. Indeed, the emergence of an industrialized

Piedmont was one of the most dramatic changes in the entire New South era. Yet just as the

Boston Associates and the Waltham-Lowell System “transformed the way New England’s waters were used” by making water a commodity, the industrialization of the South transformed the way the South’s waters were used and how people related to them.30 The best way to understand

Southerners’ reactions to industrialization and changing kinds of resource use is by examining how Southerners clashed over water pollution, mill dams, and the obstruction of rivers by industrial establishments.

***

The most obvious changes caused by manufacturing were industrial water pollution and the obstruction of the South’s rivers and streams by mill dams. Although Southerners had long used the region’s rivers and streams as a sewer for their household wastes, the dispersed rural population of the South often kept the effects out of sight. Industrialization brought both a change in kind and in degree of pollutants being dumped into the region’s waterways—making pollution more visible and conflicting with other uses of these waters. Many Southerners were alarmed at how sawmills used waterways to dispose of sawdust, mining companies used waterways to wash ores, textile mills used waterways to dispose of dyes and chemicals, and burgeoning towns and

“The Profile of Southern Culture,” in Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance, Ed. John Shelton Reed and Daniel Joseph Singal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 46. 29 United States Census Office, Compendium of the Tenth Census, Part II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883), 1219. 30 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 14-15.

184 cities used waterways to whisk away human waste. Mill dams exacerbated these problems by obstructing the flow of rivers and preventing the dispersal of pollutants downstream. Because dams often took precedent over other forms of using rivers, Southerners found that their ability to use waterways as they traditionally had—for transportation, fishing, irrigation, and watering livestock—was significantly curtailed. As they challenged industrial pollution and damming of waterways, some Southerners argued that corporations needed to be restrained so that others could also enjoy rights to water resources. In doing so, they challenged the overall arc of

Southern economic development and prompted conflicts over the best ways to use natural resources in a developing economy.

Uneasiness about the growing presence of mills in the South began almost as soon as the

Civil War ended. Because large cotton mills, forges, and other manufacturing establishments did not begin to thrive until the 1880s, Reconstruction-era conflicts generally involved smaller sawmills and gristmills, and resembled antebellum struggles over industrialization and water resources. Typically local in nature, most of these conflicts played out within communities and forced neighbors to decide what vision for the South’s future would prevail. Common law traditionally allowed nuisances to be removed by the affected parties, and violations of riparian rights by the construction of mill dams were often remedied by tearing down the obstruction.31

Indeed, during the antebellum era mill dams were occasionally destroyed to preserve traditional access to waterways.32 This solution was feasible only as long as conflicts remained local, however, and soon gave way to more formal challenges.

As conflicts over mill dams accelerated during the Reconstruction era, the South’s public officials were forced to consider potential solutions. Some states attempted to restrain the right of

31 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 30. 32 For example, in 1824 a group of South Carolinians attempted to destroy a mill on the Saluda River that obstructed their use of the river for fishing. See Christopher John Manganiello, “Dam Crazy with Wild Consequences: Artificial Lakes and Natural Rivers in the American South, 1845-1990” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 2010), 58-59.

185 dam owners to overflow land without any recourse. For instance, in his 1873 address to the people of South Carolina, Republican governor Franklin Moses counseled that South Carolina

“require[d] a statute by which can be furnished a prompt and specific remedy to persons whose lands may be injured by the overflow of water courses consequent upon the erection of mill dams across the same, and the want of proper care in the owners of such dams.” Moses also claimed that this “flowage act” should be similar to laws passed by other states, and concluded that it

“should regulate also the use of water of such streams on which adjacent mills, propelled by water, may have been erected.”33 Although his suggestions were not enacted during the

Reconstruction era, South Carolina and other states in the region frequently did act to prevent health problems caused by mill dams—often by giving county commissioners the power to remove dams that injured the public health.34

As Southern manufacturing exploded after 1880, the growing size and prevalence of mill dams and the decentralized nature of industrial pollution necessitated new forums for challenging industrial expansion and articulating different visions for the South’s resources. Because these were no longer local problems, Southerners had to find new ways of resolving conflicts over water resources. Like people throughout much of the nation, Southerners often turned to the law to arbitrate between clashing visions for economic development.35 In doing so, they drew on lessons provided by what one scholar calls “the first significant wave of industrial pollution

33 Franklin J. Moses, First annual message of His Excellency Franklin J. Moses, Jr., Governor of South Carolina, to the General Assembly at the Regular Session of 1872-73 (Columbia, SC: Republican Printing Company, 1873), 46-47. 34 For instance, see South Carolina General Assembly, An Act to Constitute the County Commissioners of Anderson County Commissioners of Health and Drainage, and to Define Their Power and Duties Therein, March 14, 1874, in Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General Assembly of South Carolina (Columbia: SC: Calvo & Patton, 1878), 624. 35 For more on how Southerners sought to preserve customary rights through the law (and the difficulties in doing so), see William G. Thomas, Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).

186 litigation in American history,” which was sparked by the industrialization of the antebellum

Northeast.36

Although English common law shaped much of the American legal system, the system of water law that emerged in the United States was unique. Beginning in the late-eighteenth century

American jurists articulated a vision of riparian rights that gave the state significant power over regulating waterways by adopting a more wide-ranging definition of what constituted a public waterway than the English model. Most scholars see the New York Supreme Court’s 1805 ruling in the case of Palmer v. Mulligan as a turning point, after which courts increasingly used their powers to facilitate economic development by securing riparian rights for industrial uses of water resources.37 By the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century this was playing out in states like

Rhode Island, where a series of mill acts made it increasingly difficult to challenge industrial uses of waterways under common law. This was not simply a legal change, however, and Ted

Steinberg claims that it represented “a stunning cultural transformation…a shift in people’s very perception of nature” so that “it was commonly assumed, even expected, that water should be tapped, controlled, and dominated in the name of progress—a view clearly reflected in the law.”38

Yet many New Englanders found ways to challenge the monopolization of water resources by industrial operations, mostly by turning to nuisance law. Despite antebellum changes in judicial decisions which tended to make the law an instrument to promote economic development, nuisance law actually changed very little, and according to one scholar “for the longest time appeared on its face to maintain the pristine purity of a pre-industrial mentality.”

Many justices were inclined to view any use of property that injured that of another as a nuisance, and upheld injunctions to abate such nuisances. Although jurists sometimes avoided the dictates

36 Christine Meisner Rosen, “’Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840-1864,” Environmental History 8, No. 4 (October, 2003): 565-97. 37 William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 132-34. 38 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 16.

187 of nuisance precedent by ruling on technicalities—especially for industrial operations—Christine

Rosen rightly shows that attempts to crack down on “traditional” polluting industries like distilleries, tanneries, and slaughterhouses were often successful even into the mid-nineteenth century.39

The antebellum South did not have the protracted legal debates about economic development that were occurring throughout the rest of the nation, mainly because the region’s plantation economy tolerated little dissent—legal or otherwise. Although Southerners sometimes clashed over resource use, these conflicts were mediated locally or in the halls of state legislatures. Some of the region’s judges even worked to preserve the economic status quo and slow industrial development.40 Yet sustained economic development following the Civil War changed the legal climate of the South, and one scholar notes that Southern judges in the nineteenth century “usually did not hesitate to interpret legislative acts and judicial precedent to accommodate changing social and political demands.”41 Industrial development was perhaps the most pressing of these new demands, and the South’s emerging class of lawyers and jurists were critical to meditating between different visions for New South economic development.42

Not all Southerners could engage in litigation, however, and nuisance cases were consistently skewed toward those who could afford a lawyer and a lengthy defense. Given that land located along major waterways was often the most fertile, and expensive, of the South’s

39 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 74-78. Horwitz’s views have been challenged by several scholars, who argue that nuisance law (and other forms of the law) actually provided courts with a useful apparatus for regulating industry. For instance, see William J. Novak, People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). For more on the divide between regulation of “traditional” polluting industries and newer types of enterprise, see Christine Meisner Rosen, “’Knowing’ Industrial Pollution,” 565-97. 40 James W. Ely, Jr. and David J. Bodenhamer, “Regionalism and American Legal History: The Southern Experience,” Vanderbilt Law Review 39 (1986), 555. 41 Timothy S. Huebner, The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790- 1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 2. 42 William G. Thomas, Lawyering for the Railroad. For one example of how attorneys spearheaded the economic development of the postbellum South see Kenneth Lipartito and Joseph Pratt, Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 11-109.

188 lands, individual landowners who filed nuisance suits against manufacturing establishments were typically well-off, and owned large tracts of farmland. Unlike water control in the West which was geared toward agriculture, Southern waterpower development was primarily intended to benefit urban and industrial interests, and conflicts over water resources frequently pitted agricultural and industrial interests against each other.43 Although many litigants were initially from the old plantation order, by the twentieth century this group had expanded to include more businesspeople and urban elites from cities, who responded to changing conceptions of the public good to challenge industrial use of water resources on different grounds than former planters.

Southerners had several methods of legal recourse for private nuisances like pollution or obstruction of waterways by seeking damages, an injunction, or both. Because pollution and mill dams often devalued or destroyed property along watercourses, some litigants simply requested damages after the fact. These suits were similar to eminent domain, in which property owners were compensated for “coerced ‘takings’ of private property” under the belief that individual property rights had to be curtailed for projects in the public’s interest, and many Southerners believed that damages were simply the price of doing business. Damage suits were perhaps the easiest for Southern jurists to decide because they did not have to deeply consider the implications for the region’s economic development.44 Although courts frequently ruled in favor of plaintiffs, awarding damages did not deeply challenge the logic or path of economic development in the South.

There were hundreds of damage suits filed throughout the South during this period, most of which involved conflicts between agricultural and industrial uses of water resources. Farmers were the most frequent litigants, and many sought to recover damages for the destruction of their crops by pollution, flooding, or the obstruction of water by the region’s expanding factories. A

43 Christopher John Manganiello, “Dam Crazy with Wild Consequences: Artificial Lakes and Natural Rivers in the American South, 1845-1990,” 70-1. 44 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, 63-66.

189 surprising number of these farmers were relatively successful at obtaining damages—both because of local juries sympathetic to their interests as well as the fact that damages were relatively easy to prove. A typical example is an 1893 clash between an Alabama farmer and

Birmingham’s Lady Ensley Coal, Iron & Railway Company.45 Although Birmingham’s iron and steel industry was widely seen as a model for successful industrial development in the South, not everyone believed that iron manufacturing represented the best use of the region’s resources. This was especially true of Alabama’s planters. As Jonathan Wiener suggests, most planters had little problem with mining coal and iron ore, but balked at manufacturing it within the state. These planters were not opposed to all industry, but “they sought industrial development which served their interests, and which they could control.” Yet when Birmingham’s iron industry took off after 1879 the environmental effects of this growth quickly became obvious, and natural resources played an increasing role in planter opposition to the manufacture of iron.46

One Alabama planter who was directly affected by the growth of Birmingham’s iron industry was Andrew J. Drake, who brought suit against the Lady Ensley Coal, Iron and Railway

Company. According to one observer, the company was “one of the largest mining and manufacturing corporations in the south,” and owned large tracts of mineral lands in northwestern

Alabama. After mining the brown iron ore on this land, the company would use a local waterway to wash it to remove impurities before preparing it for manufacture.47 Yet this conflicted with

Drake’s use of this same waterway—which ran through his property—for watering livestock, irrigation, and drinking water. Drake claimed that the company’s operations left it “ladened with red clay, refuse ore, and debris, rendering it unfit for stock and drinking purposes, and that in

45 For more on the company, see Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham, AL: The Chamber of Commerce, 1910), 412-413. 46 Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 182. 47 “Throughout the South,” The Watchman and Southron [Columbia, SC], April 26, 1893: 3. See also W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 239.

190 some places a thick sediment or ‘slush’ was deposited upon portions of the farm impairing its fertility, and in some places, it was so deep as to destroy its usefulness for cultivation.” Because of this destruction of property, Drake asked for five thousand dollars in damages.48

Although the Franklin County Circuit Court limited the damages that Drake could receive, the Alabama Supreme Court overturned this by reasoning that “The damage inflicted was neither intentional nor direct nor immediate, but was consequential.” In short, the justices claimed that the Lady Ensley Company’s washing of iron ore—which was going on throughout the region—was an unreasonable use of the state’s water resources.49 Yet the court took pains to argue that this verdict did not contradict the general understanding that industrial development required the modification of the traditional legal doctrine of sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas.

The court cited many cases which suggested that “every one must so enjoy his own property, as not to offend his neighbor’s equal right to enjoy his own unmolested. But this rule can not be enforced in its strict letter, without impeding rightful progress, and without hindering industrial enterprise. Hence, minor individual interest is sometimes made to yield to a larger and more paramount good.” Justice Thomas W. Coleman acknowledged that this doctrine was critical to promoting economic development, but claimed that it did not apply to damage cases but only to cases in which injunctions were involved.50 In many ways this is evidence of the development of what Morton J. Horwitz calls “an instrumental conception of law,” in which courts facilitated economic development.51 Although in this instance the Alabama Supreme Court protected the interests of the farmer by providing damages for the destruction of his property, the justices took pains to reaffirm legal precedent favoring industrial uses of the region’s water resources.

48 Drake, Ex’r. v. Lady Ensley Coal, Iron & Railway Company, 14 So. 749. 49 Ibid., 749. 50 Ibid., 749. 51 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, 1-30.

191 Like Drake, a surprising number of Southerners were successful at making a compelling case for damages, but obtaining injunctions was far more difficult. Corporations did not like paying out damages, but rarely were they enough to threaten the place of manufacturing in the

Southern economy. Yet injunctions did. Southerners who asked for injunctions against the construction or maintenance of dams and industrial pollutants forced the region’s judges to decide between two paths to economic development. The traditional method of determining a nuisance under common law—whether the use of one’s property injured that of another—was unsuitable for industrial operations that had unavoidable and widespread side-effects. Beginning in the mid- nineteenth century, many justices began employing a “balancing-of-interests test,” in which they decided nuisance cases on the basis of what was best for the public good. By defining the public good in terms of industry, many judges wrote off the environmental consequences of industrialization as the price of prosperity. The balancing test, as one historian notes, allowed

“local and regional economic concerns to rise above personal property rights.”52

By using the balancing test for their decisions about injunctions for dams and pollution,

Southern jurists essentially decided between two different visions for economic development based on a simplistic arithmetic of environmental costs versus public interest. Because they were members of the classes most likely to benefit from economic development, it should be little surprise that rulings frequently defined the public interest as industrial development, regardless of environmental costs. Again, this was perhaps most evident in conflicts over the burgeoning iron and steel economy of Alabama, which created far-reaching disruptions in traditional uses of water resources. The Clifton Iron Company, which was founded in 1880 near Talladega, Alabama, provides a good example. The company constructed two fifty-ton charcoal furnaces, which refined substantial amounts of iron ore mined from local holdings, and used local streams that ran

52 Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke, 61; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, 37-38; Paul M. Kurtz, “Nineteenth-Century Anti-entrepreneurial Nuisance Injunction— Avoiding the Chancellor,” William & Mary Law Review 17 (Summer 1976): 621-70.

192 through their mineral lands to wash their recently-mined iron ore to rid it of impurities.53 Yet this caused problems for landowners downstream of the furnace, including James T. Dye—a former

Confederate officer, substantial property owner, and farmer. Sediment and “refuse materials” flowed onto Dye’s property, and in 1886 he filed a suit against the company, seeking a perpetual injunction barring the continual use of their three washers. The local chancery court found in

Dye’s favor and prohibited the Clifton Iron Company from washing their ores in the stream, throwing the viability of their entire operation into doubt.54

Although the local court restrained the company’s use of water resources, on appeal the

Supreme Court of Alabama overturned the perpetual injunction by applying the balancing test.

The justices claimed the injunction should be thrown out mainly because “the great public interests and benefits to flow from the conversion of these ores into pig metal should not be lost sight of.” In effect, the justices ruled that iron manufacturing was more important than agriculture, and justified the “invasion of the rights” of this landowner to protect the “large sums of money…invested” in the mineral industries of Alabama.55 Because both courts used the same legal reasoning by employing the balancing test, at issue here were two different visions for what constituted the public good. The local chancery court interpreted the public good in terms of agriculture and more traditional uses of water resources. The Alabama Supreme Court interpreted the public good in terms of manufacturing, claiming that the iron industry would be a better use of public resources than agriculture. This disjuncture between local rulings and appeals court verdicts was common in nuisance cases throughout the New South era. Local courts and juries were often far more sympathetic to the economic interests of their neighbors than appeals courts, which considered the economic interests of the entire state. Indeed, the judicial record is littered

53 Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama, 323, 477; Grace Hooten Gates, The Model City of the New South: Anniston, Alabama, 1872-1900 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978), 50-1. 54 Clifton Iron Co. v. Dye, 6 So. 192 (December, 1888). 55 Ibid., 192.

193 with cases in which local juries ruled for the plaintiff and awarded either damages or injunctions, but were overruled on appeal.

Although courts had a mixed record when it came to single landowners, their task was even more difficult when one industry challenged another for access to, or improper use of, water resources. Because different industries relied on the same resources for different processes, corporations had to compete among themselves for a say in how local resources should be used.

This was especially true of waterways, which were used for everything from powering machinery to washing ores to disposing of industrial wastes. Yet the growing presence of mills locating in close proximity to each other sparked conflicts, and caused courts, legislatures, and public officials to reflect on what enterprises would be best for the region.

Perhaps most glaring were situations in which extractive industries like lumbering came into conflict with the South’s burgeoning manufacturing economy. Although waterways used for floating lumber were generally very different than those used to power mills, there were occasionally clashes when these two uses overlapped. Boosters had always shown a preference for manufacturing, and jurists and state officials mostly mediated these conflicts in ways that promoted the interests of manufacturing over extraction, although this varied depending on how dependent on extraction each area’s economy was. For example, in 1894 several mill owners from Tennessee brought suit against a logging company for floating their logs to market down the

Calf-Killer River—standard practice for most loggers. Because of the damage done to their mill dam from the logs, the mill owners asked for an injunction against floating lumber down the river, claiming that it was not navigable and could not be used for this purpose. The loggers argued that they had been using the river for sixteen years, and that it was a “public highway” and

“of great utility to the public in floating logs to market and to mills.” Although they claimed that the river could be used for transporting lumber, the loggers were happy to pay damages as long as no injunction was issued. The lower court granted a perpetual injunction, however, claiming that

194 the Calf-Killer River was not navigable and could not be used by the lumber company. The court further ruled an 1883 legislative act allowing “that all persons may float logs and lumber on all streams and rivers in this state on giving bond and security to protect the owners of milldams from loss or damage” only applied to waters that were navigable. On appeal, the court mostly upheld this ruling, but claimed that the legislative act could not be declared unconstitutional, and sent the case back for another hearing.56 Although the case turned on whether the Calf-Killer

River could be considered navigable, courts and legislatures had malleable standards for what constituted navigability, and often a river’s status changed frequently. They employed these standards in accordance with their vision for economic development, generally to promote the interests of manufacturing over extractive industry. This is not to say that lumber companies were never successful in preserving their own access to waterways. Indeed, large lumber companies were very often quite adept at making their case because they were better able to afford legal maneuvering and to frame their use of these resources as a public good.

Although manufacturing was favored in these conflicts, cases were more difficult when two manufacturing enterprises were competing with each other for access to the same resources.

Unless there was a clear violation of established laws, these cases forced courts to consider whether an obstruction of property was warranted by weighing which enterprise offered the greatest benefit to the public good. One such case arose in 1911 when a North Carolina rope manufactory became embroiled in a conflict with a nearby aluminum manufacturer over the proposed construction of a large dam across the Yadkin River. The proposed dam was estimated to provide between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand horsepower for the aluminum company’s operations, and would have created a large lake that significantly altered the physical structure of the river. Officials from the rope factory claimed that the dam would directly interfere with operations by raising the level of the river and flooding part their property. This would

56 Allison et al. v. Davidson et al. 39 S.W. 905.

195 ultimately hinder their ability to extract power from the river. In short, the rope manufacturers believed that the aluminum company was monopolizing water power on the river and hindering their use of this same power.57

Although the aluminum company claimed that flooding land that belonged to the rope company would not inhibit access to waterpower, their main argument was that “equity will not prevent or interrupt a great enterprise [Southern Aluminum Company] from which the general public will benefit merely to protect a comparatively unimportant property right.” They stressed how the proposed dam would benefit the broader public by providing immense amounts of power, and that they were in the process of building a large mill village to house the company’s operatives. In short, the company argued that it was “employing a great amount of labor in the development of its enterprise, and is a most important factor in the industrial progress and development of that section and in utilization of its natural resources.”58 Not surprisingly, the

North Carolina Supreme Court refused to overturn the lower court ruling denying an injunction.

The court reasoned that the dam had been authorized by the state legislature, and was in the public’s best interest. Although the justices denied that “a larger enterprise has a right to destroy a smaller one,” they argued that the public’s best interests were best served by the larger aluminum company.59

Cases like this occurred throughout the New South era. Despite a few rulings to the contrary, Southern justices frequently ruled in favor of newer industrial establishments like cotton mills as opposed to more traditional industries—like small gristmills and sawmills. As Christine

Rosen has shown, courts in the antebellum northeast generally acted likewise, and “adjudicated cases involving pollution from the traditional, stench emitting industries that had long been considered per se ‘nuisance’ industries very differently than those involving pollution from the

57 Tucker & Carter Rope Company v. Southern Aluminum Company, 81 S.E. 772. 58 Tucker & Carter Rope Company v. Southern Aluminum Company; 81 S.E. 772. 59 Tucker & Carter Rope Company v. Southern Aluminum Company, 81 S.E. 773.

196 new manufacturing and railroad industries.”60 Yet the concept of the public good began to change in the twentieth century, mostly in response to concerns about the effects of manufacturing, the growth of cities and towns, and public health problems. By 1900 there were many more groups competing to use the South’s waterways than ever before, which necessitated redefinitions of the concepts of public good and reasonable use.

***

Concerns about the effects of manufacturing did not only come from isolated farmers and mill-owners concerned about their own access to water resources. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century they were also emanating from a much wider variety of actors throughout the South, both in urban and rural areas. Many people realized that court cases had important implications for the future of the South’s economic development, and cases themselves often became the subject of debate or figured into wide-ranging conflicts over different developmental visions. The law of nuisances therefore played a key role in shaping the process of working through conflicting visions for the South’s economic development, the effects of manufacturing, and how the region’s waterways should be used in the future.

Newspapers throughout the South frequently reported on court cases involving nuisances or riparian rights, and often reprinted important decisions for their readers. In 1898 a Georgia newspaper even noted that there was “such general interest in the water power of the

Chattahoochee” that a court case involving competing claims to the river’s waterpower “attracted much attention.”61 As Southerners wrestled with the effects of industrialization for the first time, the legalese of riparian law and the principles of reasonable use were becoming familiar to the general public and showed up in clashes over resources throughout the region.

60 Christine Meisner Rosen, “’Knowing’ Industrial Pollution,” 565-97. 61 “Power Co. vs. City Mills,” Columbus Enquirer-Sun [Columbus, GA], 15 December 1898: 8.

197 Indeed, the balancing test used by judges to decide between competing interests was remarkably similar to how many Southern communities weighed varying paths to economic development. Decisions about economic development were made on the basis of what different groups believed was best for the public good, which they defined in wildly different ways. Some groups defined it in monetary terms, while others defined it more broadly to include quality of life and traditional use of resources. Yet all sought to make the region’s path to economic development accord with their respective view of the public good. Although the balancing test has been interpreted as a way to facilitate economic development by allowing for unavoidable consequences like pollution, the reality was more complex. Conflicts over the place of natural resources in the South’s development rarely turned on simple questions of preservation or development. Few Southerners could afford to challenge all forms of economic development, and many employed a kind of mental balancing test to decide between two paths. If industry had built-in legal advantages, it could be hemmed in by local statutes and risked its wellbeing when related environmental degradation fostered community resentment.

The similarities between legal balancing tests and community debates over economic development can perhaps best be seen in an 1891 conflict over mill dams in Big Stone Gap,

Virginia. Big Stone Gap was located in the heart of a coal mining region in the southwest corner of Virginia, and the fast-flowing Powell River had attracted several mills that relied on the river for power.62 There was an outspoken group of locals who argued that the mill dams should be torn down for harboring disease, and these dams became a flashpoint for conflicting ideas about resource use and economic development. One of the town’s residents—E. T. Short—appropriated language from legal battles over nuisances and claimed that the dams “should be declared a

62 For a brief background on Big Stone Gap’s economic development in a later period, see Robert Weise, “Big Stone Gap and the New South, 1880-1910,” in The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Eds. Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 173-93.

198 nuisance and removed at once regardless of the owners’ wish.”63 The local newspaper urged the city to take action against one dam in particular before the summer weather spread disease, and declared “blow it skyward, and if the dam owners…think they can recover damages from the city, let them try it.”64

Like these residents, other people in Big Stone Gap believed that water-powered industries were unsuited for their town and made developmental arguments for a disease-free environment. W. S. Morriss—one of the town’s residents—even foreshadowed arguments that would be made by businesspeople a half a century later by arguing that an environment replete with disease would hurt the business prospects of the town. He claimed that the dams should

“come out by all means. People will not stay here at a risk of their health. They will be looking for more healthy localities—for instance will go to Norfolk.” John Fox, Sr.—the father of novelist John Fox, Jr. and a recent resident of Big Stone Gap—similarly commented that “the health of the town is certainly more important than a little old woolen mill.” In the eyes of these residents, the economic benefits of mills were not worth the price of an unhealthy living environment.65 Their decision to oppose the mill was based on what they saw as the best path for the public good, and they made compelling economic arguments for destroying the mill dam.

This association of the public good with free flowing rivers was only bolstered by the fact that the owner of the dam—a wholesale clothier named Abraham Longini—was a native

Chicagoan and full-time resident of the Windy City. Because he lived far from his woolen mill, many people claimed that Longini was in no position to decide what was best for the community, and was making money at their expense.66 Yet Longini vehemently denied that his dam was causing the community’s health woes, and claimed that a manufacturing economy was in the best

63 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post [Big Stone Gap, VA], 6 March 1891: 4. 64 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 20 February 1891: 2. 65 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 6 March 1891: 4. Fox is perhaps best known for his novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), based on his experiences living in Big Stone Gap. 66 For instance, see “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 20 February 1891: 2.

199 interest of the citizenry of Big Stone Gap. In several letters to the local newspaper, Longini made developmental arguments for mill dams and manufacturing, and claimed that enterprises like his contributed to the town’s prosperity and were an inevitable stage in Big Stone Gap’s economic development. Longini insisted that attacks on his dam and mill would temper enthusiasm for manufacturing, hinder investment, and cause the town’s economy to stagnate. He concluded that

If this is the way to encourage outside capital to invest in your beautiful city, I am at a loss to understand such a policy. I can mention fifty prosperous cities in the United States and one hundred in Europe, who build dams in the heart of their town sites at enormous expense, to have water power and you advocate to destroy it, contrary to the law requiring protection to private property and also what may be the future welfare of your city.67

Like many industrial boosters Longini concluded that manufacturing was the solution for improving the town’s economy, and even predicted that mill dams would result in “a regular flow of water in all gutters on your streets to irrigate every garden spot in your town site.”68

The dam’s future not only hinged on debates about whether health problems were worth the economic gains brought by manufacturing, but also on how manufacturing impeded traditional uses of these waterways. Longini suggested that health problems were not caused by his dam but by refuse and other pollutants dumped into the river above his dam by the town’s residents. He claimed that water in the Powell River was “the best and purest of God's gift,” and was only becoming polluted “by the carelessness and recklessness of certain people who throw their refuse” into the water above his mill dam.69 Indeed, the town’s newspaper did not deny

Longini’s accusations, but simply claimed that residents were entitled to throw their trash into the river. One newspaperman wrote that “it is not possible to prevent people from throwing garbage” in the waters of the Powell River, “nor is it desirable.” Because the waters were the “natural drainage of the town,” they were necessary to remove “all the slop and refuse matter of a large

67 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 27 February 1891: 2. 68 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 27 February 1891: 2. 69 Ibid., 2.

200 population.”70 In short, changing traditional ways of using the waterway “merely because the owners of a cheap mill-dam wish to preserve the obstruction, is simply rediculous [sic].”71

Conflicts over manufacturing therefore revolved around determinations of whether limiting traditional uses of the Powell River was in the best economic interest of the town, and were intertwined with ideas about who should call the shots on how waterways were used. In this case, Longini’s absenteeism certainly predisposed the leaders of Big Stone Gap to think that his mill dam was not in the best interest of the community. Indeed, the local newspaper reported that

“The owners of the dam and their families are far removed from the peril to which they wantonly expose us,” and declared, “the people of Big Stone Gap must have a poor spirit in them if they allow person at a distance, or even at home, to keep a death dealing nuisance almost in the heart of their city.” The crux of the argument was that Big Stone Gap’s municipal officials knew what was in the best interests of the town, and believed that they should be able to call the shots on how the Powell River was used.72

Residents of Big Stone Gap employed a balancing test similar to that used by jurists, and many concluded that manufacturing was not worth threatening the public health or keeping residents from using the Powell River as they had always done. The costs were simply too high, and many townspeople concluded that their usage of the river simply could not coexist with mill dams and industry. Yet officials were quick to note that this did not signal an end to the town’s development or that the town would shun all future economic opportunity. For instance, the local newspaper concluded that Big Stone Gap would still welcome economic development, but only on favorable terms. It suggested that

we are, of course, glad to have foreign capital invested here; but if the owners of this capital do not think proper to build anything but mill-dams, and insist on keeping them in the river to collect the filth, mud and refuse in the heart of the

70 “The Dams Again,” The Big Stone Post, 27 February 1891: 2. 71 Ibid., 2. 72 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 20 February 1891: 2.

201 city—garbage that should be passed off as quickly as possible, and must breed disease as long as it is allowed to accumulate—we had better do without it.

The newspaper concluded, “The entire city cannot be sacrificed to save a thousand dollar mill- dam.”73 Ultimately, municipal officials decided that the dam had to go, and the town council ordered Big Stone Gap’s Street Committee to “abate the nuisances of the dams by blowing them skyward.”74

Like citizens of Big Stone Gap, communities throughout the South considered the benefits of manufacturing alongside the threats to health, changing use of resources, and industrial pollution. At issue were competing definitions of the public good, and residents used the same process as jurists to work through these and determine what was best for the community. Ultimately, the decision to destroy Longini’s dam was based on the value of continuing traditional uses of the river, and suggests that for many Southerners environmental quality was a sliding scale. Other communities took the path of Big Stone Gap and concluded that manufacturing was not ideal, and sought other paths to achieve economic development. Yet in one way, the case of Big Stone Gap was unique. The town was in the midst of a coal boom and could afford to seek other options. By 1894 Longini’s clothing business had folded thanks to the unsettled financial situation, and the town’s economy continued to be dominated by coal mining.75

The challenges that some Southerners posed to water pollution and damming of waterways mostly fell short in bringing about widespread change of the region’s economy until the beginning of the twentieth century. While they had some success in winning damages, the

“instrumental” nature of the Southern judicial system favored economic development through industrialization, and prevented many Southerners from implementing more far-reaching reforms.

73 “The Dams Again,” The Big Stone Post, 27 February 1891: 2. 74 “The Dam Question,” The Big Stone Post, 20 February 1891: 2. 75 “Changes and Removals,” The Clothier and Furnisher 23, No. 11 (June, 1894), 64.

202 People who brought suits against corporations were at a severe disadvantage, and lacked the finances, access to scientific or pseudo-scientific expertise, and legal skill of the many corporate lawyers experience in hanging up cases on technicalities. Community-level conflicts often fared better for people concerned about the effects of industrial development. Only a few Southern communities, however, adopted the approach of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and abandoned their commitment to a vision where manufacturing was the basis of the Southern economy. Although there was little success in changing the broad arc of Southern economic development or limiting the pollution of waterways, complaints about industrial pollution did change the terms of debate about Southern economic development. By the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial development was increasingly tempered by concerns about pollution and resource use.

***

Over time, many Southerners recognized that the terms of debate had changed. State officials responded to criticism of the ways that manufacturing establishments were using the region’s resources by increasingly regulating what corporations could and could not do with state waters, which placed new limits on Southern industries. Although this did not solve the problems created by dams, pollution, or monopolization of water resources, state and local officials more frequently mediated between manufacturers and those who felt injured by these operations. Few officials saw these as attempts to completely break the power of industry over the region’s resources, however, and simply wanted to facilitate economic development by mitigating the most apparent nuisances resulting from industrialization.

In part, greater attention to the effects of manufacturing was a result of broader changes in the business and political climate of the South between 1877 and 1900. Although New South boosters and state politicians—both Democratic and Republican—were gung-ho about the need for Southern development, enthusiasm for industrialization was briefly tempered during the radical agrarian revolts of the 1890s. By the first decades of the twentieth century the South

203 developed its own form of Progressivism, which shaped the response of Southern leaders to criticisms of how manufacturing operations were using the region’s resources. Progressives in the

South were generally middle-class businessmen who lived in the region’s burgeoning towns and cities, and one historian claims that “they envisaged as a common enemy the plutocracy of the

Northeast, together with its agents, banks, insurance companies, public utilities, oil companies, pipelines, and railroads.”76 Like efforts to end child labor in Southern factories, efforts to temper the effects of industrialization on the region’s waters were intertwined with broader goals of progressivism, and reflected a shift in the players involved in conflicts over economic development. Rather than former planters, farmers and industrialists battling for their vision through the courts, by the twentieth century competing ideas about economic development increasingly played out in governmental forums, and involved the burgeoning middle and professional classes.

This necessarily involved a redefinition of the public good, which had for so long been geared toward economic efficiency and industry. For the first time debates about the manufacturing and the public good explicitly considered questions of quality of life and health, though these discussions were never separate from questions about what would be best for the region’s business prospects. Ultimately, many state and local officials attempted to regulate resource use, and Southern politicians often spoke up about the need to limit the powers of corporations—sometimes by regulating resource use. Yet state and local attempts to manage fisheries, enact sewerage systems for the region’s burgeoning towns and cities, and regulate the obstruction of rivers all challenged the broad rights initially provided for corporations, but did not challenge boosters’ preference for manufacturing.

76 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, 370-72; William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

204 Changing ideas about the place of manufacturing in the South and the use of natural resources were also shaped by the partial realization of industrial boosters’ vision for the region.

The manufacturing boom in the Piedmont began in the 1880s, but peaked between 1900 and

1930. As more factories were constructed throughout the region—often in close proximity to each other—they fostered conflicts over access to and use of the region’s water resources. As uses of rivers shifted from powering machinery to generating electricity, the larger dams required for electric production monopolized water resources and created problems for more Southerners.

Although some small-scale efforts to develop hydropower began as early as the 1880s, construction of hydroelectric facilities boomed mostly in the early twentieth century as a result of the development of alternating current, which allowed hydroelectric power to be widely distributed.77 In June 1894 the Columbia Cotton Mill in South Carolina’s capital city went into operation as the first electrified cotton mill in the South, and led to further efforts to develop hydropower in the South. These efforts culminated in the organization of James B. Duke’s

Southern Power Company in 1905—the most substantial effort to develop Southern hydropower to that point—which reshaped Piedmont waterways by harnessing them for larger hydroelectric projects than ever before. The development of higher-capacity power lines in the mid-1910s made companies like Duke’s into major players in the region’s economic development, and by 1927 over fifty percent of the region’s mills were powered by electricity. For the first time, power company officials contributed their own vision for the South’s economic development—a vision which was often different than that of manufacturers, farmers, municipal officials, and other businesspeople.78

77 See David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 195-206. 78 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University press, 1967), 71-75. Quote p. 75; For an overview of the development of Southern hydroelectric power see Christopher John Manganiello, “Dam Crazy with Wild Consequences: Artificial Lakes and Natural Rivers in the American South, 1845-1990,” 67-128, 74.

205 To an extent, enthusiasm for hydroelectric development was driven by the belief that it was more a more permanent solution than other forms of power generation—especially coal.

Boosters throughout the nation consistently referred to hydropower as “white coal,” and argued that the water power of the South would give the region a perpetual supply of electricity.79 A newspaper from Biloxi commented that white coal “produces no smoke or ashes, and, after transforming water power into electrical energy, continues its journey to the rivers, lake and sea.

Even if black coal should be exhausted the white coal will last as long as clouds form and water runes [sic] from elevations.” The author concluded that “white coal broadens the field of manufacturing far beyond the limits of towns and cities.”80 By 1919 officials with the U.S.

Department of Labor were even urging Americans to use “the ‘white coal’ of falling water” in place of “the black coal of the underground” to lower the cost of living.81

Southern businesspeople were especially ardent proponents of waterpower as a tool of conservation. Because conservationists were preoccupied with reducing waste and efficiently using natural resources, they advocated hydropower as a way to harness the energy in waterways that would otherwise be wasted. For instance, in a 1919 George K. Hutchins—an official with the

Columbus Power Company—used conservation to advertise his company and legitimate its claims to Georgia’s rivers. Although the United States was a “wasteful nation,” Hutchins believed that waterpower offered the best potential path for the future. He claimed that Southern businesspeople could only be impressed with the region’s hydropower, and declared that “The development of these water powers means conservation in the very highest sense of the term.

Millions of tons of coal, that precious heritage which contributes so largely to our comfort and our commercial supremacy as a nation, have been saved by these developments.” He predicted

79 William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776-1917 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 131-51. 80 “A Happy Idea from France,” Biloxi Herald, 7 December 1901: 3. 81 “Urge Utilization of Idle Resources To Cut Living Cost,” Kingsport Times [Kingsport, TN], 26 September 1919: 3.

206 the “ultimate saving of coal will amount to billions of tons,” but also urged the General Assembly to pass laws that would allow companies to “develop the water powers now going to waste.”82

John Hays Hammond similarly told the Southern Commercial Congress in 1911 that hydroelectric power would bring into use “many millions of horsepower now running to waste in the flowing streams.” Yet Hammond also noted that “The development of this power would result not only in saving millions of tons of coal, but, incidentally – which is of even greater moment – in preventing in a large measure the erosion by uncontrolled flood waters of the soils of our grazing and farming lands.”83

Not everyone believed that waterpower was ideal, however, and by the twentieth century power company officials were frequent targets for people disaffected with the way that these enterprises were using the region’s water resources. The massive dams built by power companies reshaped the ecology of Southern rivers perhaps more drastically than anything before them.

Despite a great deal of opposition, power companies—like manufacturing plants—were often given priority rights over the region’s rivers. For instance, in 1913 the Central Georgia Power

Company appealed a ruling that gave municipal officials from Bibb County, Georgia, the power to treat the company’s dam as a nuisance for causing illness. There had long been questions about whether the dam was an impediment to steamboat navigation on the Ocmulgee River, and a number of suits were brought against the company while construction was ongoing to limit the height—and transformative effects—of the dam.84 Each suit proved unsuccessful, and in 1913 the

Georgia Supreme Court provided a developmental justification for the company’s use of Georgia waters. The justices noted that the power company was performing a public service by providing light, heat and power for public use, and by developing waterpowers of the state that had

82 Advertisement, Atlanta Constitution, 3 August 1919: 70. 83 John Hays Hammond, “Efficiency and Conservation in Handling Southern Resources,” in Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention, Southern Commercial Congress, Ed. LeRoy Hodges (n.p., 1911), 640. 84 See “May Have to Take Dam Out of River,” Columbus Enquirer-Sun [Columbus, GA], May 30, 1908: 7; “Declined to Interfere With Construction of the Big Dam,” Macon Daily Telegraph [Macon, GA], May 1, 1909: 8.

207 previously been wasted.85 Although the General Assembly had instituted measures where dams could be condemned as nuisances and removed, this only applied to “grist and saw mills.” Dams and hydroelectric plants were exempt from this legislation because they were semi-public institutions and involved in providing needed services to the state’s residents. On this basis, the court ruled for the Power Company, and claimed that municipal officials had no jurisdiction to dictate whether or not the company was a nuisance.86 This case set a precedent for the sweeping rights that would be given to power companies in the following years. Yet it also undermined the ability of manufacturers to obtain these same resources, and in this way hamstrung the pro- economic development interests that it was intended to serve. Ultimately, this case reflected an emerging technological and ideological shift away from granting rights to companies for hydropower, to granting rights to electric companies for hydroelectric power, which complicated the process of economic development in the South.

Power companies were concerned about legal challenges from private landowners, however, and often had to use new legal strategies and state political machinery to head off opposition to their use of waterways. For instance, in 1909 the Southern Power Company was forced to incorporate a new company to avoid potential lawsuits over their use of South

Carolina’s Catawba River. Because it had been incorporated by the General Assembly of New

Jersey, the Southern Power Company had no rights to eminent domain in South Carolina, which posed a significant threat to the company’s ability to use the state’s waters as they pleased.

Company officials later noted that “A failure to acquire these properties, or a defective title which had not been discovered, or an error in determining the water level might, in the case of a company which did not have the power of Eminent Domain, result in an injunction proceeding brought by some small property owner.” As a result, the company incorporated the Wateree

85 Central Georgia Power Co. v. Ham, ordinary, et. al., 1913 Ga. LEXIS 517-19. 86 Central Georgia Power Co. v. Ham, ordinary, et. al., 1913 Ga. LEXIS 526-27.

208 Power Company in South Carolina, and the state’s General Assembly granted it the power of eminent domain that company officials desired. This was a common strategy, and company officials even acknowledged that it “has customarily been done in South Carolina by various other power companies."87

Although hydroelectric power was supposed to free manufacturers from having to build their factories beside waterways, it did not abate conflicts over water resources, and the broad rights given to hydroelectric producers frequently conflicted with those granted to manufacturers.

Not only were power companies frequent targets for litigation from private citizens, but they also clashed with industrial establishments over access to water. A typical example is a 1911 clash between South Carolina’s Catawba Power Company—located on the Catawba River—and the owners of a small mill on an upstream tributary of the same river. The mill owners claimed that the construction of the power company’s large dam had created standing water for almost two miles upstream. This changed the flow of the water so that they had to abandon using their mill equipment because of sedimentation. A lower court jury ruled for the mill owners and claimed that even though the power company’s dam had not flooded the mill property it had destroyed its ability to function. On appeal, the Supreme Court of South Carolina affirmed the ruling of the lower court, and claimed that the mill owners were entitled to damages as a result of the destruction of their property at the hands of the power company.88 In some ways, this was a surprising decision. Rarely did appeals courts side with small mills, especially when large power interests were involved. Yet it suggests some of the ways that the electrification of Southern rivers fueled conflicts over how these waters should be allocated, and sheds light on how courts had to sift through competing ideas of riparian rights and the public good to decide on these issues.

87 As quoted in Robert F. Durden, Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Duke Power Company, 1904- 1997 (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2001), 37. 88 Hand v. Catawba Power Company, 73 S.E. 187-88.

209 Even the federal government became embroiled in conflicts over water power development and river navigability, and sometimes stymied efforts to dam rivers for purposes of power. For instance, in 1920 a South Carolina newspaper reported that the U.S. District Attorney was told by his superiors in Washington to begin a suit against the Parr Shoals Power Company for their dam on Columbia’s Broad River, which was impeding navigation of the river. The dam had been built thirty miles upstream of Columbia, and provided electricity for houses and manufacturing plants within the city. The newspaper lamented that “If the government wins this case it will likely mean the ruination of many other power plants of the country” as well as

“ruination to the industries of the capital city.”89 Although this dam was never torn down, the federal government wielded significant power over maintaining the nation’s navigable waterways, and further complicated efforts to secure access to the region’s waterways by power companies, industrialists, and other Southerners.

The urbanization of the South compounded problems of industrial pollution by interfering with urban water supplies and other needs of the cities. Despite the rapid growth of major cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, increasing numbers of small towns and villages with less than twenty-five hundred people were more typical of the New South era. As Edward Ayers notes, by 1900 approximately one out of every six Southerners lived in one of these smaller population centers.90 Although few of these towns ever became major industrial centers, they increased pressure on the region’s waterways and increased competition for water resources among manufacturers. Cities, towns, and villages all entered into this competition for water resources, but had very different needs than most factories.

Prior to the twentieth century, few Southern cities had efficient methods for dealing with sewerage, and many simply emptied human waste directly into nearby waterways. Although

89 “Parr Shoal Dam Blocks River,” The Watchman and Southron [Columbia, SC], 23 June 1920: 6. 90 Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 55-6.

210 some municipal governments made arrangements for waste disposal during Reconstruction, most urban public health problems continued unabated. Beginning with the organization of the

Virginia Board of Health in 1872, states and cities established similar commissions tasked with maintaining public health by eliminating nuisances like standing water and industrial pollution, and providing clean water for urban uses. Progress was slow, however, and city-controlled

Boards of Health were frequently mired in city politics and ineffective at providing needed services. By the twentieth century, states began taking over these roles and were somewhat more successful in protecting urban health. After 1910 many Southern states allocated increasing amounts of money to Boards of Health while granting them broader powers over controlling urban spaces.91

As concerns about urban health grew, state legislatures frequently gave public health commissions broad powers over determining how the region’s waterways were used that had formerly been reserved for the courts. As early as 1872, the General Assembly of Georgia enacted regulations “to prescribe the manner of incorporating towns and villages in this state,” and the state gave each newly incorporated town council power to “abate, or cause to be abated, anything which, in the opinion of a majority of the whole council, shall be a nuisance.” This included the power to regulate drainage, and “to erect, or authorize, or prohibit the erection of gas-works or water-works in the town; to prevent injury to, or pollution of the same, or to the water or healthfulness of the town.”92 These provisions continued to govern the incorporation of

91 David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 95-96; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, 425- 28. For more on New South attempts to square Jim Crow Laws and urban sewerage problems, see Bartow Elmore, “Hydrology and Residential Segregation in the Postwar South: An Environmental History of Atlanta, 1865-1895,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 94, No. 1 (Spring 2010): 30-61. For the most comprehensive overview of public health in the New South see John L. Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). 92 General Assembly of Georgia, An act to prescribe the manner of incorporating Towns and Villages in this State, 1872.

211 towns and villages in Georgia for several decades, and most Southern states had similar legislation governing the incorporation of towns and municipalities.

Because of the growing power of public health commissions in the South, it was perhaps inevitable that municipal water needs would conflict with those of manufacturers. Yet unlike conflicts between agriculture and industry, which courts often adjudicated to favor industry, conflicts between urbanization and industrialization stemmed from the same impulse. Indeed, urban businessmen were integral to organizing, supporting, and participating in public health crusades as well as crusades for attracting manufacturing to their municipality.

Because of the close association between public health associations and urban businessmen, their rulings rarely challenged the logic of industrial development. Many simply sought to use clean water as yet another selling point for their particular community, and to find ways for industrial and urban development to co-exist with other enterprises. For instance, in

1903 the owner of the Blue Springs Company sought to get the city of Columbus, Georgia to adopt its water system by claiming that “impure, or even water that is suspected of impurity, is the worst thing in the world for a city’s prosperity.”93 Because clean water had important implications for urban and industrial growth, discussions of waterway health were serious affairs that could make or break the fortunes of a municipality. Industrialists sometimes had their own reasons for wanting clean water, and used the machinery of municipal government to help ensure that they would have clean raw materials to work with. For instance, in a speech before the Civic

Club of Lexington, Kentucky, Elijah J. Allen explained why he believed that the city needed a system of sewerage. Allen was a factory owner, and justified the need for this based on how it would help industrialists like himself. He claimed that “I know whereof I speak. In the year 1884 we moved our factory from where we were on Vine Street out to the city limits, and at the time we could use the water in our boilers, but in recent years since they put in the brewery up here,

93 “Joint Debate is Proposed,” Columbus Enquirer Sun [Columbus, GA], 3 November 1903: 8.

212 and the asylum sewage has been dumped in, and the sewage of the city and the storm-water has been turned into Town branch, the water is horrible and we cannot use it at all, and it cannot be used for stock water until you get away below the city.”94

Yet developmental arguments about the need for clean water and manufacturing could not always peacefully coexist, and the efforts of public health officials and businessmen to protect drinking water sometimes ran headlong into industrialists with different visions for water resources. This can be seen most clearly in a struggle for clean water in Richmond, Virginia at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, a 1901 editorial in a Richmond paper lauded the state for its oversight of the city’s water supply, and claimed that “nothing is more important than to prevent pollution of a water-supply. It is far easier to require factories to take proper precautions when they are built than to have them removed by injunction or to have their business seriously impaired in order that the health of the community may not be placed in jeopardy.” In effect, this was an economic argument for clean water. Although the author recognized that this was critical for the city’s prosperity, he believed that action should be chiefly because it would prevent undue burdens on industries. He urged that the State Board of Health be given greater power over heading off pollution in the hope that the city would not allow future “pollutions of the James to occur as have been such sources of trouble and expense to other cities.”95 The author was perhaps overconfident in the abilities of the State Board of Health, but his hunch that Richmond would have to fight against industrial polluters played out almost a decade later.

By1905 industrial pollution was curtailing the city’s access to clean water. That year

Ernest Coleman Levy—the chief health officer for the city of Richmond—submitted a report to city officials detailing widespread pollution of the James River from upstream factories. Levy focused on the sulphite waste stemming from factories at Covington, Virginia—over two hundred

94 “The Urgent Need of a Better Sewerage System Emphasized,” Lexington Herald, 30 October 1904: 2. 95 “Pure Water Elsewhere,” The Times [Richmond, VA], 3 August 1901: 4.

213 miles upstream from Richmond. This waste turned the stream “dark brown and later a purplish black,” and Levy observed that “this appearance can be noted for the entire distance from

Covington to Richmond.” Although he believed that dilution was the only way to get rid of these pollutants, Levy believed that the problems were more aesthetic than real. He concluded that the waste did not actually promote the growth of bacteria and was a problem only when river levels were low. Levy noted that “the water is rendered objectionable in appearance by this waste. The dark-brown, almost black water, with its accumulation of dirty scum, is not relished by the consumer, even if he knows that it is probably safe to drink it. In a bath tub this color is very pronounced, and even in so small a quantity as a tumblerful it is decidedly noticeable.”96

Despite some agitation for greater regulation of industrial pollutants in the wake of

Levy’s report, the issue did not come to a head until 1911, when the City Council of Richmond urged the General Assembly and Richmond delegation to pass legislation “requiring the manufacturing establishments emptying noxious waste material into the rivers and streams of the

Commonwealth to desist form so doing or to maintain and operate a system for the treatment of such waste.”97 The Council asked for the support of all city authorities, including the mayor, city attorney, chief health officer, and special legislative committee, as well as the State Board of

Health. The City Council cited Levy’s study, arguing that it proved that the James River and city’s water supply was “seriously contaminated by the flowing therein of waste material from pulp and paper mills, tanneries and other manufacturing establishments, which renders the use of the water flowing in said streams undesirable, if not unfit for use for domestic purposes, thus constituting a nuisance, and also a serious injury to all riparian owners upon the said rivers and streams.” Citing the legal principle of sic utere tuo, ut alienum non laedas, the City Council

96 Levy, E.C. Report to the water committee on the investigation of the effect of trades wastes on the water of James River at Richmond (Richmond, 1905). As reprinted in Earle Bernard Phelps, “The Pollution of Streams by Sulphite Pulp Waste—A Study of Possible Remedies,” in Contributions from the Sanitary Research Laboratory and Sewage Experiment Station, Volume V (Boston, 1909), 6-8. 97 “People Must Have Purest of Water,” Richmond Times Dispatch, 15 February 1906: 6; “State Must Aid in Fight on Disease,” Times-Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 30 December 1907: 1.

214 argued that “the owners of the adjoining soil and the next owner has precisely the same rights therein as every other owner, and that no riparian owner of a stream may so corrupt or pollute it as to injure the other owners by diminishing the value of their property in the natural stream.”98

The Richmond delegation to the General Assembly did what the City Council had asked, and early in 1912 introduced several bills which called for an end to industrial pollution— especially by pulp and paper mills—in the James River. The bills echoed the sentiments of the

City Council, and mandated that “every person who shall maintain a manufacturing establishment from which deleterious, noxious or unhealthy waste material may flow or be placed in any river or stream or tributary of any such river or stream in the Commonwealth, from which any city or town obtains its water supply for domestic purposes,” had to make plans for the “purification of said waste material” under the oversight of the State Board of Health.99 State officials believed that this not only made sense from a public health perspective, but also claimed that it would save the city between ten and twelve thousand dollars per year, which they were forced to spend on

“coagulants…to remove the discoloration and impurities not natural to river water.”100 They even questioned why mills would oppose their plans “if the matter put into the water by the pulp mills was not deleterious,” as they claimed.101 The city attorney outlined how much they had invested in the city’s water purification plant, and claimed that this “seemed to be a case…of life and health and happiness against an industry.” In short, he used a balancing test similar to that of many jurists, but decided the issue on the basis of quality of life as opposed to economic gain.

The city attorney further suggested that Richmond’s priority should not be industry but clean

98 Council of the City of Richmond, Certain Resolutions of the Council of the City of Richmond (Richmond: Clyde W. Saunders, 1912), 51-52. 99 “Protect Water in James River,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 8 February 1912: 8; “To Protect Water in James River,” Lexington Gazette [Lexington, VA], 14 February 1912: 1. 100 “Charter Changes Offered in House,” Richmond Times Dispatch, 11 January 1912: 9. 101 “Business People Not Behind Bill,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 23 February 1912: 10.

215 water, and argued that “a vital principle…requires the protection of water used for domestic purpose as the prime necessity.”102

The city’s bill had a great deal of municipal support from the Richmond City Council, the

Committee on Water, the Board of Health, the City Attorney, and the entire delegation in the

House of Representatives. One newspaper even claimed that “other cities of the Commonwealth interested in the protection of their water supply from pollution are joining in the fight Richmond is making,” and the events were carried by newspapers throughout Virginia.103 Yet the city attorney rightly predicted that such legislation “would be bitterly opposed by pulp mills, iron furnaces and other industries which now empty all manner of refuse and coloring matter into the waters of the upper James River.”104

At a committee hearing on proposed regulation of the James River watershed, it quickly became clear that the businesspeople responsible for the pollution were not in favor of being regulated. Indeed, several of these mills had been forced to move to relocate to the James River from the Potomac River “as a result of court proceedings brought by the Federal Government to protect the water supply of Washington city,” and the mills had already used their substantial influence to defeat similar pollution control legislation in Virginia just the previous year.105

Predictably, representatives from the Chamber of Commerce and the city’s Business Men’s Club supported the pulp mills, and claimed that they “could find nobody, outside of the City Council, who wanted its passage.” At the hearing “large delegations representing the pulp mills at

Covington and tanneries at various points were present to oppose the bills.” They argued that these regulations would stifle their productive industry, and one representative reminded the committee “how a mill had been brought to Virginia which came near going to West Virginia,

102 “Business People Not Behind Bill,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 23 February 1912: 10. 103 “Council to Urge Passage of Bill,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 12 February 1912: 10. 104 “Charter Changes Offered in House,” Richmond Times Dispatch, 11 January 1912: 9. 105 “Charter Changes Offered in House,” Richmond Times Dispatch, 11 January 1912: 9.

216 where it was kept out by objections from small fishermen.”106 Yet their central strategy was to place blame for pollution on the shoulders of the city. W. E. Allen—a spokesman for manufacturing interests—argued that “it was strange Richmond was after the material discharged by plants, while neglecting sewerage in the streams, which really cause disease,” and claimed that

“the city avoids that subject because it would be itself affected. Rather than destroy the industries which employ so many men, Richmond had better go elsewhere for water.”107

Like Richmond, officials in other municipalities often targeted certain industries that they believed were the worst offenders, though they were often careful not to do anything that could be seen as anti-industry. A good example is how many states cracked down on distilleries, not simply because state officials had prohibitionist tendencies. Many people recognized that distilleries were responsible for a great deal of water pollution, and sought to regulate the industry. For instance, in 1910 one Kentucky newspaper noted that “practically every distillery in the state is located on some river, so that the drainage from the cattle pens pollutes the water, kills the fish and endangers the health of the residents along the river banks.”108 This was chiefly because distilleries generally kept cattle nearby to dispose of the swill on site. Although some of the “semiliquid manure” from the cattle was used as fertilizer, according to a 1906 U.S.

Geological Survey investigation, much of it was left to “pool” in the barnyard where it was emptied directly into nearby waterways.109 This was the challenge confronting public officials in

Kentucky, and one newspaper reported that “the distillers of Kentucky have arranged to meet with the state board of health about the middle of July in this city for the purpose of considering a means of draining the cattle pens at the distilleries so that they will not pollute the streams upon which they are located.” Yet the newspaper acknowledged that Dr. John G. South—one of the

106 “Business People Not Behind Bill,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 23 February 1912: 10. 107 “Business People Not Behind Bill,” Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 23 February 1912: 10. 108 “Wants Better Drainage,” The Citizen [Berea, KY], 2 June 1910: 7. 109 Herman Stabler, Prevention of Stream Pollution by Distillery Refuse: Based on Investigations at Lynchburg, Ohio (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906), 9.

217 members of the Board of Health—had “laid down the law in this county,” but “does not want to impose a hardship on any distilleries if it can be avoided.”110 Ultimately, state officials from the

Board of Health “declared the running of pollution from cattle pens into a running stream a nuisance,” and mandated that “feeding slop to cattle must be so regulated by the distilleries that none of the pollution can run into a stream of even the smallest size, provided that creek finally reaches a river or other stream from which water is taken for drinking purposes.”111

State and municipal officials were not the only people who posed challenges to manufacturers’ water needs. As the South urbanized, providing clean water for cities became a bustling business, and water companies often clashed with industrialists over use of the region’s waters. Because they relied on clean water, water works companies—many of which were substantial corporate entities—often challenged industrial pollution or monopolization of water by factories in order to protect their access to raw materials. For instance, in 1899 the president of the Hinton Water Works Company wrote a letter to the corporate attorney of the West Virginia

Paper & Pulp Works warning him that “any action taken by your company, by which the water of the Greenbrier river will be polluted and rendered unhealthy, or unfit for domestic purposes or uses or injured in any way, or by which the fish in said river will be destroyed or driven out, will be resisted to the full extent of the law.” Although the company claimed that “it is not the desire of this company to injure or damage your enterprise” they acknowledged that securing “the interests of this Co., as well as the interests of its patrons and customers and the public” were paramount. The city even got involved, and condemned the proposed construction of the manufacturing establishments in no uncertain terms. One observer commented that this had profound implications for development, and argued that “no towns can now be built along the

Greenbrier Valley without the consent and approbation of the Water Works of Hinton, and the

110 “Wants Better Drainage,” The Citizen [Berea, KY], 2 June 1910: 7. 111 “Must Not Pollute Running Streams,” The Bourbon News [Paris, KY], 10 January 1910: 2.

218 Common Council of said city.”112 In this sense, the Hinton Water Works Company redefined the public good to mean clean water, not industrial development.

This is not to say that waterworks companies, the construction of systems for sewerage and drainage, or crack-downs on pollution squelched all concerns. Given that sewerage systems were often just pipes running into a nearby waterway, they created further problems. Suits against corporate or city sewerage systems were common.113 Even in these suits, courts were more inclined to rule in favor of individual property owners whose property had been damaged by pollution from corporations or municipal sewerage systems. For instance, in 1921 a North

Carolina landowner successfully sued the Flint Manufacturing Company—a substantial textile mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. The landowner asked for a perpetual injunction, claiming that runoff from septic tanks in the mill village flowed through his own land, making it impossible to keep his dairy cattle in the area. The lower court granted the landowner’s request for a perpetual injunction. Although the cotton mill appealed to the state Supreme Court, it ruled that “it has no right to force the plaintiff to abandon the use of his own land for pasture for his dairy cattle and to abandon the use of his spring in order that the defendant may experiment with a disposal of sewage in this manner that is a nuisance to the plaintiff, however satisfactory or convenient such method may be to the defendant.”114

The North Carolina Supreme Court followed this up four years later with another ruling in favor of a landowner who brought suit against the Rex Spinning Company and Priscilla

Spinning Company for pollution from septic tanks from their textile mill village. The court argued that “defendants and their employees are engaged in a private enterprise. The public has no such interest in the operation of the defendants’ cotton mills as calls for the application of the

112 “A Fish Story,” Staunton Spectator and Vindicator, 18 May 1899: 2. 113 For an overview of one such suit in South Carolina, see William D. Bryan, “Conestee Mills: The Environmental Effects of the Rise of Greenville on a ‘Shimmering Bosom of Moonlit Waters,’” Furman Humanities Review (May 2006). 114 John L. Rhyne v. Flint Manufacturing Company, 1921 N.C. LEXIS 256.

219 rule invoked by them that a court of equity will not enjoin an enterprise by which the public will be benefited at the instance of an individual whose injuries may be compensated by damages.”

Yet the court noted that “however much the continued operation of the septic tanks may promote the interest of defendants, they have no right to commit continued trespasses upon the lands of plaintiff or to maintain a nuisance thereon which causes him irreparable damages.” The justices concluded that forcing the mill to build suitable methods of disposing of sewage would not place an undue burden on the company, and argued that the mill owners simply needed to find a better method of sewerage.115 To a large extent these decisions were a result of growing size and prevalence of towns and cities, which forced municipalities to think more clearly about where their sewage was going. Dumping wastes into rivers was more visible when it threatened urban areas, and many courts were prompted to reinterpret the public good in order to maintain urban development. Although they continued using a balancing test to decide cases like these, defining the public good in terms of urban health complicated the way courts dealt with economic development. Many jurists ruled against manufacturing operations when landowners brought suits for sewerage problems, and saw no excuse for having inadequate systems of filtration and sewage disposal.

Perhaps the best example of how urban development complicated choices about economic development and water resources can be seen in a notable 1906 legal clash between the

City of Durham, North Carolina and the Eno Cotton Mills. The chief health officer of Durham filed a lawsuit for the city against Eno Cotton Mills—a textile manufacturing establishment located just three hundred feet from the Eno River, in Hillsborough, North Carolina. The city claimed that the cotton mill was using the Eno River as a sewer. Along with the typical industrial wastes like dyestuffs, city officials alleged that the cotton mill funneled the human waste from

115 A.E. Finger and D.E. Rhyne v. Rex Spinning Company and Priscilla Spinning Company. 1925 N.C. LEXIS 12.

220 water-closets in the houses of its three hundred employees directly into the river. Even though the mill was miles upstream, the city obtained its drinking water at a point just downstream of the cotton mill, and claimed that “the waters of the said Eno river have become and are now being polluted and made unfit for drinking purposes, and that the health of the inhabitants of the city of

Durham…are seriously menaced.”116 The city asked the court for a perpetual injunction to halt this source of pollution and asked that the mill “provide some other method of disposing of its sewage and dye waste, and other dangerous and foul matter, and that it discontinue to empty and discharge the same into the said Eno River.”117

The cotton mill did not deny that they were using the river as an industrial sewer, and the case hinged upon weighing which interests were most important—the mill’s business or the town’s health. Representatives of the cotton mill claimed that although they polluted the vicinity of the mill, this pollution did not extend several miles downstream to the intake of the water supply of Durham. Mill representatives made a number of technical arguments to show that the pollutants put into the river had already been rendered harmless. Yet their larger argument depended on the ability of a river to cleanse itself of pollutants. The manufacturers argued that the river “constantly renews from its sources and the accessions from other water courses, and the interruptions of the current of this river by ponds and backwaters as described would give the water polluted at the mouth of the sewer and drain ample time, considering the distance to be traversed, to become chemically and bacteriologically pure before it reaches the intake.”118

Officials even claimed that there were other places more suitable for getting clean water, and urged the Durham Water Company to look elsewhere. In short, representatives of the mill believed that “God Almighty had provided the Eno river as the natural power for disposing of filth and other deleterious substances deposited on the earth by man and beast,” and argued that

116 City of Durham v. Eno Cotton Mills, 1906 N.C. LEXIS 146. 117 City of Durham v. Eno Cotton Mills, 1906 N.C. LEXIS 146. 118 City of Durham v. Eno Cotton Mills, 1906 N.C. LEXIS 146.

221 “the cost of its destruction by any purifying process would be tantamount to a confiscation and ruination of the Eno cotton mills.”119

The trial judge ruled in favor of the city. Though he gave the mill time to construct a treatment system, the judge granted the city an injunction against the mill halting the “flowing or discharging any sewage into said Eno river until the same shall have passed through some well- known system of sewage purification approved by the State Board of Health; and from depositing human excrement and dyestuff, on the watershed of the Eno river at Hillsboro, so near to said river that the same shall be washed into said river until the final hearing of this action.”120

Not surprisingly, the mill appealed the ruling, and the final decision was left to the North

Carolina Supreme Court. On appeal, the court acknowledged that riparian owners had the right to reasonable use of their waters, and noted that “the question is whether the upper riparian proprietor is engaged in a reasonable exercise of his right to use the stream as it flows by or through his land.” The Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the lower court, and argued that dumping dye and wastes into the river was not reasonable, mandating that the mill either stop using the river in this way or build adequate treatment facilities. Even with this landmark ruling against a polluting industry, however, the court was quick to note that it was not anti- development, and that “the injunction should operate so as to produce the least possible injury to the defendant’s property and business consistent with the maintenance of the rights and interests of the public.”121

This case was widely publicized, and an official with the North Carolina Board of Health commented that it was “a matter of very great and far-reaching importance involving a new

119 “Would Columbus Mills Be Liable in Damages?,” Columbus Ledger [Columbus, GA], 17 June 1906: 7. 120 City of Durham v. Eno Cotton Mills; “Report of Board of Health,” Robesonian [Lumberton, NC], 27 August 1906: 3. 121 City of Durham v. Eno Cotton Mills.

222 question in our State.”122 Although the Supreme Court framed their ruling in a way that continued to encourage industrial activity, many outside observers clearly believed that the ruling would have important implications for the future of the region’s economic development by setting a precedent for regulation of manufacturing, though there was a great deal of disagreement over whether this was desirable. For instance, a sanitation engineer from New York observed that arguments about “riparian self-purification” made by the cotton mill were true, and claimed that the decision had been made on the basis of “legislative enactment…and not scientific investigation into the needs or demands of any particular case.” He saw this as a dangerous precedent and claimed that “this is not altogether as it should be, and the laws, while compelling the removal of nuisances and the protection of public water supplies, should be of such scope and latitude as to enable each case to be considered scientifically upon its merits.”123 A newspaper correspondent in Richmond, Virginia disagreed, and argued that “this is a question which…should claim the attention of our law-makers.” He editorialized that “legitimate enterprise is to be encouraged, but not at the expense of the public health. The streams of Virginia are nature’s own gifts, and they belong to the people. They may be used by private enterprise so long as there is no trespass, but when they are so employed as to deprive the public of its rights, the restraining power of the law should be exercised.”124

Not everyone, however, believed that the decision set a good precedent for attracting industry to the South. One Georgia citizen wrote to the editor of his local newspaper under the pseudonym “A Tax-Payer” regarding the case. He noted that although Eno Cotton Mills was dumping the refuse of over three hundred operatives into the Eno River, “the defilement of the water shed of the Chattahoochee river, including Atlanta down to Columbus, consists of fecal

122 “Report of Board of Health,” Robesonian [Lumberton, NC], 27 August 1906: 3. 123 Alexander Potter, “Advance in Sewage Purification,” Municipal Engineering 31, No. 6 (December 1906), 439. 124 “Pollution of Streams,” Times-Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 17 February 1906: 4.

223 matter, excrement, sewage, etc., from about 250,000 people.” He claimed that “the case in point of size and constancy of pollution was much less threatening to the health of the inhabitants of

Durham than are the large cotton factories at West Point, Langdale and Riverview, and their operatives to the health of the inhabitants of Columbus.” The letter writer therefore worried that

“if Columbus ever used the Chattahoochee river for municipal ownership, she would be liable in damages for injuries by sickness and deaths from such waters causing those result—the same as a private corporation should be liable for damages,” and observed that “The North Carolina case, with less danger than at Columbus, shows the hindrance of such dangers and liabilities.” The writer believed that Durham’s victory had set a dangerous precedent for future economic development by opening the door for complaints about public nuisances on the Chattahoochee

River. He ultimately lamented that “If the cotton factories at and above Columbus can be stopped from the use of the Chattahoochee river as a sewage and natural drainage for all cotton mill waste and filth, then Columbus’ present and greatest coming industries are stabbed in the heart.”125

***

Like this “Tax-Payer,” Southerners throughout the region recognized that conflicts over the effects of manufacturing—specifically pollution and health concerns—had broad implications for the South’s economic development. Although other parts of the nation had been through similar transformations decades earlier, they were more far-reaching in the South and happened more quickly. Many Southerners would have agreed with Ted Steinberg’s contention that

“industrial capitalism is as much a battle over nature as it is over work,” and they protested rapidly changing uses of the region’s resources.126 Many people also looked to other parts of the nation for lessons about economic development, and understood that the outcome of these conflicts would decide just how far states could go in giving industries access to natural

125 “Would Columbus Mills Be Liable in Damages?,” Columbus Ledger [Columbus, GA], 17 June 1906: 7. 126 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 16.

224 resources. Because most Southerners—not just outspoken industrial promoters—believed that manufacturing was the best solution for the region’s continued underdevelopment, the stakes were high in conflicts over the allocation and use of water resources. Although some people, like this “Tax-Payer,” certainly welcomed development and gave little thought to the environmental costs, many others believed that there should be limits to how industries could be permitted to use the region’s water resources.

Throughout the New South era, these Southerners challenged corporations that they believed had crossed the line into irresponsible use of resources in many different forums.

Although these challenges were rarely successful—and often only on a local level—taken as a whole they publicized the need for greater oversight of the ways that factories were using the region’s water resources, and contributed to the increasing management of corporations that coincided with other Progressive era reforms.127 These challenges were not limited to former planters who were opposed to industry, but even emanated from those most likely to benefit from economic development—the South’s burgeoning middle and professional classes. In fact, by the twentieth century concerns about the environmental effects of manufacturing on the South’s waterways had become part and parcel of the region’s own brand of Progressive reform, and was rarely intended to challenge the place of industry in the region’s economy, but to affirm it.128

Calls for changes in the ways that corporations used resources were not limited to the

South’s waters, however. Southerners frequently challenged other industrial nuisances like smoke pollution, chemical wastes, and fires caused by sparks from railroads or factories.129 Yet these conflicts were never as widespread as conflicts over water, both due to the prevalence of

127 Historians have generally chosen not to see conservation of any sort as a player in the South’s progressive reform movements outside of the regulation of fish and game. For instance, see Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism. 128 See George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 233, 223-53; James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 59. 129 See Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke. For more railroad nuisance cases, see James W. Ely, Jr., Railroads and American Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 117-30; 200-205.

225 waterways in the South and the traditional reliance that many Southerners had on water resources.

Although many Southerners wanted clean air, they rarely expressed the urgency that they did when confronting changing uses of the region’s waterways.

Ultimately, the South’s leaders were forced to respond to these concerns, both because they wanted to head off major criticism of industrial development, but also because clashes over different visions for the region’s resources were becoming more widespread as industrialization and urbanization proceeded. State and municipal leaders addressed some of the more glaring problems so that they could continue the region’s courtship of industry. Indeed, many of the solutions that they enacted fell most heavily on those who were the smallest offenders— especially small mill owners and small towns that could not afford to construct substantial fishways or sewerage systems. Many of the people who originally voiced concerns about resource use gained little, as environmental problems continued and monetary compensation for damages to private property was sometimes difficult to acquire. Yet in voicing their concerns about unchecked use of industrial resources, these Southerners reshaped the terms of debate for industrialization in the South.

Chapter 5

“The Garden Spot of the Nation”

In an address before the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical Fair Association in

November of 1872, Eugene W. Hilgard—a professor of agricultural chemistry at the University of Mississippi and the state’s official geologist—claimed that the South was entering a phase of economic development that necessitated a new relationship with the region’s land. At great length, Hilgard described how societies ranging from ancient Greece to Moorish Spain had used up the fertility of their soils. He concluded that Southerners were “once more repeating history” by depleting their own soils through the “continuous cropping” of cotton and corn, destructive methods of farming, and an attitude toward the land that saw it as something to be abandoned after only a few years of use. Although he recognized that frontier conditions demanded methods of cultivation that were not ideal, Hilgard declared that “we have long passed this stage of development, and it is high time for us to be looking forward to a state of things that can endure permanently.”1

Hilgard believed that permanent growth would only be possible by adopting a different attitude toward the use of the region’s soils. He argued that seeing land “as a thing to be abandoned so soon as we have succeeded in stripping it of its first flush of fertility, by a rapid process of exhaustion by injudicious cropping, without even rest or rotation” would prevent

Southerners from developing “those social qualities which distinguish the peaceful and civilized tiller of the soil from the nomad.” The problem, then, was not simply that poor methods of farming would lead to soil degradation, but that “there is in the very plan of existence I have

1 Eugene W. Hilgard, Address on Progressive Agriculture and Industrial Education (Jackson, MS: Clarion Book and Job Office, 1873), 4-6. For more on Hilgard see Walter E. Pittman, Jr., “Eugene W. Hilgard and Scientific Education in Mississippi,” Earth Sciences History 4, No. 1 (1985): 26-31.

227 referred to, a degree of selfishness and recklessness of consequences—a sort of ‘devil take the hindmost’ principle, which cannot leave but impress upon the moral and intellectual life of a community.”2

In many ways, Hilgard’s suggestions were little different than those of antebellum reformers who urged crop rotation and the application of manures and marls to soils in order to restore fertility. While Hilgard understood that destructive uses of the soil were a necessity of the frontier experience, however, he had little patience for continuing these practices in the changing developmental context of the postbellum South. As a university-trained scientist and native of

Germany, Hilgard was certainly not typical of the mass of Southern planters, freedpeople, or yeoman farmers. Yet his commentary on Southern development is indicative of a greater interest in scientific methods of using the region’s natural resources, especially its soils, and the growing role of academics in shaping changing visions for the region’s development. Indeed, Hilgard spoke to widespread fears that the relationship between Southern farmers and their soils was unsustainable, and needed to be transformed before the region would be prosperous once again.

***

Historians have been more apt to recognize exploitation of the South’s soils than voices like Hilgard’s calling for more restrained ways of using the region’s agricultural resources.3 There

2 Eugene W. Hilgard, Address on Progressive Agriculture and Industrial Education, 4-6. For a brief introduction to Hilgard see Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 202-04. 3 Perhaps the best example is Stanley W. Trimble, “Perspectives on the History of Soil Erosion Control in the Eastern United States,” Agricultural History 59, No. 2 (April 1985): 162-180; Julius Rubin, “The Limits of Agricultural Progress in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Agricultural History 49, No. 2 (April 1975): 362-73. Carville Earle notes that antebellum planters in the eastern cotton belt and Chesapeake regions used techniques that consciously sought to make agriculture more sustainable, but claims that these programs ended during the peak of the New South era, when fertilizer began to replace better methods of farming. See Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 178. Lynn Nelson’s Pharsalia examines the life of one Virginia plantation from the antebellum era into the late-nineteenth century, but discusses agricultural reforms less in these later periods. See Lynn A. Nelson, Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). C. Vann

228 is a great deal of scholarship that focuses on antebellum agricultural reformers like Edmund

Ruffin or on New Deal soil conservation work, but there is less scholarship bridging the gaps between these two extremes. Although it was bookended by two prominent agricultural reform programs, scholars characterize the New South era itself as a time in which the values of reformers had little purchase, and planters were seized only by the desire to plant more cotton and extract short-term profits from the soil. For instance, C. Vann Woodward claims that the postbellum “survival and expansion of the plantation did not mean the preservation of the antebellum ‘plantation system.’ It was often the plantation without system, at least in cotton culture—the plantation minus such scant efficiency, planning, responsible supervision, and soil conservation as the old system provided.”4 Although geographer Carville Earle takes on the myth that Southern farmers were “soil miners,” especially during the antebellum period, he argues that fertilizer use in the eastern cotton belt after 1880 made “the myth and reality of the southern soil miner…one and the same.”5 Stanley Trimble similarly describes antebellum planters and their postbellum brethren as “often primitive when it came to land ethics” and concludes that “planters earned well their reputation as ‘land killers.’”6

Yet postbellum planters did not see impoverishment of the soil as a necessary consequence of agricultural development, and conflicts over agriculture often revolved around different visions for what would enhance soil fertility and the value of farmland. Many farmers

Woodward also provides a good example, and argues that under the agricultural system of the New South “The evils land monopoly, absentee ownership, soil mining, and the one-crop system, once associated with and blamed upon slavery, did not disappear with that institution but were, instead, aggravated, intensified, and multiplied.” See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 180. A few historians do touch on attempts to conserve the region’s agricultural resources, but only briefly. For instance, Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 103-04. Perhaps the most sustained examination of agricultural conservation in the South is Mark D. Hersey, My Work is that of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 4 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 179. 5 Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner,” 209. 6 Stanley Trimble, “Perspectives on the History of Soil Erosion Control in the Eastern United States,” 175.

229 believed that exhaustive methods of farming were a hallmark of previous generations, and sought to reconfigure the relationship between agriculture and the environment—though they were often stymied in fully realizing their visions.

***

By the end of the Civil War, it was evident that Southern plantation agriculture was broken. The emancipation of the South’s slaves threw the future of the region’s staple crop economy into doubt and necessitated the development of new labor arrangements before cultivation could resume. As a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia suggested, “Great agricultural changes must necessarily attend the revolution of our ancient system of labor.”7 Planters were left without capital, freedpeople were left without land, and war or neglect had contributed to a marked decline in agricultural infrastructure throughout the region. As a result, the value of the region’s farms decreased by almost fifty percent in the immediate aftermath of the war, and production stagnated.8 Speaking to the uncertainty faced by postbellum Southern farmers, an

Alabamian remarked in 1866 that “one thing planters have got to learn: the old system is gone up, and we must begin new.”9

One of the most pressing problems was the poor condition of the region’s soils. Soils throughout parts of the South had been cultivated for over two hundred years. Staple crops like cotton, rice, and tobacco placed great strains on soil fertility. Because unsettled land was plentiful, planters throughout much of the South practiced a system of farming known as “shifting cultivation” or “extensive agriculture,” in which only part of a plantation’s land was placed under cultivation at any given time. In this process, forestland was burned to provide the soil with nutrients and clear land for planting. Once the nutrients in the soil had been depleted from staple

7 “Fertilizers,” Daily Constitutionalist [Augusta, GA], January 9, 1866: 2. 8 Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 3-5; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 1988), 125. 9 J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), 427.

230 crop cultivation, usually after several years, planters simply cleared more land. Old fields were left fallow to recuperate, sometimes for decades. Although this was a logical response to the unique problems of farming in the South, outsiders perceived it as an incredible waste of land and resources, and antebellum critics latched onto to shifting cultivation as an example of the backwardness of slavery. After the Civil War, however, critiques of shifting cultivation began to emanate from Southerners hoping to overhaul the South’s agriculture in the image of the North.10

Travelers throughout the South frequently described widespread erosion and loss of soil fertility. After traveling through Georgia and Alabama just after the Civil War, John Townsend

Trowbridge remarked that “one sees many plantations ruined for some years by improper cultivation.” He described farms where “The land generally washes badly, and where the hill- sides have been furrowed up and down, instead of being properly ‘horizontalized,’ the rains plough them into gulleys, and carry off the cream of the soil.” Trowbridge even remarked that

“one becomes weary of tracts of poor-looking country, overgrown with sedge-grass, or covered with oaks and pines.”11 John Richard Dennett—correspondent for the Nation—similarly described a conversation with a woman in North Carolina whose soil “was almighty poor; it wouldn’t fetch more’n a bushel o’ wheat to the acre, so much of it was washed out, and all guttered.”12 A traveler on the Mississippi Central Railroad put it more colorfully, remarking that

“I don’t see how you Mississippi people make a living—either your land is miserably poor, or you have abused it awfully.” He declared that “the whole country along that railroad looks like a turkey gobbler that has been pulled through a briar bush by the tail.”13

10 John Majewski and Viken Tchakerian, The Environmental Origins of Shifting Cultivation: Climate, Soils, and Disease in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South,” Agricultural History 81, No. 4 (Fall 2007): 522- 49. See also John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 22-52. 11 J. T. Trowbridge, The South, 482. 12 John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865-1866, Ed. Henry M. Christman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 118. 13 As quoted in Eugene W. Hilgard, Address on Progressive Agriculture and Industrial Education, 6.

231 By the end of Reconstruction, there was a consensus that plantation agriculture was the chief culprit responsible for destroying the South’s soils and stunting agricultural development.

Despite attempts to reform antebellum agriculture and the use of crop rotation in the eastern

Cotton Belt, most Southerners believed that the plantation system was needlessly destructive, and blamed both planters and slaves for being careless with the region’s soils.14 For instance, just after

Civil War had ended a South Carolina newspaper claimed that “We have already urged repeatedly upon our readers the substitution of the farming or thorough tillage policy for the more slovenly staple culture—the slovenliness being due equally to the use of negro labor and the carelessness of the planter.”15 In 1884 planter John Bankston Davis similarly told the Mt. Zion

Grange, in Campton, South Carolina that both the South’s forests and the “natural productiveness of the soil” had been ruined by the plantation’s “wretched system of cultivation.”16 Although he did not arraign planters for their role in depleting soils, Ephraim Lowe—the director of the

Mississippi State Geological Survey—claimed that his state had moved beyond the stage of development in which this was necessary. Like Hilgard, Lowe argued that before the Civil War

Mississippians were living in “a frontier state,” and concluded that “Our methods of agriculture were crude and wasteful…. Frontier people are proverbially wasteful and in those days

Mississippi was wasteful.”17 By the twentieth century this narrative had become so prevalent that historians like Ulrich B. Phillips and Avery Craven wrote it into their scholarship, and even

Theodore Roosevelt used it to promote his agenda of conservation throughout the nation.18

14 Carville Earle argues that crop rotation during the late antebellum period in the eastern cotton belt was actually a sustainable solution to the problems faced by Southern agriculture. See Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner,” 178-210. 15 “The Moral of King Cotton,” Daily Phoenix [Columbia, SC], 22 August 1865: 2. 16 John Bankston Davis, “Practical Farming,” The Carolina Spartan [Spartanburg, SC], 21 May 1884: 1. 17 E. N. Lowe, Our Waste Lands: A Preliminary Study of Erosion in Mississippi (Nashville: Brandon, 1910), 10. 18 For Roosevelt’s use of this narrative see “Addresses at the Southern Conservation Congress,” American Lumberman, 15 October 1910: 53.

232 Staple crop cultivation did place enormous strains on the region’s soils, and by the first few decades of the nineteenth century soil erosion, declines in soil fertility, and decreasing crop yields resulting from staple crop cultivation were quickly becoming evident. These were environmental and social problems. As land became unsuited for further cultivation, planters were forced to migrate west, which caused many of the South’s leaders to worry about the continued viability of the region’s slave economy. In response to these problems, planters like

Virginia’s Edmund Ruffin and South Carolina’s Whitemarsh Seabrook sought to popularize

“scientific methods” of cultivation that would restore fertility, including crop rotation and the application of marl to soils. These reformers were motivated by a desire to ensure the survival of plantation agriculture and slavery, and believed that maintaining soil fertility would halt migration out of the region and save plantation agriculture. Although the reform movement failed to gain much traction, it disseminated ideas about soil conservation among a subset of the South’s plantation elite. Indeed, a significant number of planters in the eastern Cotton Belt and

Chesapeake—perhaps the most intensely cultivated parts of the South—practiced crop rotation and the use of manures in order to keep up soil fertility, even if these measures failed to catch on in other places.19 Perhaps even more significantly, however, agricultural reformers challenged the prevailing basis of agriculture by promoting a different relationship with the region’s soils that would make their long-term use possible.20

Antebellum reformers swayed only a few of their contemporaries, but postbellum

Southerners paid more attention to their efforts. Although scholars mostly suggest that antebellum agricultural reforms had little connection to the later conservation movement of the Progressive

19 Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner,” 178. 20 The literature on antebellum reformers is voluminous, but for a good overview see Lynn A. Nelson, “When Land Was Cheap, and Labor Dear: James Madison’s ‘Address to the Albemarle Agricultural Society’ and the Problem of Southern Agricultural Reform,” History Compass 6, No. 3 (2008): 917-933. See also Avery Odelle Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1820 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1925); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth.

233 Era, an awareness of the antebellum reform movement is evident in the words of Southern reformers following the Civil War. Indeed, their strategies for improving soil fertility were outlined in newspapers and agricultural journals throughout the region, and were discussed at countless local agricultural society meetings. In short, antebellum strategies provided fodder for many postbellum reformers hoping to overhaul the structure of the South’s agricultural economy.

For instance, in 1881 A. H. Perkins wrote that “More than forty years ago, Edmund Ruffin recommended lime, green fallows, rotation of crops, and rest in grass, as the best means of improving the worn-out lands of Eastern Virginia; and, notwithstanding the activity of the age, no better way has been found out.”21 Another planter wrote a letter to the editor of the popular

Southern Planter, asking for information about whether the programs of Ruffin and others still had purchase in the region. This planter acknowledged that he was “one of a large class who, with good intensions, though it seems ignorantly, have accepted the statements of the ‘ancients,’

DeSaussure, Liebig, Johnston and even Edmund Ruffin.”22

Not everyone, however, believed that these reforms were appropriate in the changing context after the Civil War. For instance, in 1906 one writer argued that Edmund Ruffin’s advocacy of the use of marl and lime to improve soil fertility would not pay with free labor, at least not compared to commercial fertilizers. Yet the author still believed that Ruffin provided a model for progressive farmers throughout the region, and noted that “the fact remains that Ruffin was the great pioneer of agricultural chemistry in the South and both his contemporaries and posterity owe him a heavy debt of gratitude for his services.”23 Whether they agreed with the specific methods reformers promoted or not, then, many advocates of scientific farming argued that they should be applauded for their efforts to bring about a new relationship with the South’s

21 A. H. Perkins, “Exhausted Lands—Corn Fodder, &c.,” Southern Planter and Farmer 42, No. 4 (April 1881): 204. 22 R. Kenna Campell, “More Inaccuracies,” Southern Planter 43, No. 6 (April 1, 1882): 86. 23 Mary Washington, “The Pioneer of Agricultural Science in the South,” Southern Planter 67, No. 10 (October 1906): 817.

234 soils. While reminiscing about Edmund Ruffin, a writer from Rockbridge County, Virginia, described him as “the enthusiastic, intelligent pioneer in advocating scientific farming,” and concluded that “He, with the old planters whom he so nobly served, has passed away, but the value of his rich contributions to American tillage will long survive him.”24 After reading a biographical sketch of Ruffin published in the Southern Planter, another planter similarly claimed that “Mr. Ruffin’s life is or ought to be an inspiration to every intelligent and aspiring farmer of

Virginia and the South.”25

Narratives stressing the destructive nature of the plantation system and the need to take up the attitudes, if not the practices, of antebellum reformers were handy for postbellum modernizers hoping to overhaul Southern agriculture. Although former planters were often the most vocal about the need for reform because they had a direct financial stake in the success or failure of Southern agriculture, these ideas also had currency with the region’s public officials, urban businesspeople, and emerging classes of scientists and other academics within the South.

These groups perceived agricultural reform programs as a critical part of their overall vision for a prosperous South—a vision that was dependent on regional markets and uses of Southern raw materials. Because agriculture was often seen as the foundation of Southern prosperity, these groups pursued agricultural reform because they believed it was a necessary step toward making the region prosperous and rebuilding the South in the image of the North, without challenging the racial status quo.

Yet this narrative was also shaped by widespread optimism that the South had extraordinary soils and unparalleled conditions for farming—that it was the “Nation’s Garden

Spot,” as many reformers liked to say.26 The ability of the South’s soils to recover quickly with

24 Ashby, “Reminiscences of Mr. Edmund Ruffin,” Southern Planter 66, No. 12 (December 1905): 916. 25 C. H. S., “The Life of Edmund Ruffin,” Southern Planter 62, No. 9 (September 1901): 530. 26 For instance, see Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, The Nation’s Garden Spot (n.p.: Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company, n.d.).

235 better methods of cultivation became a mantra of many modernizers, and justified efforts to rebuild the South’s agriculture. Georgia’s comptroller spoke to this optimism in 1866 when he noted that “We have a soil capable of being improved to almost any extent, if a proper system of cultivation and manuring be adopted. How this can be done, and with the greatest economy, is a question of vital interest to every citizen of Georgia, and opens and broad field, and a useful field, for thought and enterprise.”27 Just a few years later a planter from Georgia predicted that “we are on the very verge of a total revolution in agriculture,” and concluded that “The day of reform is clearly dawning, and the sun-light of science will soon brighten with exuberant harvests, every cultivated field of the South.”28 Farish Furman—politician and planter renowned for promoting

“scientific farming”—similarly noted in 1882 that

When I determined to go farming, five years ago, I saw that it would not do to farm in the old way. I saw farmers around me getting poorer every day, though they worked like slaves. I saw them starving their land so that each year their yield was scantier, and their farms less valuable. I saw that it was still the plow following the ax, and that as fast as the farmer starved one piece of land he cleared out a new piece.29

Furman condemned this as a “wasteful system,” and claimed that it “must stop somewhere and soon.” Yet he was optimistic that Southern soils could recover quickly, and claimed that I knew that Georgia was blessed with the best conditions of season and soil, and that if properly treated it would yield large results.”30

Ultimately, the consensus that plantation agriculture was the root of the South’s problems led many planters to be more open than they had ever been to new ways of farming. As one of

Georgia’s state officials explained in 1866, “It is evident to every thinking man that, with our changed system of labor and the impoverished condition of our lands, that a complete change of

27 “Annual Report of the Comptroller General of the State of Georgia, Made to the Governor,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, November 5, 1866: 1. 28 Southern Cultivator 27 (January 1869): 53. As quoted in Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984), 72. 29 “Important Facts for Farmers,” Daily Picayune, 11 November 1882: 9. 30 “Important Facts for Farmers,” Daily Picayune, 11 November 1882: 9.

236 our old system of culture has become necessary before the planting interest will be very remunerative.”31 Throughout the New South era, farmers, businesspeople, state officials, and even the federal government worked to rebuild Southern agriculture. Although there was great optimism that scientific and progressive methods of farming would replace the plantation’s wasteful uses of Southern soils, there was no consensus about what path was best. Instead, conflicting visions for the region’s agricultural development revolved around a complex mix of environmental and social questions.

***

The most important question following the Civil War involved the future of staple crop agriculture in the South, and conflicts over how to use the region’s agricultural resources primarily revolved around which crops farmers should grow. The Southern plantation economy only allowed for the cultivation of a few staples—rice, indigo, sugar, cotton, or tobacco—which were dependent on slave labor. Although these crops made antebellum planters wealthy, they impoverished the region’s soils. Despite their attempts to reform Southern agriculture so that it would not drain fertility from the South’s soils, antebellum planters like Ruffin and Seabrook never challenged the dependence of the Southern economy on the cultivation of staple crops. In fact, reformers hoped to prolong staple crop cultivation by ameliorating its effects on the region’s soils. As Nicholas Herbemont—a South Carolina reformer—explained in 1836, “by industriously spreading knowledge among our planters and farmers, we shall so increase the fertility of our soil, that our citizens will cease to look for westwardly for rich lands, and patriotism, aided by self-interest, will save the country.”32

31 “Annual Report of the Comptroller General of the State of Georgia, Made to the Governor,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, November 5, 1866: 1. 32 Nicholas Herbemont, “On Manures,” Southern Agriculturalist and Register of Rural Affairs 9, No. 1 (January 1836), 7. For more on Herbemont see John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 60.

237 Because most antebellum planters never seriously considered abandoning the cultivation of lucrative staples, it was not until after the Civil War that the region’s farmers weighed whether they should plant new types of crops. The stakes were high. Observers rightly believed that the types of crops grown in the South would determine whether the region would remake itself into a modified version of the antebellum South, or remake itself in the image of the North. Questions about the future of the region’s agricultural economy had implications for the region’s social structure, racial relations, and system of labor, and were shaped by different visions for each of these aspects. Yet conflicting ideas about how to use the South’s agricultural resources also played a central role in shaping the region’s agricultural trajectory.

No crop dominated visions for the future of the South’s economy like cotton. After the development of the cotton gin in 1793, short staple cotton spread throughout the South, and just before the Civil War “King Cotton” was the highest-grossing export in the entire United States.33

Because it had traditionally underpinned much of the South’s cultural, social and economic structure, the future of cotton was one of the most pressing questions of the New South era.

Writing in about the South’s cotton economy in 1881, Henry W. Grady commented that “whether this staple is cultivated as a profit or a passion, and whether it shall bring the South to independence or to beggary, are matters yet to be settled.”34Although Southerners reconsidered the future of rice, sugar, and tobacco, attempts to reform Southern agriculture were centered on cotton.

Visions for the future of the South’s staple crop began to come into conflict even before the end of the Civil War. In the wake of emancipation, most freedpeople were hesitant to plant cotton, which they identified with slavery and thought would only enrich their former masters. As

33 Mark D. Hersey, “’Their Plows Singing beneath the Sandy Loam’: African American Agriculture in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South,” in African Americans in the Nineteenth Century: People and Perspectives, Ed. Dixie Ray Haggard (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2010), 135. 34 Henry W. Grady, “Cotton and Its Kingdom,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine LXIII (October 1881):719-20.

238 Northern teacher Laura M. Towne wrote from South Carolina’s Sea Islands, “The negro can see plainly enough that the proceeds of the cotton will never get in black pockets.”35 Further, many freedpeople hoped for greater control over their time and labor, and rightly feared that a cotton economy would result in patterns of work similar to slavery, and would roll back the autonomy they had achieved with emancipation. Freedpeople who settled on their own land therefore adopted forms of cultivation that were focused on growing products that could be consumed on the farm—mostly corn and hogs. Although some did cultivate cotton on the side, this simply reflected a desire to obtain extra cash rather than a wholehearted embrace of the region’s staple crop economy and full participation in the market. As Eric Foner has explained, “Rather than choose irrevocably between self-sufficiency and farming for the market, they sought to avoid a complete dependence upon either while taking advantage of the opportunities each would offer.”36

Despite a brief moment of promise immediately after emancipation that African

Americans would receive land for their own subsistence purposes, the South’s plantations were instead put on the path of commercial cotton production. Even before the end of the Civil War, army officers, speculators, U.S. Treasury officials, white Southerners, and northern investors had stymied efforts to distribute land in the South Carolina Sea Islands to freedpeople, and instead had bought up Southern plantations in order to continue cotton cultivation. While some reformers hoped to demonstrate the viability of free labor in cotton cultivation, most investors simply hoped to get rich off ruined Southern plantations.37 As cotton prices plummeted immediately after the war, however, many northern planters who had come into the region were financially ruined.38

35 Laura M. Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne written from the sea islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884, Ed. Rupert S. Holland (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1912), 20. As quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 52. 36 Eric Foner, Reconstruction, quote 109, 52-54, 108-110. 37 Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 52-53; Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 38 Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters, 146.

239 With the failure of these land distribution efforts, the Freedman’s Bureau mostly turned its attention to overseeing labor contracts between freedpeople and planters for plantation labor. By prioritizing commercial uses of the region’s lands, the Freedman’s Bureau guaranteed the growth of the South’s cotton economy.39 By the end of Reconstruction, the South produced nearly five million bales of cotton, and was beginning to surpass even the highest levels of cotton production in the antebellum era.40

Although African Americans initiated calls to diversify the region’s economy, diversification was wholeheartedly embraced by the South’s public officials and businesspeople during and after Reconstruction, though for different reasons. Indeed, appeals to abandon staple crops and diversify Southern agriculture were ubiquitous throughout the New South era. George

B. Tindall even calls the “diversification campaign” a “perennial Southern growth,” while Gilbert

Fite claims that by the twentieth century diversification “had become little short of a religion.”41

Advocates of diversification argued that the cultivation of staple crops tied farmers to the whims of national and international markets, enriched people living outside the region, forced farmers to depend on markets outside the region for sustenance, made them go into debt to purchase needed items, and stunted the development of industry in the region.42 Many public officials, journalists, and a select few planters hoped that diversification would enable Southern farmers to become self-sufficient, and advocated something akin to the “safety first” agriculture that dominated yeomen areas of the antebellum South. In the words of Henry W. Grady, “the road to prosperity” was “when every farmer in the South shall eat bread from his own fields and meat from his own pastures, and disturbed by no creditor, and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teeming

39 Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 163-64. 40 The crop of 1860 yielded 4,823,770 bales of cotton, while the 1878 crop yielded 4,811,265 bales of cotton, and total national production was steadily increasing. United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, First Number (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879), 115-16. 41 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 123; Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 68. 42 For an overview of diversification, see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 63-68; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 188- 95.

240 gardens, and orchards, and vineyards, and dairies, and barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and growing them in independence.” Cotton cultivation in itself was acceptable, but only as a “clean surplus.”43 For many of the South’s public officials and businesspeople, then, diversification offered Southern farmers a degree of independence that they could never get in a staple crop economy, where they had to purchase the essentials of life from outside the region.

Crop diversification went hand-in-hand with visions for a region that would no longer rely on plantations of thousands of acres of land, but on smaller farms cultivating many different crops. White public officials and businesspeople hoped that plantations would be subdivided into smaller units and farmed mostly by white, independent, small farmers. Poet and teacher Sidney

Lanier even went so far as to declare that “the New South means small farming,” and “small farming means diversified farm-products.” Lanier’s vision was remarkably similar to that of

Grady: “small farming means, in short, meat and bread for which there are no notes in bank; pigs fed with home-made corn, and growing of themselves while the corn and cotton were being tended; yarn spun, stockings knit, butter made and sold (instead of bought); eggs, chickens, peaches, watermelons, the four extra sheep and a little wool, two calves and a beef.”44 People like

Lanier and Grady believed that farms up to fifty acres offered the best chance of diversifying, and would be the building blocks for a new type of agriculture much different from the large plantations of the antebellum South.

Although attempts to move away from cotton cultivation were a product of different visions for the South’s social and economic landscape, they were informed by perceptions that cotton cultivation was harmful to soil fertility. Most freedpeople had other issues undergirding their hesitancy to grow cotton, but concerns about the effects of cotton on soil fertility permeated

43 Henry W. Grady, “The South and Her Problems,” in Life of Henry W. Grady Including His Writings and Speeches, Ed. Joel Chandler Harris (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1890), 111. 44 Sidney Lanier, “The New South,” in Retrospects and Prospects: Descriptive and Historical Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 104, 110.

241 later efforts to distance the region from the staple. Planters had long been aware that cotton was exhausting to grow, and this often underpinned arguments for crop diversification. Because of perceptions that the plantation system was at fault for the environmental problems that confronted

Southerners after the war, it was easy for many people throughout the region to link staple crop agriculture to environmental degradation. For instance, in 1868 a Tennessee newspaper correspondent claimed that “our system of labor is unreliable, and our lands in great measure exhausted by the growth of cotton,” and concluded that “it is high time that our farmers were turning their attention to some crop which requires comparatively little labor in its cultivation and which does not impoverish the soil like cotton, and yet one that will afford some return to the farmer for his trouble.”45 In 1873 a farmer from Orangeburg, South Carolina told the members of his local agricultural society that raising staple crops “has been proved to be ruinous in the extreme.” He concluded that “While the South has occupied itself with only one commercial production, the people have become impoverished; the soil worn out and the produced staple, from redundancy in the markets, so depreciated in value that a bare support, and sometimes not even that can be obtained.”46 The Brenham Weekly Banner of Texas similarly urged local farmers to diversify their “exclusively cotton country,” claiming that “Raising cotton and using the proceeds to buy bread and meat and forage for the work stock not only impoverishes the soil, but also the planter’s pockets.”47 Even Henry Grady noted in 1887 that “no one crop will make a people prosperous…Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of husbandry, the money crop is a curse.”48 In short, Southern businesspeople and planters widely believed that a diversified economy was a permanent economy, and that staple crop agriculture would impoverish the land.

45 “Giles County Wheat Club,” The Pulaski Citizen [Pulaski, TN], October 16, 1868: 3. 46 “Essay Read Before the County Agricultural Society,” Orangeburg Times [Orangeburg, SC], August 7, 1873: 5. 47 “Wheat,” Brenham Weekly Banner, May 11, 1882: 3. 48 Henry W. Grady, “The South and Her Problems,” 47.

242 Critics of cotton monoculture also argued that it was intertwined with labor arrangements that negatively affected the region’s farmland. Because slave labor was widely condemned for the poor state of the South’s soils, modernizers had long understood that the fertility of the region’s soils was bound up with the system of labor by which the land was worked. Although changes in labor and the structure of the Southern economy after emancipation resulted in new labor arrangements, many of the South’s most vocal reformers believed that these arrangements were no less exhausting to the region’s soils than slavery. Sharecropping and tenant farming—the two most common labor agreements in the postbellum South—were also the most vilified, and were blamed for continuing the degradation of Southern soils.

At their inception, sharecropping and tenant farming were a logical response to the problems confronting both planters and freedpeople in the aftermath of the Civil War. As Harold

Woodman explains, “emancipation destroyed the slave social system without automatically creating a new free labor system in its place,” and necessitated the development of new forms of labor to replace slavery.49 Because cash was scarce and freedpeople did not want to work as gang laborers under conditions resembling slavery, planters and freedpeople negotiated a number of different labor contracts that depended on new forms of credit. In tenant contracts planters would provide their tenants with between twenty and forty acres of land for their own use. Tenants generally paid between a quarter to a half of the total crop produced in rent for this land. Unlike tenants, sharecroppers were wage laborers who were paid for their labor with a share of the total crop produced on the plantation. In each of these contracts the owner was responsible for supplying everything needed for cultivation but labor, which included a house, seed, and all necessary implements for farming.50 While these institutions became more exploitative over time,

Gavin Wright and most other scholars suggest that they initially represented “a balance between

49 Harold D. Woodman, New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 4. 50 Harold D. Woodman, New South-New Law, 68. 68-76; Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 4-5.

243 the freedmen’s desire for autonomy and the employer’s interest in extracting work effort and having labor when it was needed.”51 Despite the claims of one farmer from Hanover County,

Virginia that sharecropping was “the most pernicious and destructive [system] to the farming interest that could possibly have been inaugurated,” these labor arrangements were a logical response to the changed conditions of the postbellum South.52

Share and tenant contracts dominated the South’s cotton and tobacco belts, and critics often blamed their development on the continuation of staple crop agriculture and soil exhaustion.

From the outset, tenantry and sharecropping had been intertwined with the production of staples.

As railroads expanded throughout the South and connected planters with northern markets for cotton and other staples, they no longer had to rely on cotton factors in the region’s port cities to market their crop. Planters and tenants had little capital to purchase needed goods, however, and complex systems of credit were developed to allow for cultivation and the purchase of foodstuffs and other goods off the plantation. This was facilitated by a burgeoning class of merchants who lived in rural areas and interior cities. These merchants provided planters and tenants with credit in exchange for a portion of their crop. They often charged exorbitant interest rates, and one merchant from Hawkinsville, Georgia explained that twenty-five percent was typical, though he would lower this to ten percent for “good men.”53 Because merchants mandated that farmers grow staple crops—chiefly cotton—in order to receive credit, use of farmland was intertwined with the

South’s financial systems. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, “The currency of the Black Belt is cotton.”54

51 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 85-86. 52 “How to Manage Labor,” Southern Planter and Farmer 39, No. 3 (March 1878): 116. 53 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 77. 54 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 180-84; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 148.

244 Tenantry and sharecropping were bound up with the South’s unique system of credit, and were rightly seen as promoting cotton monoculture and degrading the region’s soils. For instance, while testifying before a Congressional committee in 1900, Georgia planter J. E. Nunnally described tenantry as “a stumbling block in the way of prosperity and progressive and diversified agriculture.” He claimed that “tenant as well as landowner had grown poorer year by year under its oppression. All cotton to the exclusion of grain, stock, and cattle is a stupendous error.”

Nunnally admitted, however, that he continued to enter into contracts with his tenants because it was the only way to be profitable with cotton.55 The authors of a 1907 Department of Agriculture

Farmers’ Bulletin examining tenantry and diversified farming similarly concluded that one of the key factors behind the South’s “rapid depletion of soil fertility” and “lack of diversification” was

“the lack of forehandedness among the tenant class and the disinclination of the planters and the merchants to lend money or supplies on anything but cotton.” Because “cotton is ‘tangible,’” as they explained, “A dishonest tenant can dispose of eggs, butter, grain, pork, or truck without the knowledge of the creditor, but a cotton bale is too large to escape undetected.” Yet the authors also noted that “Unfortunately, it is true that most of the merchants do not want to abolish the credit system. It is to their advantage to continue it, and some of them fail to see that the entire country is held back because of it.”56

Perhaps most widespread were claims that tenants and sharecroppers had no incentive to look out for the long-term interests of the land by taking measures to prevent erosion and keep up fertility because they did not own the land they farmed. For instance, in an 1880 study of

Alabama’s cotton production, Eugene Allen Smith—a professor of geology at the University of

Alabama—claimed that tenants “do not own the land, have no interest in it beyond getting a crop

55 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 455, 456. 56 D. A. Brodie and C. K. McClellan, Diversified Farming Under the Plantation System (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907), 9.

245 from a portion of it…and are not interested in keeping up the fertility, at least not to the extent of being led to make any attempt at the permanent improvement of the same.” Smith explained that the typical landlord was “interested in the improvement of his land,” but was stymied by the tenant and sharecropper system, which caused landlords to be “further removed from personal care of the land.”57 A farmer from Georgia also implicated landlords for soil degradation, arguing that

the tenant system, as a whole, has a tendency to reduce the average production per acre of most of the crops, because a great deal is left to the management of the ignorant negro farm hand, the landlord being interested only to the extent of his rent…The tenants go in and get what they can out of the land at the least possible expense, and pay no attention to building up the land or saving it; while the landowners who are native Georgians and live near by, permit this deterioration of the land without intervention as a matter of economy to themselves. They share in the extra present profits, and are recouped to a great extent for their losses by trading and trafficking with their tenants.

He concluded that “public opinion is against the tenant system in Georgia for the reason that the crops and the land are neglected.”58 A 1906 article in the Hickman Courier similarly declared that

“Intensive farming would naturally be the result if every man owned his home for the renter does not know how long he will stay and naturally wants all he can get out of the soil this year even if he must rob next year’s crop to get it.”59

Given the prevalence of African Americans and poor whites as sharecroppers and tenants it should not be surprising that race and social status played perhaps the most significant role in delineating—at least in the eyes of the conservative white planter elite and their urban counterparts—who was using the region’s soils correctly and who was not. Throughout the New

South era, middle- and upper-class white Southerners stigmatized black and poor white

57 As reprinted in Lucille Griffith, Alabama: A Documentary History to 1900, Revised and Enlarged Edition (University, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1972), 590-91. 58 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 907-910. 59 Hickman Courier [Hickman, KY], 1 June 1906: 3.

246 Southerners based on how they treated their soil.60 Indeed, claims that African American farmers did not understand how to use the region’s soils properly were often intended to justify greater control over labor or to promote the displacement of African Americans with white immigrants.

In fact, labor was a perennial concern of Reconstruction and New South public officials, planters and businesspeople. Since the end of the Civil War there had been a strong push to encourage immigration to the South in order to bring the South’s unsettled lands into cultivation. Private immigration societies, state immigration bureaus, and Southern railroad companies constantly advertised the region’s opportunities to potential immigrants, and not only employed hundreds of immigration agents scattered around the world, but also sold hundreds of thousands of acres of land to settlers. Although their efforts had little payoff, advocates of immigration hoped to bring unused lands into cultivation and to displace the region’s wholesale reliance on black labor by attracting white immigrants from Europe or the North.61

Despite attempts to replace the region’s African American laborers with supposedly more

“efficient” white immigrants, it became evident to the region’s planters, businesspeople and journalists that this would not happen quickly, if at all. Over time, then, racialized characterizations of natural resources use shifted from attempts to push African Americans off the land to justifications for keeping them as docile labor. Value judgments about the inability of black farmers to farm correctly were not simply a way to stigmatize African Americans. Instead, they served a deeper developmental purpose—ensuring a steady supply of docile and cheap laborers.

The stigmatization of African American farmers to promote their displacement through immigration can perhaps be seen most clearly during a meeting of the Memphis Chamber of

Commerce in 1872. In the course of the meeting, several speakers decried the tenant system for

60 See Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging,” 37-64; Mark Hersey, “’Their Plows Singing Beneath the Sandy Loams,’” 139. 61 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 297-99.

247 “impoverishing the soil” and imperiling the commercial prospects of Memphis. One member declared that African American tenants were a “thorn in the commercial kidney of the valley,” while another claimed that “impoverishment of the land” was due to “the eating up nature of the negro cultivation of soil…It is not that sort of labor that was calculated to build up the South. The labor that will make this country great must be accumulative labor. White labor was accumulative.” As a result, the Chamber concluded that “it becomes our imperative duty to look after our roads out West,” in order to provide a path for potential immigrants.62 The governor of

Georgia, William Northern, similarly claimed that

We have not diversified our crops because the Negro has not been willing to diversify….We have not improved our soil because the Negro is not willing to grow crops to be incorporated into the soil, nor leave his cotton seed to be returned to the fields that he has denuded of humus and all possible traces of fertility. Because he is unwilling to handle heavy plows we have permitted him to scratch the land with his scooter just deep enough for all the soil to be washed from the surface, leaving our fields practically barren and wasted. We have not raised stock on the farm because the Negro is cruelly inhuman and starves the work animals we put into his hands for his personal support. We have accepted his thriftless and destructive methods simply because under our present system we have not been able to do without him.

Northern concluded that “If this be true our present system in this relation is absolutely ruinous and it will not invite the residence of intelligent settlers from outside.” 63 Even twentieth century efforts to attract new types of labor were couched in similar terms. Writing in 1905, historian and native Alabamian Walter L. Fleming linked the need with new sources of labor with the lack of agricultural improvement on the part of the region’s African Americans. Fleming claimed that

African Americans held “the most fertile land of the South,” but could not “equal in production the white farmers on the poorest land.” Fleming concluded, “Agricultural development in the

62 “Chamber of Commerce,” Memphis Daily Appeal [Memphis, TN], 26 November 1872: 4. 63 As quoted in Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South, 192.

248 black belt is at a standstill because of the worthlessness of the black and the difficulty of getting more white labor.”64

By the time that the conservation movement was gaining purchase throughout the region in the twentieth century, the language of conservation was frequently used to justify the replacement of African American labor with white immigrants. Like utilitarian conservationists throughout the nation, the South’s public officials, businesspeople and many planters became obsessed with eliminating waste to ensure the most efficient, and long-term, uses of the South’s natural resources. They often concluded that Southern soils were not being degraded by the systems of farming in the region as much as by ignorant or inefficient farmers who were not treating the region’s soils with an eye toward their long-term use. These perceptions, while tinted with obvious racial and class biases, served to justify attempts to replace the South’s black laborers with white immigrants from outside the region.65

Writing in 1905, Robert DeCourcy Ward, founder of the national Immigration Restriction

League, explained that “What the South wants most today is not the newly arrived, ignorant, and penniless alien,” but immigrants who were assimilated to American ways, “or else the immigrant with money, coming from northern Europe, skilled in intensive and diversified farming.”66

Although a Bostonian, Ward spoke for many Southerners who believed that immigrants should know how to treat the region’s soils with care, and hoped that “desirable immigrants” would replace the South’s African American laborers. In a 1908 article entitled “Negro Must Become

More Efficient or Give Way to Immigration,” a newspaper from Manning, South Carolina argued that “The ignorant negro in the South is one of the greatest economic burdens with which any people has ever had to contend,” and claimed that it was a “principle of political economy” that

64 Walter L. Fleming, “Immigration to the Southern States,” Political Science Quarterly 20, No. 2 (June 1905): 279. 65 See Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 71-72. 66 Robert DeCourcy Ward, “Immigration and the South,” Atlantic Monthly 96 (1905), 614-15. As quoted in Robert M. Myers, “’Desirable Immigrants’: The Assimilation of Transplanted Yankees in Page and Tourgée,” South Central Review 21, No. 2 (Summer 2004), 63-4.

249 communities with more white people were more prosperous. The newspaper declared that

African Americans needed to be educated in order to “make him more efficient, a prosperity- maker and not a poverty-breeder.” The article suggested that this inefficiency was mostly manifested in the way that African Americans treated the soil, noting that “No acre of land will long own as its master the man or the race who mistreats it and makes it untruthful,” and concluded that “Either we must have the negro trained or we must not have them at all.

Untrained, he is a burden on us all. Better a million acres of untilled land than a million acres of mistilled land.”67 In1928 the dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Arkansas put it more simply: “We want the inefficient farmers to leave and the sooner the better.”68

Improved methods of farming were not simply used to stigmatize the efforts of black tenants throughout the South, but to ensure a greater measure of social control over them. Perhaps the most honest assessment of how agricultural reforms would help ensure a ready supply of black laborers came from Jonathan Miller—a South Carolina planter—who argued that diversification would ensure white supremacy in the South. He complained in 1875 that the region’s planters “are not adopting such measures as are calculated to make us independent.” He singled out planters’ overreliance on cotton, but suggested that planters could get out of debt and become more independent if they “raise our own grain and forage, stock, milk and butter, mutton and bacon, make more manure, and buy less of the fertilizers, make our lands better, homes more comfortable, farm more and plant less.” Black labor was a key part of Miller’s vision for a diversified South, and he advised that “Settle good negroes on our farms, make them comfortable, and they are the best laborers that we can get, and as they are already here we should try and make them as useful to us as possible,” and concluded “More farming and less cotton culture will

67 “Negro Must Become More Efficient or Give Way to Immigration,” The Manning Times [Manning, SC], 23 December 1908: 5. This article seems to be pulling its claims directly from Clarence Poe. See Clarence Poe, The Agricultural Revolution (n.p., n.d.), 7. 68 Dallas News, 17 February 1928. As quoted in Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, 309.

250 make the negro more dependent upon us and more tractable.”69 While explaining how to farm in a more businesslike manner, W. B. Mercier—a planter from Centreville, Mississippi—claimed that labor problems “can be partially met, and perhaps successfully so, by substituting crops that can be grown and harvested by the use of improved machinery, and turning out more of our thin lands to pastures for growing more stock.” He concluded that “the peaceable and successful employment of the negro as our only farm help will soon be a thing of the past unless some more stringent laws for his management and control can be devised.”70

Questions about the use of commercial fertilizers on plantations with tenants and sharecroppers also revolved around ideas about race, labor, and the desire for social control.

Although commercial fertilizers were seen as a potential solution to the region’s staple crop woes, many planters were hesitant to put them in the hands of tenants who they thought would use them incorrectly. Besides concerns about whether fertilizers would repay their initial investment, Mark

Hersey explains that many planters realized that good crop yields also made their laborers more mobile, allowing the tenant to “escape from under his creditors’ thumbs.”71 Planters’ decisions about the use of commercial fertilizers therefore turned on a complex calculus of environmental, social and financial questions. For instance, a South Carolina newspaper claimed in 1875 that when trying to figure out if it paid to use fertilizer, it was important to determine “first who is to use the fertilizer.” The newspaper argued that “any good standard fertilizer in the hand of a good farmer will pay a reasonable profit, and no fertilizer in the hands of the poor farmer yields much profit,” and concluded that “We had rather risk the land without any fertilizer under the management of a poor tenant than to furnish him the very best fertilizer. We should expect in any event to lose money, and the less the expenditure the smaller the loss.”72

69 “A Letter from South Carolina,” Southern Planter and Farmer 3 (March 1875): 125. 70 W. B. Mercier, “Farming as a Business,” Southern Planter 64, No. 11 (November 1903): 708. 71 Mark Hersey, “’Their Plows Singing Beneath the Sandy Loam,’” 139. 72 “Commercial Fertilizers,” Anderson Intelligencer [Anderson, SC], 25 March 1875: 1.

251 Withholding commercial fertilizers from their tenants was simply one of many ideas that planters and others had about how to reform the system of sharecropping and tenant farming in order to blunt its degradation of the region’s soils, though most proved impractical. Indeed, calls to lengthen the period of time that tenants were under contract, replace African American tenants with “more efficient” laborers from outside the region, or provide greater education to tenants— either through on-the-job oversight or formal agricultural education—were mostly unrealized.

Although there were many proposals for reforming the South’s labor structure to better use the region’s soils, most people realized that as long as cotton remained the basis of credit it would be nearly impossible to move away from tenant and share contracts. As a result, replacing staples with other crops was seen as a solution to all of the problems associated with Southern agriculture, from tenant farming to soil degradation. There was no shortage of opinion about what crops would be best. Newspapers throughout the region published examples of successful farmers growing crops that ranged from sweet potatoes to bees. By looking through newspaper clippings from Georgia, Sidney Lanier documented the cultivation of “rice, sugar-cane, cotton, peaches, plums, apples, pears, figs, watermelons, cantaloupes, musk-melons, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, Catawba grapes, Isabellas, Scuppernongs, peas, snap-beans, butter- beans, okra, squash, beets, oyster-plant, mustard, cress, cabbage, turnips, tomatoes, cauliflower, asparagus, potatoes, onions” as well as various types of livestock.73 A volume compiled by the editor of the Southern Cultivator in 1908 explained how to raise a variety of important “Southern crops,” including cotton, corn, wheat, oats, hay and other forage crops, peanuts, sweet potatoes, melons, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, various root crops, asparagus, and even lettuce.74 In short, there were many different ideas about what crops should be grown in lieu of cotton or other staples. Although planters, businesspeople, and public officials often hoped that these crops

73 Sidney Lanier, “The New South,” 111-12. 74 G.F. Hunnicutt, ed., Southern Crops: As Grown and Described by Successful Farmers (Atlanta: The Cultivator Publishing Company, 1908).

252 would supplant cotton, not all of these proposals necessitated complete disengagement with the market. Some crops were meant promote a more subsistence-based economy, while others—like truck crops—were intended to replace staples with viable market alternatives.

“The great aim of every farmer,” one Kentucky newspaper claimed, “should be to grow such crops as food for stock as impoverish the soil the least and make the richest manure.”75 As this statement suggests, farmers weighed the cultivation of new crops on the basis of how these crops would use the region’s soils. For instance, a newspaper from the rural hinterlands of

Houston, Texas, praised a local farmer for experimenting with Nicaraguan wheat. This farmer assumed that wheat would solve the South’s agricultural problems, and the newspaper explained that “A greater diversity of crops has long been a pressing need in all the exclusively cotton country. Raising cotton and using the proceeds to buy bread and meat and forage for work stock not only impoverishes the soil, but also the planter’s pockets.”76 A planter near Charleston, South

Carolina exclaimed “Let sorghum juice, sorghum cane and sorghum mills go to—the Yankees!”

He claimed that “No plant I ever tried so impoverished the soil,” besides necessitating dangerous milling.77 Livestock was a particularly popular choice, and many boosters urged Southerners to take up stock-farming instead of staple crop agriculture because it would be less exhausting to the region’s soils and would provide valuable manure. In 1898 Milton V. Richards—the Land and

Industrial Agent of the Southern Railway—urged Southern farmers to diversify by raising livestock. Richards noted that cotton and tobacco were both “exhaustive of the soil,” but claimed that “the south has tens of millions of acres of land especially adapted to stock-raising.” It was not simply that the land was cut out for stock raising, but that it “does not impoverish the land, but on the contrary, enriches the soil, and puts it in such a condition that better crops can be grown.”78

75 “Worth Thinking About,” Lexington Herald [Lexington, KY], 7 February 1910: 5. 76 “Wheat,” The Brenham Weekly Banner [Brenham, TX], 11 May 1882: 3. 77 As quoted in “Sorghum in the South,” Knoxville Weekly Chronicle [Knoxville, TN], 23 August 1871: 3. 78 M. V. Richards, “Stock Raising in the South,” Augusta Chronicle [Augusta, GA], 29 August 1898: 8.

253 Calculations like these abounded throughout the New South era, and intermingled with ideas about profit and the marketability of certain crops to shape which types of crops planters experimented with.

Although the region did have “natural conditions” that “were favorable to the production of a wide variety of crops,” ideas about what could replace cotton and other staples ranged from realistic to ridiculous.79 Indeed, there had apparently been so many failed attempts to raise new breeds of livestock in Kentucky that one commentator felt the need to remind farmers that “In choosing a breed of cattle or any other class of live stock due consideration should be given to the question of environment. Where one breed would be a failure another would perhaps be a success.”80 Claims that one crop or another were better for the South’s soil fertility were therefore not always borne out in reality, and most either failed to establish roots in the South or brought unexpected consequences. Although some crops, like grains, peaches and oranges, did manage to find a home in parts of the region, attempts to raise bees and silkworms reflected the failure of most Southern attempts at diversification as well as the wishful thinking of many reformers.

Whether or not these new visions were always borne out on the ground is not the key point, however. The very fact that so many reformers felt the need to justify the use of different types of crops on the basis of how they would affect soil fertility suggests that environmental issues were becoming more compelling to planters, public officials, and businesspeople throughout the region.

Not everyone believed that diversification was the best use of the South’s soils, however, and there was often staunch opposition to such radical change. Some planters called for a continuance of staple crop agriculture, or at least grudgingly acknowledged the South’s reliance on it. This was to some degree based on a recurring belief that staple crops like cotton actually

79 Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 14. 80 “Worth Thinking About,” Lexington Herald [Lexington, KY], 7 February 1910: 5.

254 did not strain Southern soils. “The much abused ‘cotton crop,’” as one farmer wrote in the

Southern Planter in 1885, “if properly managed, was a great renovator of the soil—possibly the best renovating crop in the world.” Because only the lint had commercial value, this farmer argued that the nutrients contained in the seed, stalks and leaves were all “returned to the soil.”81

A merchant from Georgia naively claimed that cotton did not take any nutrients from the soil, while W. F. Massey—an author and farmer from North Carolina—believed that not only were the

South’s soils in good shape, but “Tobacco and cotton have not been the cause of the unproductive condition of our lands. Any other money crops treated in the same way would have exhausted the surface soil just as effectively as tobacco or cotton—in fact, more rapidly than cotton.” 82

The strongest evidence of support for staple crop agriculture, however, was simply that few merchants or planters ever heeded calls to diversify. Because cotton was currency, the livelihood of most groups was firmly moored to the success of the staple. No one expressed this more clearly than T. N. Jones—a lawyer from Tyler, Texas. In 1928 Jones spoke to the divided mind of the South’s ruling class, claiming that “There are those in every village, town and city in the South who constantly demand that cotton shall be planted in large acreage and have never at any time heretofore urge and are not now urging any decrease in acreage.” He suggested that they were mostly “the large and influential class engaged in local commercial pursuits,” and declared that

They may meet, yes, they do meet, in the Chambers of Commerce and proclaim that there must be a reduction of cotton acreage, and from those place proceed directly to the cuddyholes in their places of business and write chattel mortgages for the poor devils to sign covering the cotton crops from one to five years and in addition, everything from the pig to the products raised by the children. Listen to the speeches in the Chambers of Commerce, and in the banquet halls where a few

81 E. F., “The Cotton Plant and Soil Fertility,” Southern Planter 46, No. 10 (October 1885): 515. 82 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission, 78-79; W.F. Massey, “Have We Any Worn-Out Soils?,” Southern Planter 61, No. 4 (April 1900): 197. For more on Massey see James R. Troyer, “Wilbur Fisk Massey (1839-1923): North Carolina Botanist, Horticulturist, and Agriculturist,” The Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society 116, No. 2 (2000): 101-12.

255 most carefully selected farmers are entertained, and go directly from there to the mortgage records and see the work that is really being done.

Jones concluded that “Always, everywhere, in the private counting houses, the demand is made that cotton must be produced so that debts can be paid.”83

This is not to say that diversification programs made no headway in the South. Certain pockets of the South could boast of some notable successes, which fueled enthusiasm about diversification. Between 1890 and 1900 the total production of actually cotton declined throughout parts of the South, chiefly the Atlantic Plain, Piedmont, mountain areas, and Central plateau.84 By 1930 the South led the nation in producing strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, watermelons, blackberries, dewberries, peaches, pecans, and the region also grew more garden vegetables for home consumption than any other part of the nation.85 Even as early as 1900 the

South was producing some twenty percent of the nation’s truck crops, and by 1930 Southern farmers harvested over ninety million dollars of vegetables annually.86

Newspapers seized on these and any other successes they could find, constantly discussing them in order to convince more farmers to diversify. Indeed, one scholars estimates that the Atlanta Constitution alone published thousands of articles during the era urging Southern farmers to diversify and calling attention to farmers who had done so successfully.87 Given the high profile of diversification in agricultural meetings, newspapers, and journals, then, it likely reached the ears of almost every farmer in the region. Indeed, by 1930 these ideas had become so

83 Dallas News, 17 February 1928. As quoted in Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, 189- 90. 84 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 191, 506. 85 United States Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, Volume II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 97-111. 86 James L. McCorkle, Jr., “Truck Farming in Arkansas: A Half-Century of Feeding Urban America,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58, No. 2 (Summer 1999), 181. Rupert B. Vance argues that “The spread of truck growing on the edges and within the Cotton Belt is not so much a proof of diversification within the cotton system as it is of the rise of a new specialization on its fringes.” See Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South, 225; United States Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, Volume II, 17. 87 Harold E. Davis, “Henry Grady, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Politics of Farming in the 1880s,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 71, No. 4 (Winter 1987): 571-600.

256 common that few planters would have been surprised by the declaration of Alexander Hull—a farmer from the coastal plain of Georgia—that “I am a diversified farmer as taught by the newspapers.”88

By 1877, however, it was evident that shifting from a staple crop economy to one that involved cultivating a more diverse array of crops would not occur quickly. Despite pleas for conservation through diversification, there was little success in freeing the region from the grip of

King Cotton, or any other staple for that matter, especially throughout the Black Belt. The expansion of railroads and commercial fertilizers, and the financial interests of Southern public officials, businesspeople, and merchants only more firmly cemented the place of cotton in the region’s economy.89 By 1879 the staple had such a hold on the South’s economy that the United

States Census Bureau compiled a two-volume addendum to the 1880 census specifically on cotton cultivation.90 Even the boll weevil infestation, which many Southerners grudgingly lauded for forcing them to diversify, could not shake the South’s reliance on King Cotton.91 Grady and

Lanier’s vision for a region of small farms was borne out in the census, as the average size of

Southern farms declined from 347 acres in 1860 to 156 acres in 1880. Yet this did not reflect the rise of small subsistence farmers like they had hoped, but the rise of a permanent class of sharecroppers and tenants farmers even more dependent on the whims of the market and cotton than their antebellum ancestors.92 By the late 1920s the region was producing almost fourteen and a half million bales of cotton each year, up from just over four million bales in 1870.93

88 As quoted in Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture: A Study in the Social Geography of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 278-79. 89 Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 170-78. 90 Gilbert C. Fite, “Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War,” 7. 91 James Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 170-75. 92 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 178. 93 United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1929), 668. Census Bureau figures use preliminary figures for the 1928 cotton crop, and are based on 500-pound bales.

257 Complaints about cotton’s monopoly over region’s economy continued late into the twentieth century and were intensified by consistently declining prices for cotton.

There were a variety of factors that contributed to the failure of diversification campaigns. Perhaps the major obstacle to diversification was that few farmers had the capital to make an abrupt change in their method of farming. As a Georgia farmer explained in 1900, growing cotton had initially been a “necessity.” Because “We were poor, had nothing to go on, had no collateral,” the region’s planters “had to plant the crop that would bring money right away.”94 In a region where cotton and other staples stood in for cash, few merchants would advance planters or tenants credit needed to purchase essential goods on any other basis. New crossroads merchants and planters increasingly defined which crops tenants could grow, and virtually always chose cotton or tobacco. Although few people believed they were ideal, reform of tenancy and sharecropping was difficult, chiefly because there was nothing to replace them with. Further, most planters and tenants inside plantation areas had little experience growing anything but staples, and there was a steep learning curve to growing new crops. Despite their participation in efforts to reform Southern agriculture, railroads made obtaining commercial fertilizers relatively easy, and further helped to lock farmers in to the staple crop economy by temporarily increasing yields.95 Yet perhaps the most compelling factor behind the failure of diversification was financial. This was perhaps best expressed by James Barrett—a farmer from

Augusta, Georgia—who lamented that he had tried growing green peas, truck crops, and raising horses, cows and pigs, but had not been successful. Based on this experience, Barrett concluded

94 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 60. 95 Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 170-78.

258 that diversification would not bring the profits its advocates claimed, and complained that “I have diversified, and I have not made any money by diversification.”96

***

Although conflicts over staple crop agriculture continued well into the twentieth century, the terms of debate gradually shifted to the best ways to soften the effects of staple crop agriculture. This reflected a realization that staple crop agriculture was becoming more ingrained in the Southern economy as well as the growing belief that staple crop cultivation did not have to be a zero sum game. Speaking about the changing conditions of farming in the South, a farmer wrote in 1877 that “It will not avail for practical farmers any longer to wrap themselves up in the mantle of self-complacency and scoff at book-farming. There is no denying the fact, and they can no longer shut their eyes to it, that some knowledge of agricultural science has become a matter of absolute necessity.”97 As has been noted, this was not the first time in the South’s history that the environmental effects of planters’ methods for growing staple crops had been questioned.

Through antebellum agricultural periodicals, reformers had long advocated “scientific” methods of farming, including the use of chemical fertilizers, marls, manures, and different methods of cropping.98

Postbellum visions for the South’s agricultural resources covered much of the same ground as their antebellum predecessors, and focused on stemming the loss of soil fertility and soil erosion. Perhaps the most well-known champions of agricultural reform were planters like

David Dickson and Farish Furman. Dickson and Furman conducted experiments on fertilization, and newspapers publicized their results throughout the region. The South’s many agricultural societies gave planters a forum to discuss agricultural improvements, and agricultural journals

96 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 49-50. 97 “What a Wonderful Thing is Nature!,” Southern Planter 38, No. 11 (November 1877): 1. 98 See Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth.

259 published articles from practical farmers and scientists at new agricultural schools. In the 1870s and 1880s, these efforts culminated in the organization of state experiment and demonstration farms, which were intended to do study the best methods of farming in the region and to provide a visible example for the South’s farmers to follow.99 Because railroad companies hoped to increase the amount of freight they carried, they were particularly active in promoting agricultural reforms, and larger companies—like the Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard Air Line, and Southern

Railway—often hired agricultural experts and established their own demonstration farms.100

By 1900, agitation for agricultural reforms could be heard coming from planters, the pages of agricultural periodicals, railroad agents, scientists, public officials and businesspeople throughout the region, though there was no consensus about what methods were best. Writing to the Southern Planter and Farmer in 1881, a professor from the Virginia Agricultural and

Mechanical College summed up the feeling among Southern planters, declaring “Let us ding- dong into the ears of agricultural colleges, departments and societies; let us claim a hearing of all scientific men and teachers by damnable iteration if necessary. What we desire to know is this:

How to farm profitably and not exhaust our lands.”101

The most divergent visions revolved around different means of restoring soil fertility, especially commercial fertilizers. Antebellum planters had long relied on Peruvian guano to keep up soil fertility on the South’s plantation lands.102 Although chemical fertilizers like superphosphate were introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, their use only spiked in the aftermath of the Civil War as planters and croppers desperately tried to increase crop yields in a

99 Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 72-9. See also Lester D. Stephens, “Farish Furman’s Formula: Scientific Farming and the ‘New South,’” Agricultural History 50, No. 2 (April 1976): 377-90. 100 Roy V. Scott, “American Railroads and Agricultural Extension, 1900-1914: A Study in Railway Developmental Techniques,” The Business History Review 39, No. 1 (Spring, 1965): 74-98. 101 M. G. Ellzey, “Feeding and Fertilization,” Southern Planter and Farmer 42, No. 10 (October 1881): 573. 102 Carville Earl, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner,” 201-03; Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 41-42; Julius Rubin, “The Limits of Agricultural Progress in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Agricultural History 49, No. 2 (April 1975): 363-64.

260 worsening market.103 This was largely due to a southward shift in the production of fertilizers after the Civil War, especially as new phosphate deposits were discovered in the coastal parts of

South Carolina and Florida in the late 1860s. Although they were often difficult to extract, these phosphates provided the raw materials necessary for fertilizer production. Phosphates fueled optimism among the region’s planters and public officials that the South’s lands could become fertile once again, and that the production of fertilizers could provide a model for agricultural and industrial cooperation. Writing soon after the discovery of phosphates on South Carolina’s coast, an Aiken newspaper claimed that these deposits would “correct the wretched system of agriculture” by turning the state’s “dry and arid lands…from sterility into verdure and beauty.”

Phosphate-based commercial fertilizers were “specially adapted to the renovation of the exhausted cotton lands of the South,” and this newspaper predicted that they would “exercise a marked and decisive influence on the cultivation of this staple.”104 Just a few years later, the

Southern Planter similarly claimed that “our phosphate mines are the wonder of the world….enriching the poor lands up to a fertility equivalent to the alluvial bottoms of the

Mississippi, or the delta of the Nile,” while an advertisement for real estate in Port Royal, South

Carolina boasted that nearby “inexhaustible beds of bone phosphate” proved that “nature intended to leave nothing wanting to renew the fertility of the soil” in the area.105

These predictions proved reasonably well-founded. After the Civil War, many planters began to rely solely on commercial fertilizers to restore their soil fertility, and fertilizer manufacturing and phosphate extraction thrived. For many planters, it seemed foolish not to use commercial fertilizers. As economic historians Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch point out,

103 Farmlands in Virginia and Maryland, especially in the Chesapeake region, perhaps used the most superphosphates in the antebellum era. For a brief overview of the development of superphosphates see Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America, 96-108. 104 “Our Mines of Wealth,” Aiken Tribune [Aiken, SC], 4 January 1873: 1. As reprinted from the New York Bulletin. 105 “South Carolina Superphosphates,” Southern Planter 46, No. 2 (1 February 1885): 84; “First Auction Sale,” Aiken Tribune [Aiken, SC],19 April 1873: 3.

261 fertilizer use was logical because “to the sharecropper, expenditures on fertilizer brought immediate returns commensurate with the costs. To the landlord, the fertilizer not only increased the current output, but had the additional advantage of forestalling the depreciation of the farm.”

By 1891 planters in the Cotton Belt alone were using over 560 thousand tons of fertilizer annually—an eleven-fold increase since 1875. As the largest consumers of commercial fertilizers in the nation, Southerners spent almost five times as much per acre cultivated on commercial fertilizers.106 Yet this was ultimately not an easy choice for many farmers, and the place of commercial fertilizers in Southern cultivation was by no means guaranteed. Throughout plantation areas, planters were forced to consider whether commercial fertilizers served their long-term interests, and there was no shortage of different ideas.

Opposition to the use of fertilizers mostly came after their heyday in the 1880s, when it was becoming evident that they were not an ideal long-term solution to the problem of declining soil fertility. Indeed, calls for ending the region’s reliance on commercial fertilizers were closely linked to the Populist revolt of the 1890s. As Farmers’ Alliance groups multiplied throughout the

South, many urged their members not to purchase commercial fertilizers, or to at least limit their dependence on them. Populist concerns about commercial fertilizers were bound up in broader attacks on corporate interests, as well as widespread fears that commercial fertilizer companies were swindling farmers by lying about what their product actually contained. For instance, in

1892 the local chapter of the Farmers’ Alliance in Washington County, Georgia resolved that

“we…bind ourselves in the most sacred manner that we will not plant one acre of cotton until we have made ample provision for all necessary feed crops, and that even then we will not buy commercial fertilizer to make cotton with, unless we can do so with a cotton option at a fair

106 Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 102-03, 189.

262 price."107 Although efforts to reduce the acreage of cotton in the state were defeated, representatives to a statewide meeting of Alliancemen in South Carolina resolved to “use as little commercial fertilizer as possible,” and one newspaper reported that “several speeches were made favoring its total disuse.”108 Like these groups, local Farmers’ Alliance organizations often spearheaded opposition to commercial fertilizer as part of a broader assault on corporate trusts.

Although many Alliancemen were opposed to chemical fertilizers because they distrusted fertilizer manufacturers, there is evidence that they were also influenced by arguments about how cotton monoculture and fertilizer use would affect the region’s soils. Wheel, Grange, and

Farmers’ Alliance organizations had long promoted “scientific” methods of farming, which were part of their broader vision for how to reform the region’s agriculture and economic structure.109

In fact, many of the region’s agricultural leaders had experimented with different ways to increase the fertility of their own farms, and their knowledge of improved methods of cultivation played a key role in raising their profile among their fellow farmers, ultimately positioning them to take the reins of agricultural organizations like the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance.

For instance, decades before he was a Populist candidate for governor in Alabama,

Reuben Kolb was a pioneer of agricultural reform. After the Civil War, Kolb conducted a variety of experiments with cotton and fertilizer on his plantation in order to determine the most lucrative, and long-term, methods of cultivating the staple. Ultimately, he decided to try his hand at diversification, and experimented with peaches, pears, collard greens, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, peas, and cantaloupes. Kolb quickly became famous for his cultivation of watermelons. By 1889 he had even bred a new variety of watermelon—the “Kolb Gem”—and

107 “Resolutions for 1891,” The Weekly Telegraph [Macon, GA], 20 January 1892: 7. 108 “Cotton and Fertilizers,” Savannah Tribune [Savannah, GA] 23 February 1895: 1. 109 See Connie L. Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 98-99.

263 was harvesting two hundred thousand Kolb Gems on his farm each year, which he sold in local and urban markets throughout the region.110

Like Kolb, North Carolina’s Leonidas L. Polk began experimenting with diversified agriculture soon after returning from his military service during the Civil War. In 1877 he was appointed North Carolina’s first commissioner of agriculture, and lectured on agricultural improvement throughout North Carolina. After the General Assembly nixed funding for the commission, Polk founded the Progressive Farmer—a newspaper which provided farmers with a forum in which to discuss methods of farming and improving soil fertility, and ultimately led to the organization of politically-active farming clubs throughout the state. After helping to initiate the beginnings of the Farmers’ Alliance in North Carolina, Polk became a major player in the national Populist movement, and served as president of the National Farmers’ Alliance between

1889 and 1891. Other agrarian leaders—such as Ben Tillman, Frank Burkitt—were staunch advocates of agricultural reform. Their concerns about declining soil fertility ultimately filtered down into national and local Farmers’ Alliance programs, and the political, social and economic visions for the South espoused by Alliancemen were never separate from ideas about how to achieve the best uses of the South’s soils.111

Although many Populists rightly claimed that commercial fertilizers were making

Southern farmers less independent, opposition to their use was also driven by perceptions that fertilizer exacerbated the South’s most pressing environmental problems. As commercial fertilizers continued to jeopardize the long-term health of the region’s soils, concerns about their use spread to other groups. Writing in a popular volume on Southern agriculture in 1911, Georgia farmer L. W. Jarman acknowledged that it was difficult to find anyone who was not enamored

110 “Rueben F. Kolb: Agricultural Leader of the New South,” Agricultural History 32, No. 2 (April 1958): 109-19. 111 See Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 222-30; Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 190-91

264 with fertilizer. Yet he claimed that “in times past the easy purchase and use of fertilizer has seemed to many of our Southern farmers a short cut to prosperity, a royal road to good crops of cotton year after year.” Jarman believed that fertilizer was a short-term solution to the loss of soil fertility, and concluded that it often did more harm than good. He described farmers who relied on fertilizers, where

the result has been that their lands have been cultivated clean year after year, their fertility has been exhausted,…their soils have largely washed away, and much land that formerly would make good crops without fertilizer now makes but poor returns with fertilization…[Fertilizers] have caused them to fall into a system of all cotton farming that looked alone to present gain, and not to the improvement of the soil. To say the least of it, the use of commercial fertilizer has not been an unmixed blessing to the Southern farmer. Like all other good things, it can be abused. It has enriched thousands of good farmers…on the other hand, it has caused thousands of poor farmers to fall into a system of farming that impoverished them and their lands as well.112

Like Jarman, North Carolina industrialist Daniel A. Tompkins believed that fertilizer was not ideal, and he claimed that “under a proper system of agriculture it should not be necessary to rely to such a great extent upon the mines and chemical works for restoring fertility to the soils, in return for the drafts made upon it by humanity.”113 In 1913 South Carolina’s commissioner of agriculture lamented that “Soils are being treated today as if conditions of soil exist as they did when the use of commercial fertilizers was first introduced,” and claimed that “Continual use has rendered them acid to a high degree, and conditions today are far different.” This was chiefly a result of the “Ignorance of intelligent use of fertilizing ingredients,” which was “so general that it has been the cloak behind which fancy mixtures have been put on the markets in neat packages with ready purchasers at hand—some profits to manufacturers.” He concluded that “the time has come to take some decisive action towards stopping this great expenditure and financial drain

112 L. W. Jarman, “About Fertilizers,” in Southern Crops: As Grown and Described by Successful Farmers and Published from Time to Time in the Southern Cultivator (Atlanta: The Cultivator Publishing Company, 1911), 370-373. As quoted in Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner,” 206-07. 113 Daniel A. Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil (Charlotte: D.A. Tompkins, 1901), 400-401.

265 upon the farm and inevitable ultimate exhaustion of the soil.”114 Although there was still widespread enthusiasm for fertilizers throughout the region, by the twentieth century a small number of Southerners had realized that commercial fertilizers were not ideal. They argued that fertilizers prolonged an exploitative staple crop economy, increased fertility only temporarily while undermining the long-term value of the soil, and made farmers dependent on manufacturers, and they sought to find new solutions for declining soil fertility.

Indeed, some farmers and academics criticized fertilizers not only for how they affected

Southern soils, but for fostering a dangerous mentality toward the region’s lands. For instance, while testifying before a Congressional Committee in 1900, Henry Hammond of South Carolina claimed that “the use of fertilizers tends to make the farmer more shiftless and less careful in saving, and in the cultivation of his land,” while an article appearing in the Southern Planter that same year announced that “there is no method of so using land, even though supplemented with heavy fertilization, which will not in the long run ruin the land for crop production and make of its owner a poor man. It is contrary to all the laws of nature and science.”115 Just a few years later,

Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian urged Southern farmers to “Stop Land-Robbing and Start Land-

Building.” The author claimed that the region’s farmers were losing millions of dollars annually in their use of commercial fertilizers, chiefly from their “failure to apply to the right crops and the right soils and in the right proportions.” This commentator did not advocate buying less fertilizer, but claimed that commercial fertilizers would only be effective in combination with homemade manures and legumes. He concluded that “Without these to give life and body to our soils, commercial fertilizers are a mere expedient and makeshift, merely postponing the certain day of

114 South Carolina Commission of Agriculture, Commerce and Industries, Ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, Commerce and Industries of the State of South Carolina (Columbia: Gonzales and Bryan, 1913), 9. 115 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 882-883; “Rotation of Crops,” Southern Planter 61, No. 12 (December 1900): 643.

266 gullied waste and exhaustion.”116 Even the popular American Farmer published a number of articles which characterized fertilizer as a temporary solution for Southern farmers.117

As arguments against commercial fertilizer gained purchase throughout parts of the

South, arguments that farmers needed to adopt other means for enriching their soils did as well.

Planters advocated a variety of solutions that they believed were better for the long-terms interests of the South and its resources. The merits of terracing, crop rotation, the use of manures and marls to restore soil fertility, and a number of other techniques for improving soil fertility and preventing soil erosion were endlessly evaluated in the pages of agricultural periodicals, newspapers, at the meetings of agricultural societies, and on experiment farms.

Because many Southern farmers did have concerns about commercial fertilizers, there was a strong push to use natural—not chemical—means to enrich soil fertility. This was a response to legitimate fears of being swindled by fertilizer companies and the desire to become less dependent on fertilizer manufacturers and merchants who sold these fertilizers. Yet it also stemmed from a reasonable belief that natural means of improving soil fertility were better for the long-term health of the Southern lands. For instance, in 1896 a correspondent to the Southern

Planter wrote that Southern farmers should use methods that had proven successful in the past.

The writer noted that Edmund Ruffin had provided “much valuable matter concerning the use of lime and its great value as a fertilizer. No one can read the able articles” published in the

Farmers’ Register of 1833 “without being impressed with the great importance of its use to our worn out soils. Now that it can be so cheaply and easily procured, there is no reason why the many ‘old fields,’ and exhausted hillsides many not be reclaimed and made productive.” The author concluded that “Let our farmers go back to ‘first principles’ and follow the experience of our forefathers who knew nothing of ‘guano’s’ and commercial fertilizers, the too constant use of

116 “We Must Stop Land-Robbing and Start Land-Building,” The Jeffersonian [Atlanta, GA] 30 January 1908: 6. 117 Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America, 225.

267 which, at the present day, has impaired, rather than benefitted the land, and left the farmer poorer, and the fertilizer men richer—let more lime-kilns be opened and a free use of it be tried, thus keeping our money at home, and enhancing the value of our property.”118 In 1900 P. H.

Lovejoy—a planter and merchant from Hawkinsville, Georgia, argued that commercial fertilizer was bad for the land. He suggested that farmers “use commercial fertilizer because it is easier to handle and to get better and quicker results,” but argued that “if the farmers would put the same amount of money into making a fertilizer than they put into the commercial fertilizer it would build the land up better and make better crops.” Like Lovejoy, many other farmers believed that commercial fertilizer would bring short-term gains, whereas making organic fertilizers on the farm would have lasting benefits.119

Crop rotation was often seen as another method for keeping up soil fertility, and went hand-in-hand with arguments about the need to diversify the region’s crops. In 1900 a correspondent to the Southern Cultivator declared that “there is no method of so using land, even though supplemented with heavy fertilization, which will not in the long run ruin the land for crop production and make of its owner a poor man. It is contrary to all the laws of nature and science.” Employing a “proper system of rotation of crops” would mean that “land can never become ‘worn out’” because crops in a rotation used and returned different nutrients to the soil, and ultimately balanced each other out. In fact the eighth commandment of good agriculture as promoted by Seaman A. Knapp was to “carry out a systematic crop rotation, with a winter cover crop on Southern farms.”120

By the twentieth century, these proposed solutions for agricultural problems made their way from private farms and the pages of agricultural periodicals to state and federal programs

118 E. C. M., “Albemarle Lime,” Southern Planter 57, No. 3 (March 1896): 129. 119 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 79. 120 “Farmers Ten Commandments,” The Jeffersonian [Atlanta, GA], 9 December 1909: 15.

268 intended to improve Southern agriculture, and the number of contributors to this regional discourse about the best methods of farming swelled. The development of Farmers’ Institutes, which had their genesis in the Midwest in the 1880s, allowed experiment stations as well as black and white agricultural colleges to distribute information on agricultural improvement to farmers en masse. Indeed, by 1910 there were over eighteen hundred Farmers’ Institutes held throughout the South annually.121

Perhaps the most significant new player in Southern agricultural development was the federal government. Although the federal government had occasionally partnered with demonstration farms for studies of specific methods of cultivation, in 1902 the U.S. Department of Agriculture appointed Seaman A. Knapp as a permanent demonstration agent for the Southern states. Knapp’s successful demonstration work in Louisiana’s rice fields in the 1880s convinced the federal government of his talents in teaching new techniques of agriculture to Southern farmers. After being appointed demonstration agent, Knapp established a network of private demonstration farms throughout the South, where a few local farmers in each community were taught improved methods of cultivation. These farmers would show off new methods on their own farms, which spread the gospel of agricultural reform and diversification to many more people than ever before. Indeed, in just one decade Knapp recruited one hundred thousand farmers to demonstrate new methods on their own farms, providing farmers throughout the region with concrete examples of agricultural reforms on nearby farms.122

The efforts of agricultural reformers over the course of more than a century ultimately culminated in the passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914, which provided federal funding for agricultural extension programs. It should be no surprise that the authors of this bill—Hoke Smith and A. F. Lever—were both native Southerners. Their staunch support for agricultural extension

121 Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 78-79. 122 Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 78-79.

269 perhaps reflected their awareness of the continued challenges facing Southern farmers, and the persistent struggle for agricultural improvement.123

***

Struggles over crop rotation and diversification were both indicative of broader questions about the ideal relationship between agriculture and the region’s natural resources. Public officials, journalists, and elite businesspeople sought to reshape Southern farming to satisfy each of their visions for the region, and believed that decisions about fertilizers, crop rotation, and other aspects of Southern farming were critical. By the twentieth century, these groups often linked decades of agitation for agricultural reforms in the South with the burgeoning national interest in conservation. For instance, while speaking at a Farmers’ Demonstration Conference at the Louisiana State University in 1911, J. F. Merry—the immigration agent for the Illinois

Central Railroad—told the audience the South’s “great and permanent wealth is not along in your marble quarries, your oil wells, your forests, your salt and sulphur mines, your limitless coal fields, or your mountains of ore.” Although these were “valuable temporary assets,” Merry claimed that “in time they will become exhausted.” He concluded that agriculture was the only permanent basis for Southern prosperity, and declared that “that which is God-given and will abide with you forever is your fertile soil, your warm sunshine, and your abundant rainfall.” In order to take advantage of these assets, Merry urged the use of fertilizer and crop rotation, which he estimated would allow Southern farmers to continue farming for more than a thousand years.124 In 1913 Fairfax Harrison, the president of the Southern Railway, similarly noted that

“There is, I believe, no phase of the conservation movement so important to our Southern states as is that of soil conservation.” Harrison argued that soil conservation would make the South’s

123 Roy V. Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 288-313; Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 81-82. 124 J. F. Merry, The Awakened South, Louisiana State University Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1911), 7-8.

270 farmers prosperous, creating new markets for manufactured goods and facilitating the development of Southern industry. Like other utilitarian conservationists, Harrison argued that

“soil conservation does not require withdrawal of the soils from use….On the contrary, soil fertility may best be maintained and built up by a system of farming that will yield the largest present returns.”125

Most farmers in the South did not have the luxury of seeing these issues in terms of how they would affect the broader structure of the Southern economy, however. Instead, these were simply everyday choices about what would be best for their own farms, and what would provide the most profit for the longest time. This does not negate the fact that many farmers were concerned about the environmental effects of their own operations, if for no other reason than it made economic sense to be concerned about declines in soil fertility, erosion, and the continued viability of Southern agriculture.

Even if they could not successfully apply less exhaustive methods of farming to their own lands, evidence suggests that farmers knew about them and many tried to implement them.

Indeed, Gilbert Fite claims that “If there was any southern farmer outside of southern Appalachia and other self-sufficient subregions of the South who was unaware of the principles of diversified farming and improved agricultural practices, it was only because he refused to listen or was unable to read.”126 For instance, a farmer from Madison County, North Carolina, told a WPA interviewer that he had bought a five hundred acre farm at five dollars an acre in the mountains of

North Carolina in 1897 with money saved from working at a sawmill. The land was mountainous, and the farmer claimed that “land for a crop washes and leaches out no matter what you do to stop it.” Although erosion was a continuing problem, this farmer noted that “Yes, I know all about running the plow across the slope and not up and down. The furrow across a slope on a

125 Fairfax Harrison, “Conservation of Southern Soils,” in The First Exposition of Conservation and its Builders, Ed. W. M. Goodman (Knoxville: Knoxville Lithographing Co., 1914), 337. 126 Gilbert Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 68.

271 level helps to hold the water back. I hear that some city folks say that we mountain farmers are so ignorant that we plow up and down a hill and that this causes the top soil to wash away. Not a bit of truth in that! I never plowed my land that way. Never heard of anybody else doing it that way.

Them that thinks we plow that way are pure down fools. They ought to know a horse can’t pull a plow up hill and a man can’t hold a plow going down hill.” He noted that there were many factors hindering efforts to promote soil erosion, and explained that

Us mountain farmers know all about terracing land to stop it washing. But it takes a team to throw up terraces and ain’t many farmers up here owns more than one head of stock. Another trouble is that the land is so steep that you can’t hardly control a team to throw up a terrace. Because most of the land in a cove is steep, one horse walks higher than his mate in throwing up ground for a terrace. The horses don’t pull together, the harness gits broken, and a man trying to terrace soon spends a day at it and gits nowhere. No, terracing just ain’t worth a penny on a mountain farm. The soil of the coves is rich, but loose and leaches bad. New ground will produce ninety bushels of corn an acre the second year. But even with the best kind of farming, doing all we can to save the top soil, it gradually washes away and that ninety bushel is made no more. Crop gits less and less each year. In ten to twenty years so much top soil is gone that it don’t pay to work it. What a man has to do then is to clear a new cove. So I bought five hundred acres when I first come to Tennessee so that I’d have plenty of new land to clear later on.127

This farmer knew about what techniques would stem soil erosion, and was not pleased that “city folks” believed that he was unknowingly destroying his land. Rather, his testimony suggests that by the twentieth century ideas about agricultural reform were making their way down to small farmers throughout the region.

This is also evident in the case of one cotton farmer from Dutch Fork, South Carolina— just northwest of Columbia. The farmer—who was interviewed by an agent of the Federal

Writers’ Project in the mid-1930s owned a three-horse farm of ninety-six acres which he shared with two African American sharecroppers. His land was fertile, and when he inherited the farm it was widely acknowledged as one of the best in the county. Yet the farmer—given the moniker

127 Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers’ Project, These Are Our Lives: As Told By the People and Written by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 84-5.

272 Oscar Staub by the interviewer—did not take care of his land. He plowed under terraces designed to prevent soil erosion and only grew cotton. Staub temporarily kept up soil fertility with massive applications of guano, and mandated that his sharecroppers act likewise. While his two sharecroppers attended a lecture by Seaman A. Knapp about farm demonstration work, Staub stayed home and worked on the farm, which “had begun to show signs of sheet erosion.” Despite constantly urging from his wife and other community members to diversify, he continued to plant

“cotton, and cotton alone”—even after a disastrous experience with the glutted market of 1915 and fears of the boll weevil. One observer noted that “the crop yield…grew less and less with each succeeding year,” and concluded that “it was not because they planted less acreage in cotton, but it was due to an exhaustion of the fertility of the soil. The fine gray fields of Alamance silt loam, which a few years before had shown signs of sheet erosion, had now turned to red clay and were streaked with washes. In a few fields there were gullies which compelled the plowman to turn back when they cultivated the cotton.”

Following the First World War and the arrival of the boll weevil, even Staub’s two sharecroppers—who had to endure frequent hunger—considered diversification. During the interview, one claimed “So I say one day to Jake, 'Jake, dis ain't gwine do; us'll have to plant some peas lak dat man from 'way out yonder - Doctor Kinhap, I believe dat he name - egvised de farmers to do. Miss Jane, she say she want us to plant peas. But Mister Oscar say, 'un-uh', he don't want nothin' but cotton planted on de place; dat he in debt and hafter raise cotton to git de money to pay wid.” Even the county extension agent was not able to convince Staub of the error of his ways, and Staub tried to have him fired for “doin' nothin' but goin' 'round over the county and a- makin' fun of my ole pore lan'.” In short, Staub continued his planting of cotton regardless of the cost until he had exhausted all of his land, and was eventually forced to leave the farm and move west.

273 On the surface, Staub’s failed attempt to extract as much profit as possible from his land regardless of the cost is a typical story of New South environmental degradation. What is interesting about this story, however, are not the actions of Staub but of everyone else. The interviewer talked with a number of people in the community—including a grocer and Staub’s two sharecroppers—who consistently pointed out the error of Staub’s ways. In the eyes of the community Staub became a pariah—not only for his erratic behavior, but for his lack of attention to the needs of his soil. In the end, Staub’s status as an outsider reveals just how much others recognized the need to diversify and use methods that would conserve the soil. The interviewer gives the closing words of the piece to Mose Austin—one of the African American sharecroppers still living on the farm. Sitting on the porch of Staub’s ramshackle home, Austin wisely noted that

“’dis place ain't what hit used to be when Marster Isaac, who wuz Mister Oscar's father, lef' hit nigh on to thirty year ago…But now when I sets here and looks 'cross at dese here gullies, weeds, and briars, and to dat muddy water in de ribber, I says to myself, ‘Mose, dat muddy water am de blood of dis lan.’” Austin recognized that the land was bleeding, and that the poor state of the farm was “due to the handiwork of a veteran soil robber.”128 These examples suggest that the conflicting visions for agricultural reform playing out in journals and newspapers, and at barbeques and meetings often influenced what many farmers were trying to do on the ground.

Although reforms were not always successful, they shaped how the vast majority of Southern farmers understood the relationship between themselves and the region’s natural resources.

***

Agriculture was always part of a more expansive vision for Southern economic development. Most boosters used the agricultural orientation of the region as evidence that industries requiring raw materials would flourish. Yet the expansion of other enterprises often

128 Staub’s real name was J. Thomas Metz. See South Carolina Writers’ Project, John L. Dove, “Always Agin It,” Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project. Available at: .

274 threatened the very resources on which Southern farmers relied. Conflicts over the future of agriculture were never simply limited to farmers, but were part of a broader regional debate about

Southern economic development, the enterprises best suited for the region, and the place of agriculture within a changing economy. Resolving disputes between agriculture and other enterprises that competed for the same resources was therefore a key part of Southern development.

Perhaps the best example was the South’s burgeoning cottonseed oil industry. Although they initially had little commercial use, the seeds from short staple cotton plants contained small amounts of oil (one ton of cottonseed contains about fifty-two gallons of oil). The declining availability of whale oil for use in lamps in the mid-nineteenth century led entrepreneurs to pioneer a process of crushing the seed to extract the oils. Yet it was not until the price of compound lard and vegetable shortening rose in the 1870s and 1880s that cottonseed—which could be used to manufacture these products—truly became a valuable commodity, and the construction of cottonseed oil mills began in earnest. As transportation networks linked cotton fields with national and international markets, the South’s cottonseed industry grew quickly, and by the 1880s cottonseed oil mills were a common sight on the Southern landscape. Because of the high cost of transportation, the South’s poor railroad facilities, and the tendency of cottonseed to deteriorate, these mills had to be built close to cotton fields or railroad depots, where they could secure seed directly from farmers, ginners, or seed agents.129

Because the cottonseed oil industry turned previously “wasted” raw materials into valuable products, it exemplified many boosters’ visions for economic development in the New

129 For more background on the cottonseed oil industry, see H. C. Nixon, “The Rise of the American Cottonseed Oil Industry,” Journal of Political Economy 38, No. 1 (February, 1930): 73-85; Luther A. Ransom, The Great Cottonseed Industry of the South (New York: Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter, 1911), 9- 75.

275 South.130 Besides providing struggling cotton farmers with cash—which was an attractive prospect in a region chronically short of capital—the industry’s promoters also argued that it would require little change in farming practices, while providing a new source of jobs and tax revenues. For instance, in 1882 the Atlanta Constitution argued that “it is clearly a waste to bury this vast treasure in the earth or in the bellies of cattle when it does no good in either place,” and

Wilbur Fisk Tillett claimed that the cottonseed industry illustrated that “The chief profit of

Northern industries consists in saving the waste, and this must ultimately be the profit of Southern industry likewise.”131

Yet boosters believed that the cottonseed industry also offered other benefits to

Southerners. Luther Ransom—one of the industry’s most ardent proponents—claimed that farmers had “no outlet for seed that gives them such value as the oil mills.”132 Boosters like

Ransom sought to quell fears about Southern industrialization by using this “home industry” as a model of cooperation with Southern agriculture, and to prove that manufacturing could thrive in the agricultural South. Because the cottonseed industry gave value to wasted resources, promoters were optimistic that it would be a success, and believed that Southern farmers would be just as enthusiastic. Yet there were many other voices calling for different ways of using this resource until well into the twentieth century. The success of the industry was therefore never guaranteed, but depended on resolving intense conflicts over how cottonseed resources should be used.

Indeed, claims that the cottonseed industry converted waste products into valuable commodities and made “every acre of the farmer’s cotton field…increasingly productive” were myths.133 Because cottonseed contains nitrogen, potash, phosphoric acid, and other important nutrients found in soil, many farmers believed that it offered a way to avoid cotton’s drain on soil

130 See Richard H. Edmonds, “The Utilization of Southern Wastes,” 164-65. 131 Wilbur Fisk Tillett, “The White Man of the New South,” Century Magazine 33 (March 1887): 772-73; “Two Points of Interest,” The Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 15 October 1882: 5. 132 Luther A. Ransom, The Great Cottonseed Industry of the South, 23. 133 “The Romance of the Cottonseed,” Macon Daily Telegraph [Macon, GA], 21 August 1907: 4.

276 fertility without having to abandon staple crop agriculture. Antebellum planters often spread cottonseed on fallow fields to restore soil fertility or fed it to livestock.134 As early as 1866 a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia commented that “There are few manures surpassing that which we formerly had in some abundance, viz: cotton-seed,” while a merchant from Georgia later commented that cottonseed was “one of the best fertilizers we have.”135 As the industry expanded in the 1870s and 1880s, these planters and other agricultural experts loudly protested the sale of cottonseed off the farm to oil mills, and argued that the long-term interests of Southern farmers were better served by using cottonseed for fertilizer. Even as early as 1863, one observer claimed that the slow development of the industry was due in part to the “the great value of the seed as a manure,” which caused most planters to be “indifferent” to selling seed to oil mills. By the 1870s, however, this “indifference” had become outright hostility throughout much of the Cotton Belt, and rural newspapers and agricultural periodicals hosted an intense debate about the merits of different uses of cottonseed.136 For instance, in 1872 an article in Southern Farm and Home claimed that “we have long deprecated the exportation of cotton seed from the South, as a ruinous waste of the essence of the fertility of our lands,” and argued that this was “selling its [the soil] productive power, and getting nothing, or next to nothing for it.”137 Soil scientist Eugene Hilgard similarly argued that “the soil ingredients are our capital, and it is this we sell, at a mere nominal value, in selling our cotton-seed,” and urged the South’s farmers to “return their cotton-seed religiously to the soil on which it grew.”138 One South Carolinian even took a shot at advocates of the industry by claiming that “Our cotton oil mills and chemists tell us that the oil in seed is of no

134 James C. Bonner, “Advancing Trends in Southern Agriculture, 1840-1860,” Agricultural History 22, No. 4 (October 1948), 258. 135 “Fertilizers,” Daily Constitutionalist [Augusta, GA], January 9, 1866: 2; U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, 77. 136 Francis Peyre Porcher, Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, Medical, Economical, and Agricultural (Charleston: Steam-Power Press of Evans & Cogswell, 1863), 97. 137 “Cotton Seed Cake, &c.,” Southern Farm and Home (September, 1872): 414-15. 138 Eugene W. Hilgard, Address on Progressive Agriculture and Industrial Education, 13.

277 value as a fertilizer, and that it is a loss to put it on land, but it is cheaper for the farmer to lose the oil at home than it is to haul it off to the mills and give it away.”139

As these comments suggest, conflicting visions for future of the cottonseed oil industry were not abstract exercises in political economy, and farmers throughout the Cotton Belt understood that they had the potential to significantly affect their own bottom line. Although profit considerations were important in deciding whether or not to participate in cottonseed oil production, many Southern farmers understood that calculations of profit could never be made without taking environmental factors into account. This is perhaps best illustrated by a farmer from Mississippi, who in 1900 estimated the value of cottonseed to the average cotton farmer using a very different calculus than the industry’s boosters. Rather than focusing on the profits realized from selling seed to mills, this farmer calculated the value of cottonseed by the amount of nutrients that would be lost if the seed were sold. He estimated that the annual crop of cottonseed in the South contained nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash worth around

$48,356,000 only “for enriching the soil,” and concluded that “when restitution instead of spoliation shall be the order of the day” the South was in store for great gains.140 This was radical redefinition of profit from the industry’s advocates. Yet this farmer was simply expressing widely-held beliefs about the value of traditional uses of cottonseed and the maintenance of soil fertility. Although profit was never absent from these considerations, this suggests that some

Southerners did not always favor immediate cash payouts over long-term solutions.

As cottonseed oil mills spread throughout the South and railroads shipped cottonseed to mills at large transportation centers, farmers were increasingly forced to decide whether or not they would sell their cottonseed to these processors. Although social considerations sometimes played a role in these choices, widespread concerns about soil fertility were not just rhetoric, and

139 Anderson Intelligencer [Anderson, SC], 25 January 1905: 1. 140 G. H. Turner, “How Some of the Fertility of Southern Soils Slips Away,” Southern Planter 61, No. 3 (March 1900): 134.

278 many cotton farmers ultimately decided that it was not in their best interests to sell their cottonseed. Many continued using the seed as they traditionally had—either by direct application to the soil or for livestock feed. Sales of cottonseed were especially low in the Southeast, where soils had been most depleted by staple crop agriculture.141 For instance, in an 1890 U.S.

Department of Agriculture report, county agents throughout the Cotton Belt reported that farmers were not selling cottonseed to oil manufacturers. A typical report from Georgia noted that the state’s farmers “are slow to sell cotton-seed, the majority using it to compost with barn-yard manure and acid phosphate, the best known fertilizer for cotton.”142 Tenant farmers needed cash more than just about anyone, yet many did not sell their seed. For instance, a tenant farmer from

Rock Hill, South Carolina declared that “of course we used cotton feeding the cow,” and the manure was used to increase soil fertility.143 Even the industry’s boosters had to admit that many farmers were reluctant to sell their cottonseed, and as late as 1904 one promoter observed that the

“seed[s] are used directly by farmers for fertilizer in no small quantity” throughout the cotton- growing part of the South.144 These observations were quite accurate, and by the turn of the century sales of cottonseed in the Southeast only made up around thirty percent of the total cottonseed crop produced.145 Because the industry was reliant—at least initially—on obtaining raw materials from farmers, these actions directly threatened the future of cottonseed oil production, and oil manufacturers had to increasingly rely on cotton ginners and seed agents for their cottonseed.146

141 D. A. Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 240. 142 United States Department of Agriculture, Report Upon the Numbers and Values of Farm Animals, and on Freight Rates of Transportation Companies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1890), 27. 143 Oral History Interview with George R. Elmore, March 11, 1976. Interview H-0266. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). 144 Leebert Lloyd Lamborn, Cottonseed Products: A Manual of the Treatment of Cottonseed for its Products and their Utilization in the Arts (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1904), 221. 145 “Our Cottonseed Industry,” The State [Columbia, SC], 31 January 1902: 4. 146 Lynette Boney Wrenn, “Cotton Gins and Cottonseed Oil Mills in the New South,” Agricultural History 68, No. 2 (Spring 1994), 232-42.

279 In the 1890s, the opposition to selling cottonseed to oil mills was given direction by the

Farmers’ Alliance. Alliance opposition varied by locale and was at least partially based on the perception that the cottonseed industry was controlled by powerful trusts. Yet evidence suggests that it was also intertwined with the concerns of Southern farmers about declining soil fertility. At a national meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance and Agricultural Wheel in Birmingham in 1889, delegates adopted a resolution calling for Southern farmers not to sell their cottonseed to oil mills unless they could get prices that were above “their real agricultural value as fertilizer.”147 Just four years later the Alabama Farmers’ Alliance started a campaign to “stop the sale of cottonseed” to oil mills. One newspaper reported that this was “based on the idea that the removal of the seed impoverishes the soil and will ultimately render the land sterile and valueless.”

Although some farmers “refused to abide by the agreement,” similar attempts were made by local

Farmers’ Alliance groups throughout the cotton-producing states.148

Indeed, the Farmers’ Alliance is perhaps a good illustration of the divided mind of many

Southerners about the cottonseed oil industry. Some local Alliance groups actually constructed their own oil mills—suggesting that they had few qualms with cottonseed oil production as long as it was on their terms.149 In 1890 Southern Alliancemen even provided staunch opposition to

Congressional attempts to regulate oleomargarine, believing that it would stunt the region’s cottonseed oil industry and favor northern dairy interests. The split in the Farmers’ Alliance over the value of selling cottonseed for oil therefore reflects the local nature of debates about cottonseed, natural resources, and economic development. Resource use was often worked out on a local level, and New South economic development was shaped less by what Paul Gaston calls

147 W. Scott Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (Fort Scott, KS: J. H. Rice & Sons, 1889), 346-47. 148 “The Cotton Seed Industry,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, 23 November 1893: 6. 149 For instance, in 1888 a newspaper reported that the local Farmers’ Alliance in Harrisburg, Texas was in the process of constructing a cottonseed oil mill, and this was just one of many constructed by Farmers’ Alliance groups throughout the South. See “The New South,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette [Fort Worth, TX], 17 December 1888: 2.

280 “the New South Creed,” and the rhetoric of regional journalists and politicians than by local decisions about the best uses of the region’s natural resources.

Although conflicts over the best uses of cottonseed continued into the twentieth century, the terms of debate shifted—which reflected criticisms of cottonseed sales off the farm but also the worsening agricultural situation, new scientific thinking about the nutritive value of cottonseed, and the response of oil mills to the complaints of many farmers about soil fertility. By the twentieth century, scientists had discovered that the nutrients in cottonseed were mostly stored in the meal—a byproduct of oil production—and cottonseed mills worked out a system where farmers could exchange their seed for cottonseed meal, without stripping it of its fertilizing capabilities. This prevented farmers from having to choose between selling their seed or fertilizing their fields. Cheaper commercial fertilizers also made it more cost effective for many farmers to purchase commercial fertilizers, and by 1900 cottonseed was no longer the cheapest option for restoring soil fertility.150 Cottonseed producers were therefore ultimately able to address the concerns of farmers enough to allow the industry to expand greatly throughout the region, and at its peak in 1915 there were over eight hundred cottonseed oil mills throughout the

South, which processed around four million pounds of cottonseed annually.151

The cottonseed oil industry did not live up to boosters’ hopes or farmers’ fears, however, and debates over the industry continued into the twentieth century. Persistent concerns about the sales of cottonseed forced oil producers to cave in to the demands of farmers by returning cottonseed meal to many farmers. Despite visions for sustainable uses of cottonseed, however, the oil industry ultimately facilitated the production of commercial fertilizers and continued cotton monoculture, which wreaked havoc on Southern soils and contributed to the environmental problems that many people hoped to avoid. Still, debates over the sale of cottonseed suggest that

150 E. H. Jenkins and John Phillips Street, “Cotton Seed Meal As A Fertilizer,” Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 156 (June 1907): 156-57. 151 “Wonderful Work of the South,” Dallas Morning News, 14 February 1902: 6.

281 even within the South’s cotton monoculture—which historians rightly credit with some of the worst environmental problems in the New South era—were attempts to implement forms of agricultural development that would be more “permanent.” Discussions about the future of the industry revolved around different visions for the use of cottonseed—whether on the farm or in the oil mill—but neither cotton farmers or oil processors were willing to conclude that industrial expansion could be had at the price of soil fertility.

***

In 1878, a planter from Union County, South Carolina wrote, “The improvement of our lands is of the first importance. Upon this rests the prosperity and success of our agricultural interests; and upon the success of our agricultural interest hinges the success of all other interests.”152 Throughout the New South era, planters worked to reconfigure their relationship with the region’s soils in order to achieve this “improvement.” Southern planters, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, scientists, public officials, and journalists understood that the region needed to adopt new methods of farming before the long-term uses of the South’s soils were guaranteed.

Indeed, perhaps in no other sector of the region’s economy were ideas about the “wise use” of resources as widespread as in agriculture. Although postbellum reformers ultimately failed to achieve a complete revolution in the way that Southerners farmed, they did contribute to a climate in which calculations of long-term resource use and health were ever-present.

152 J. R. M., “Improvement of our Lands a Necessity,” Southern Planter and Farmer 39, No. 2 (February 1878): 75.

Conclusion

Resource Use in a Developing Area

In economic and environmental terms, the end of the Civil War ushered in an era of great promise. People throughout the nation understood that the South had to be rebuilt, and there were many different ideas about how to do this. Whether land would be distributed to freedpeople for subsistence purposes, whether the region would become an industrial powerhouse, or whether the

South would adopt a modified plantation-style economy were just some of the questions that waited to be answered in 1865. As Southerners and Northerners alike faced the task of completely reimagining the region’s economy, the possibilities for the South’s future seemed boundless.

Indeed, in 1870 a writer for Putnam’s Magazine claimed that although the Old South was “dead,” the New South “sits in the seat of the dethroned king, exhibiting a lustier life, and the promise of greater growth and strength, than did its predecessor.”1 Despite a lack of capital and lingering questions about labor, there was a widespread hope that the South’s abundant natural resources would facilitate economic development and make the region prosperous once again. This optimism was still apparent as late as 1913, when a North Carolina newspaper declared that “The contemplation of the resources and latent promises of the South is staggering in itself.”2

As the first American region to reimagine its economy in the era of conservation, the possibility of building what many people considered a “permanent economy”—dependent on long-term uses of natural resources—seemed within reach. Conservationists throughout the nation claimed that the Southern states were perhaps best poised to work the principles of wise use into their economic development. Southerners were familiar with the tenets of conservation,

1 “The New South. What it is Doing, and What it Wants,” Putnam’s Magazine 5, No. 28 (April 1870): 458. 2 “New South’s Glory To Be Sung At Exposition,” Charlotte Daily Observer [Charlotte, NC], 25 August 1913: 2.

283 and many of the region’s most powerful businesspeople and public officials were enthusiastic about its prospects in a region whose economy depended so much on natural resources. Although there was no consensus, ideas about the best ways to use the region’s natural resources informed efforts to rethink the structure of virtually every sector of the South’s economy in the aftermath of the Civil War. Southerners clashed over the best ways to restore soil fertility and prevent erosion so as to ensure the long-term viability of their farms; they fought back against pollution and the obstruction of Southern waterways from the region’s burgeoning manufacturing industries; they looked for more efficient ways of using the South’s timber and minerals to ensure their sustained value; they considered whether tourism was the best use of the region’s abundant natural resources. How the region’s natural resources were used, then, mattered a great deal to

Southerners hoping to rebuild the region’s economy in a way that would best fulfill their long- term interests.

From the perspective of 1930, Southern leaders did have some notable successes to fuel their optimism about building a permanent economy. Between the end of the Civil War and the

Great Depression the South experienced significant economic growth. In all six decades after

1869, the region experienced higher levels of industrial growth than the rest of the nation.3 The manufacture of textiles, tobacco products, iron, steel, lumber products, coal, chemicals, and petroleum products all boomed. Even by 1913 the Southern textile industry was refining more cotton than New England mills, and the region was beginning to attract a broader range of textile- based manufacturing, including dye and finishing plants as well as manufacturers who produced tire fabrics, woolen goods, rayon, hosiery, and knit goods.4 By 1929 Southern states—mostly

Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana—were producing almost sixty percent of the nation’s

3 Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 5. 4 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 75-6.

284 petroleum.5 Railroad lines increased in response to new opportunities for business, and between

1865 and 1900 Southern railroad companies built twenty-six thousand miles of new track throughout the region. By 1927 railroad lines throughout the South had added almost fifty thousand more miles of track for a region-wide total just over seventy-five thousand miles.6 This railroad growth also brought tourists into the region en masse and facilitated the construction of hundreds of resorts. As a result, by 1930 Southern tourism had become a stand-alone industry for the first time. All of this economic growth fueled significant urbanization as well, and by 1929 over twenty-five percent of the region’s population lived in urban areas.7

Much of the region’s economic expansion came from enterprises that boosters believed would use Southern natural resources most efficiently, or believed were the “highest” forms of development. Businesses that used waste products experienced significant growth in the region, especially during the twentieth century, and the region developed a number of industries like the

Celtex Mills in Louisiana and Masonite Corporation in Mississippi, which made building materials out of sugarcane and wood waste.8 Although the manufacture of pulp and paper got off to a relatively slow start, by 1935 the industry had grown significantly.9 In 1930 High Point,

North Carolina was one of the nation’s leading hubs for the manufacture and sale of furniture, and by 1929 Southern states—mostly North Carolina and Virginia—were producing almost sixteen percent of the nation’s furniture.10 Although lagging far behind the rest of the nation,

Southern states also began producing Portland cement to replace wood building products, and in

5 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 91. 6 John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 275; United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1929 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1929), 394. 7 United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1929, 42. 8 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 85. 9 William Boyd, “The Forest is the Future?: Industrial Forestry and the Southern Pulp and Paper Complex,” in The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s, Ed. Philip Scranton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 204. 10 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 84.

285 1930 alone shipped over thirty-three million barrels of cement to market.11 Limited agricultural diversification was also beginning throughout parts of the South. The production of cotton actually declined in coastal, mountain, and Piedmont sub-regions and by 1930 other areas were making strides in cultivating vegetables, fruit and berries—both for market and subsistence purposes.12

Southerners also made some headway in stemming unchecked use of their natural resources. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt established the nation’s first wildlife refuge at Pelican

Island, Florida, in response to the overhunting of coastal bird populations for their plumes. The

1911 Weeks Act authorized the Forest Service to purchase forestland in the eastern United States, and paved the way for the formation of Pisgah National Forest in 1916, Shenandoah National

Forest in 1918, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. Federal powers under the

Weeks Act were expanded with the passage of the Clarke-McNary Act in 1924, which removed most limits to the Forest Service’s ability to purchase eastern forestlands, provided for fire protection programs, promoted reforestation, and encouraged state forestry programs.13 Indeed, by 1928 there were more than three million acres of land that had been designated as National

Forests under the Weeks Act, with another 117 thousand acres approved but not yet acquired.14

Beginning in the twentieth century, states throughout the South appointed conservation or forestry commissions that sought to address the most glaring of the region’s environmental problems. At the same time, private wood product companies like Champion Fibre made gains with private forestry programs designed to prolong their use of Southern natural resources.

11 United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1929, 778. 12 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 191, 506; United States Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, Volume II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 97-111, 17. 13 Donald C. Swain, Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 14-15; Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 87-91. 14 United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1929, 722-24. This is only about 2% of the total in the continental US, however.

286 Southern boosters were believers in statistics, and constantly trotted out figures to show that the region was achieving parity with the rest of the nation. Although the examples provided here fueled optimism that the South was moving in the right direction, they are certainly not intended to give the impression that Southerners were on the verge of building a permanent, or even prosperous, economy. They were far from it. By 1930 hopes of achieving a permanent economy were still unrealized, and Southern economic development fell far short of expectations.

Conditions improved little for the overwhelming mass of Southerners. The region remained mired in staple crop economy with increasingly exploitative labor and credit systems, and by 1930 fifty- five percent of Southern farmers were tenants.15 Despite significant urban growth the vast majority of Southerners continued to live in rural areas, and poverty and malnutrition were widespread. Declining prices for cotton and other staples resulted in waves of foreclosures and bankruptcies throughout the rural South that only exacerbated these problems. Even with its significant progress in industrial development, the South remained “a low wage region in a high wage country,” and manufacturers headed off most attempts to unionize Southern laborers.16

Instead of building permanent regimes of resource use, the New South era was marked by unsustainable enterprises and environmental disasters. Widespread deforestation, destructive flooding, air and water pollution, and continued soil erosion all contributed to a perception that

Southerners gave little thought to the region’s environment. Franklin D. Roosevelt perhaps best summed up the state of the region in 1938, when he famously declared the South “the nation’s number-one economic problem.”17

In short, the South’s economic development ultimately suited no one—whether those calling for the exploitation of resources, those advocating their restrained use, or anyone falling in

15 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 125. 16 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South, 76. 17 For more on how the 1938 Report on the Economic Conditions of the South led to greater federal involvement in the region’s economic development see Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

287 between. Most historians claim that this was largely because the South’s leaders embraced growth at any cost. Yet this is too simplistic. How to use the region’s natural resources in the best way was always on the mind of the region’s public officials, businesspeople, and journalists, and informed efforts to rebuild Southern agriculture, industries, and tourism. Many public officials and businesspeople embraced ideas about conservation and efficient uses of the region’s natural resources. These ideas not only spoke to their desires to build an efficient economy, but also posed little threat to the status quo and the prospects of the region’s ruling class. Whether they considered themselves conservationists or not, most Southerners valued using the region’s resources in the most efficient ways, especially as declines in natural resources became more marked over the course of the era. Although measures that would promote long-term uses of the region’s resources did not always win out in calculations of what would be best for the South, they were always part of the equation. In short, by the twentieth century Southern economic development was occurring in a climate of opinion that placed great value on efficient ways of using the region’s natural resources. This raises an important question: Given that environmental issues had a high profile among the region’s leaders during the New South era, what was it about the Southern experience that ultimately hindered the development of a “permanent economy” and sustainable uses of natural resources in the region?

***

Despite the claims of most scholars, the failure of Southerners to realize permanent growth and effectively manage their use of natural resources in the years between the Civil War and Great Depression was not simply the result of economic desperation. Although typical narratives of the New South claim that “the concepts of conservation and environmental protection were too esoteric to stand up against the region’s seemingly insatiable desire for more industrial payrolls,” there was little in the concept of conservation as understood by the South’s

288 business leaders and public officials that interfered with their desire to attract “more industrial payrolls.”18

Part of the problem is that scholars have read struggles between Southern economic development and environmentalism after the Second World War back into the New South era. By the mid-twentieth century, intense conflicts between environmentalists, industrialists, developers and public officials were occurring throughout the South. Clashes between environmental groups and Southerners bent on growth occurred over the construction of a jetport in the Everglades, the development of a petrochemical plant at Hilton Head, South Carolina, a canal between the

Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers, and even over pollution from Canton’s own Champion

International, among other examples. Yet there was a very different dynamic at play in these conflicts than in conflicts over resource use during the New South era.

As Samuel Hays explains, environmentalism and conservation were each a product of very different historical contexts. Whereas conservationists stressed the need for the efficient use of natural resources so as to maximize profits for the longest possible time, environmentalists sought to maximize their quality of life by ensuring a healthy living environment.19 In short, environmentalism was a product of abundance; conservation was a product of scarcity. Although environmentalists challenged the developmental logic of the South’s leaders by deemphasizing the economic value of natural resources, or at least stressing the economic benefits of aesthetic uses of natural resources, conservation did not. Conservation simply promised to maximize the economic value of natural resources for the longest time, and was a doctrine that New South leaders could get behind. Indeed, perhaps nowhere in the nation was the link between conservation and development as strong as it was in the South, and Southern leaders almost always interpreted “wise use” in ways that would promote continued economic growth.

18 James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 121-22. 19 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955- 1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-22.

289 Further, historians who claim that Southerners traded environmental quality for jobs overlook important changes in the relationship between Southern leaders and the region’s resources in the aftermath of the Civil War. As Gavin Wright explains, the Civil War caused fundamental changes in the ways that Southerners valued their natural resources, seen perhaps most clearly in the shift from planters acting as “laborlords” to “landlords.” Wright contends that

“When slavery was abolished, investment strategies, entrepreneurial designs, and political schemes whose end purpose was to increase the productivity and value of land came to the fore.

Ironically, in dismissing these writers as ‘publicists’ obsessed with claims of ‘abounding resources,’ historians have overlooked the clues to the real economic change that these favorite phrases provide,” and he concludes that “the passionate Southern attachment to the soil was a post-Civil War phenomenon.”20 In short, narratives of abundant natural resources were mostly a product of the transformations wrought by the Civil War, which led many people to conclude that land and resources were the region’s only assets. Because New South economic development was occurring in a context that placed great value on land and resources, then, Southern public officials and businesspeople were predisposed to support efforts that promised to maximize the efficient use of these resources.

In this context, the “jobs vs. environment” justification that many scholars have used to explain Southern environmental degradation simply does not hold up for the New South era.

Southern businesspeople and public officials almost always viewed environmental quality in terms of maximizing the long-term output of the region’s natural resources. The aesthetic concerns about quality of life that often contributed to environmentalism had little purchase in a region that was desperate to develop its economy. Yet this does not mean that New South leaders

20 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 19, 34, vi.

290 had no interest in environmental quality, only that their conception of environmental quality was based on economic, rather than aesthetic ways of valuing Southern natural resources.

Admittedly, occasional glimpses of what would later make up the “jobs vs. environment” argument used so devastatingly by mid-twentieth century industrialists are evident in the New

South era. For example, in 1899 a pulp and paper mill refused to locate near Hinton, West

Virginia—even after buying fifty thousand dollars worth of property there—because residents and members of the municipal government threatened to take action if they did pollute. The mill relocated to Covington, Virginia, to avoid any potential problems. The residents of Hinton who had helped to stave off the mill ultimately earned the ridicule of Virginia newspapers, who could not understand prioritizing fish over jobs.21 Incidents like this were relatively rare in the New

South era, however. This was not simply because the doctrine of conservation as it was understood by the region’s public officials was compatible with economic development, but also because few states or municipalities ever had stringent-enough laws on the books that would deter potential industries. In directly challenging industrial pollution, Hinton differed from most

“business progressives,” who simply tried to mute the effects of economic development, but never challenged it.

If the South’s failure to manage its natural resources cannot be attributed to a tradeoff between jobs and environmental quality, then what was behind the region’s unprecedented environmental degradation?

A key factor inhibiting attempts to realize a permanent economy was that there was no consensus about what this meant—even among the South’s ruling classes—and instead there were many conflicting visions for what a permanent economy would look like. Indeed, one contemporary scholar notes that development is “normative,” and claims that “the definition of

21 For instance, “Drove the Plant Away,” Staunton Spectator and Vindicator [Staunton, VA], 27 April 1899: 2.

291 development will vary between individuals, political parties, and countries.”22 During the New

South era there was never a consensus about what “development” meant, or the best ways to achieve it, and boosters often promoted conflicting visions for the region’s resources and development. For instance, while some people believed that commercial fertilizers were the best method of maintaining the fertility of Southern soils, others pointed to manures, lime, and a variety of new farming methods. All were searching for a way to make the long-term uses of the

South’s soils viable, but believed that different paths were ideal.

Unlike the North and the West, development in the postbellum South occurred in a context that was laden with the social, political, and economic structures that already existed in the region. Although Northerners and Westerners had the opportunity to develop an economy, postbellum Southerners were forced to re-develop their economy on top of these preexisting structures, of which the structure and remnants of the antebellum economy posed perhaps the biggest challenge.

Complicating this mass of opinion was the fact that Democratic governments throughout the South were less active than their counterparts from later in the twentieth century at promoting what they saw as the ideal forms of economic development. Throughout much of the New South era, Democratic state officials were content to hang back and let private interests take the lead in promoting economic development. A patchwork of railroad subsidies, grants of land, and tax breaks certainly did encourage economic growth, but they fell far short of the measures that active state development boards would take in the mid-twentieth century to “sell the South.” By the 1920s Southern states were beginning to organize state commissions that more aggressively courted new businesses—Alabama’s Department of Commerce and Industries, North Carolina’s

Department of Conservation and Development, and Florida’s Bureau of Immigration, among

22 Frederick Nixson, Development Economics, Second Edition (Oxford: Heinemann, 2001), 12.

292 others.23 Yet for most of the New South era, public officials were reluctant to engage in the active policies of industrial recruitment that were evident later in the twentieth century, and promotion of economic development was mostly left to private interests—which often worked at cross- purposes.

External factors also hampered the ability of the region’s leaders to realize their vision for a permanent economy. Perhaps most important was that few Southerners had the capital necessary to take up different methods of using resources. State governments were always strapped for cash, and had little to spare to experiment with economic programs that might or might not prove profitable. Unlike the West, Southern states had little in the way of public domain, and implementing government programs of conservation on private land often proved difficult because it hinged upon convincing or forcing landowners to cede their land to the state or federal government. This was a particularly tall order given that land was one of the few assets available to Southerners in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Southerners were also rebuilding the region’s economy in a national context that discouraged changes to the South’s economic structure and use of its natural resources. The region’s economic development gained speed much later than either the North or West, and it had to compete with both of these regions for a place in the national market. As a result, nascent

Southern industries faced fierce competition from similar, more ingrained industries in other places. As David Carlton notes, “unfortunately for the southern economy, it had to coexist within national boundaries, with a well-developed industrial region which could provide strong competition to any southern ‘infant industry’ requiring a skilled labor force and experience

23 James C. Cobb, Selling the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990, Second Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 64-5.

293 entrepreneurs.”24 Attempts to change paths were subject to unique competition from the rest of the nation, which made it difficult to move past low-wage, extractive industries.

Yet perhaps the biggest hindrance to the development of a permanent economy in the

South was actually a product of the environmental visions of the region’s public officials and businesspeople. The concept of conservation that the South’s leaders championed—indeed, the brand of conservation that was popular throughout the nation—privileged efficient uses of natural resources over more expansive views of environmental quality. Many of the enterprises and practices favored by the region’s leaders actually brought with them a bevy of environmental problems that were not explicitly a part of their limited vision of environmental quality. For instance, manufacturing paper from wood pulp created widespread water and air pollution, the use of commercial fertilizers temporarily boosted soil fertility at the expense of the long-term health of soils, the manufacture of Portland cement resulted in significant air pollution, and the region’s tourist economy paved the way for sprawl and pollution. These problems—many of which fell most heavily on lower-class Southerners—rarely figured into the calculus of Southern leaders during the New South era, however. Despite their efforts to rebuild a permanent economy and implement long-term uses of resources, businesspeople and public officials did create a climate in the South in which the region’s development was never separate from broader ideas about resource use and environmental quality. Yet their narrow view of economic efficiency ultimately prevented them from building an economy that used resources in long-term ways.

24 As quoted in James C. Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists,” 54.

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Unpublished Theses

Harris, Anne Barber. “The South As Seen By Travelers, 1865-1880.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1967.

Hillyer, Reiko Margarita. “Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism and Memory in the New South, 1870-1917.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2007.

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320

Lanning, E. Kaye. “Champion Fibre Company: Industry in Western North Carolina.” M.A. thesis. University of North Carolina, 1980.

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Youngs, Larry R. “Lifestyle Enclaves: Winter Resorts in the South Atlantic States, 1870-1930.” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2001.

CURRICULUM VITAE William D. Bryan

EDUCATION

2013 Ph.D., History, The Pennsylvania State University 2009 M.A., History, The Pennsylvania State University 2007 B.A., History and Political Science, Furman University, magna cum laude

PUBLICATIONS

2011 “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality: Weighing Paths to Economic Development at the Dawn of the Environmental Era,” Environmental History 16, Number 3, (July 2011) 2011 “Piscatorial Politics: Fishery Regulation and the Economic Future of Rhode Island, 1869-1872,” The New England Quarterly 84, Number 3 (September 2011)

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

2013 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award 2012 Summer Resident, Institute for the Arts and Humanities 2012 Raymond Lombra Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Research in the Humanities, Penn State College of Liberal Arts 2011 James Landing Graduate Fellowship in History, The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center 2011 Karen and Lewis Gold Graduate Fellowship, The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center 2010 McCourtney Pre-Dissertation Fellowship 2008 The Hardin Craig Prize, Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2013 “’Nature’s Bounty’: Competing Visions of Economic Development in the New South,” American Historical Association (panel organizer) 2011 “Touring the New South Creed: Southern Railroads as Tourist Boosters,” Southern Historical Association (panel co-organizer) 2010 “’Ecology Emotion’: The Fight Against Industrial Pollution and Environmentalism in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1969-1970,” American Society for Environmental History (panel organizer) 2009 “’The Strength of the Scup Ticket’: The Politics of Fishery Regulation in Rhode Island, 1870-1872,” North Atlantic Fisheries History Association

SERVICE

2011-13 Editorial Assistant, The Journal of the Civil War Era (UNC Press) 2011 Organizer, “Landscapes of Freedom: Freedom Struggles During the Long Nineteenth Century” Graduate Conference (George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center) 2010 Representative, History Graduate Student Association 2009 Research Assistant, Pennsylvania’s Agricultural History Project