Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

6-1985

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

Ralph W. Haskins

Committee Members

John Lounsbury, Michael Donald

Abstract

For three centuries foil owing its exploration by Hernando De Soto, Wiregrass Georgia, a belt of pine trees and wild grasses, remained an unchanging world of self-sufficient farmers and livestock herders. Even as the locus of economic development shifted from Tidewater to Piedmont following the Revolution, the piney woods, bypassed by cotton planters, remained one of the state's antebellum backwaters.

Generally, scholars in the field of historical research have neglected the Wiregrass Country, although they have examined in de tail Piedmont plantations and towns. Yet change, not continuity, characterized life in the late nineteenth century forest. Between 1865 and 1910 a series of invasions, encouraged by New South boosters and unopposed by the area's small planter class, altered traditional patterns of life. New railroads and roads opened up the forest to industrialization, northern tourists and healthseekers visited resort hotels, immigrant mill hands crowded into new communities, and a growing town middle class, which provided goods and services, prospered. As long as timber remained, the region took on an industrial veneer which lent support to claims that a diversified economy, patterned in the northern image, was emerging.

By the mid-nineties, however, the pines were gone, the indus trial boom was over, and mill towns dried up. As New South promoters sought a solution to the malaise, another wave of newcomers--Cotton Belt and Upcountry farmers—moved onto cutover land. The society they fashioned, characterized by cotton production and tenancy, stimulated town growth and filled the backwoods with farms, stores, and gins. Ironically, the cotton culture, held at bay by the forest's antebellum inhabitants, now overran the piney woods, its ascendancy made easier by the new railways, roads, industries, and towns that were considered symbols of a New South. By 1910, few pinelanders doubted that their world was not new, but it had little in common with the prosperous New Order envisioned by Henry Grady. Back-to-back timber and cotton booms had not made the once self-sufficient Wiregrass Country diversified and independent, but had transformed it into an economic colony of the North and the urban South.

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