SOILS OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES AND THEIR USE-V. 



THE CECIL SANDY LOAM. 



GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION. 



The Cecil sandy loam is the dominant soil type of the southern 

 Piedmont region, so far as geographical extent is concerned. From 

 central Virginia southward through the central or Piedmont sec- 

 tions of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and east-central 

 Alabama it occupies extensive areas. The bureau has encountered 

 this soil type in 29 different surveys located in the five States men- 

 tioned. In those soil surveys it has covered an aggregate area of 

 3,143,960 acres. In some of the single soil surveys it has been so 

 extensively developed that it occupied more than one-half of the en- 

 tire area included in the survey. While the total extent of the Cecil 

 sandy loam in the Piedmont section can not be determined until that 

 region has been entirely covered by detailed soil surveys, still it is 

 safe to predict that fully one-third of the southern Piedmont is occu- 

 )ied by this single type. Only the Cecil clay is comparable with it 



widespread development. 



THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOIL AND SUBSOIL. 



The surface soil of the Cecil sandy loam, to an average depth of 

 ibout 10 inches, is a gray, brownish-gray, or yellow sandy loam, 

 grades downward through a narrow zone of friable red sandy 

 clay into a deep subsoil, which in almost all cases is a tenacious stiff 

 red clay. This in turn rests at considerable depth upon the partly 

 decomposed granite or gneiss from which both surface soil and sub- 

 soil have been derived by the ordinary processes of weathering. The 

 Cecil sandy loam occupies the less eroded portions of the territory 

 covered by the Cecil materials. It still carries on its surface the 

 more thoroughly disintegrated and weathered remains of the original 

 mass, and those coarser materials, such as the broken quartz and 

 feldspar, which it has been impossible for water moving across the 

 surface to carry away. The Cecil sandy loam is therefore to a 

 degree an erosion type, whose sandy surface material has originated 

 through the removal of the finer silt and clay particles and their 



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