58 RESOURCES OF SOUTHERN ALABAMA. 



lation has come in from other regions and states, and one 

 has to have a little education in order to read real-estate 

 advertisements and railroad time-tables preparatory to mov- 

 ing to a new home. The illiteracy percentage for Dothan 

 (total population over 10 years old, including nearly as 

 many negroes as whites) is actually lower than in Boston, 

 Mass., which was once regarded as the center of all culture 

 in the western hemisphere. 



The leading white churches in 19 C 6 were Southern Bap- 

 tist, Southern Methodist, Freewill Baptist, Methodist Pro- 

 testant, Northern Methodist, and Primitive Baptist. The 

 leading denominations among the negroes were Baptist, 

 African Methodist, and A. M. E. Zion. 



AGRICULTURE. 



Information about farming operations in this region 

 previous to 1910 is still harder to get than in the case 

 of population, for the census does not return farm sta- 

 tistics by beats as it does population. At that time "im- 

 proved land in farms" constituted 42.7 of the total area of 

 Geneva and Houston Counties (a little more than in any of 

 the other regions), or 5.39 acres per inhabitant. The gen- 

 eral conditions of agriculture in 1909-10 are shown in 

 Tables 10 to 12, which are arranged differently from the 

 others on account of being based on only one census. Table 

 10 gives certain statistics for the two races separately as 

 well as combined, and Table 12 gives the value of animal 

 products per farm and per acre in more detail than is at- 

 tempted elsewhere in this report. 



The proportion of white farmers is a little larger than 

 in any other region in southern Alabama. The number of 

 owners and tenants, taking both races together, is almost 

 exactly equal, but as usual there are more owners among 

 the whites than among the negroes, and owners had con- 

 siderably larger farms than tenants. The animals slaugh- 

 tered were presumably mostly hogs, which are raised in 

 large numbers here, as in other peanut-growing regions. 



The leading crops in 1909 were cotton, corn, peanuts, 

 "vegetables" (probably meaning mostly watermelons in 

 this case), sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, oats, hay, and Irish 

 potatoes. Since the coming of the boll-weevil, about 1912, 



