70 RESOURCES OF SOUTHERN ALABAMA. 



ductive were developed, so that farmers took possession of 

 the cut-over lands quite rapidly. 



Mobile was founded about 200 years ago, and has long 

 been an important seaport, being at the mouth of a system 

 of several hundred miles of navigable rivers traversing 

 some very fertile territory ; and it would probably be nearly 

 as large as it is even if the country within fifty miles of it 

 was an absolute desert. For this reason Mobile County is 

 treated separately in most of the tables that follow, for to 

 include it with the others in the region in computing the 

 density of population would give very misleading results. 

 And in some of the population tables separate calculations 

 have been made for the city of Mobile and the rest of the 

 county, which it will be seen does not differ much from Bald- 

 win and Escambia; the other two counties used in the sta- 

 tistics of the southwestern pine hills.* 



Table 13 shows the development of population in this 

 region in somewhat more detail than was done for previous 

 regions, mainly by adding two classes that are negligible 

 in the other regions, namely, free negroes (up to 1860, soon 

 after which all slaves became free) and foreign-born 

 whites (first returned in 1850). For most of the census 

 periods separate figures for the city of Mobile are available, 

 and those have been utilized in the manner indicated. (The 

 apparent decrease in population of the city between 1860 

 and 1880 is due to a reduction of its area in 1870.) 



The large percentage of negroes in Baldwin County in 

 ante-bellum days (there was no Escambia County until 

 1868) is doubtless due to the fact that the population was 

 then largely concentrated on plantations situated on the 

 edge of the Mobile River bottoms (which belong more prop- 

 erly to the region next to be described). Since the Civil 

 War white farmers have steadily invaded the once despised 

 sandy pine lands, cultivating the soil on a small scale with 

 little or no hired labor, and the proportion of negroes has 

 decreased considerably, as shown in Table 13 and also in 

 Fig. 26. The percentage of foreigners in this region is and 

 always has been far above the State average, probably main- 

 ly on account of its nearness to our principal seaport. 



*Although the greater part of the area of Washington County is 

 in this region, the population and agriculture are chiefly concentrated 

 in the more fertile regions in the northern and eastern portions, so 

 that census returns for the whole county tell us very little about con- 

 ditions in either part. 



