78 RESOURCES OF SOUTHERN ALABAMA. 



time the lumber industry attained its maximum relative im- 

 portance. 



In ante-bellum days the only land that could be culti- 

 vated with profit for any length of time was river and creek 

 bottoms, some of the more clayey uplands, and limited areas 

 near cow-pens, where barnyard manure was available. 

 Some farming was indeed attempted on the sandier soils, 

 but such fields were usually exhausted and abandoned in a 

 few years, and their owners moved away to new clearings. 

 But in the last fifty or sixty years the discovery of valuable 

 deposits of mineral fertilizers in various parts of the world, 

 such as potash salts in Germany, phosphate rock in South 

 Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, and sodium nitrate in 

 Chile, has revolutionized- agriculture on sandy soils through- 

 out the world, and caused some phenomenal developments 

 which are still in progress.* The total area cultivated in 

 the southwestern pine hills, and in similar areas in neigh- 

 boring states, about trebled in the thirty years from 1880 

 to 1910, and the returns from this year's census will doubt- 

 less show a still further increase, despite the shortage of 

 fertilizers caused by the recent war. (Even without fer- 

 tilizers it ought to be possible to produce crops that take lit- 

 tle or nothing from the soil, like turpentine, huckleberries, 

 honey, butter and sugar.) 



The main features of agricultural development in this 

 region are shown in Tables 14 to 16, in which conditions 

 in Baldwin and Escambia Counties are contrasted with those 

 in Mobile County, to illustrate the influence of a large city 

 on farming. In Table 15, unlike the preceding ones, the 

 percentage of foreign white farmers is given. It should 

 be borne in mind that the figures for Baldwin County at 

 the earlier censuses are not very representative, because 

 most of the farms in that county at first belonged to the 

 region next to be described. 



Especially noteworthy here are the small number of 

 cultivated acres per farm, the farm building values consid- 

 erably above the State average (indicating prosperity and 

 progressiveness), the numerous domestic animals, the pre- 

 ponderance of horses over mules (even among the negro 

 farmers), the rather large percentage of foreign -born farm- 

 ers and of farm owners, the high expenditures for fertili- 



*For details see the article on development of agriculture in the 

 pine-barrens, cited in the introduction (page 21). 



