MISSISSIPPI: THE SETTING 



tained a substantial mixture of pines. The oak-hick- 

 ory forest also covered the Pontotoc Ridge and the 

 northern half of the Flatwoods. 



Agriculture and the Forests 



Early settlement was on the edges of the State, along 

 the coast and in the Bluff hills around Natchez. But 

 the real opening of the State came with the cotton 

 boom which began around 1800. First, southwestern 

 Mississippi was marked off and tilled, then the Pearl 

 and Tombigbee River valleys. After the land boom 

 of the 1830's and the development of railroad and 

 steamboat routes, cotton farmers moved into the north- 

 ern and central uplands (fig. 7) . 



By 1850 more than 3 million acres of forest had been 

 cleared for cultivation and pasture, and population had 

 passed the 600,000 mark. In 1860, cleared acreage 

 exceeded 5 million acres. It dropped drastically dur- 

 ing and after the Civil War, but recovered to 5.2 mil- 

 lion acres in 1880. In the latter year, extensive culti- 

 vation occurred in all parts of the State except the 

 Piney Woods. The Delta already had 16 percent of 

 the cotton acreage, an indication that the movement 

 of farmers from the central and northern hills was well 

 under way. 



It was erosion of the upland farms that forced the 

 large-scale opening of the Delta to cotton. There 

 were considerable obstacles to clearing the forest and 

 draining Delta land, and in protecting plantations 



against flooding, but a large part of the Delta was con- 

 verted by hard labor into productive fields. The rich 

 cotton agriculture which developed has continued to 

 the present day. 



Hill-land erosion had become a serious problem in 

 the early years of cotton cultivation. Particularly in 

 the fertile brown loam uplands of the State, erosion 

 took an extremely heavy toll (fig. 8). Hundreds of 

 thousands of acres of once good hill land were washed, 

 dissected by gullies, and ruined for further cropping. 

 As early as 1850 — according to Mississippi, a Guide 

 to the Magnolia State — Eugene Hilgard, the first State 

 geologist, wrote about the northern part of the State 

 as follows: "Even the present generation is rife with 

 complaints about the exhaustion of soils — in a region, 

 which, 30 years ago, had just received the first scratch 

 of the plowshare." 



The abandonment of upland fields which followed 

 on the heels of soil erosion was intensified around the 

 turn of the century by the boll weevil plague and, later, 

 by the loss of world cotton markets. Thus, throughout 

 the history of upland farming in Mississippi, which is 

 largely the story of cotton production, land has been 

 cleared for cultivation, then abandoned to revert to 

 forest. 



When fields which had originally been claimed from 

 mixed pine-hardwood stands were abandoned, they 

 usually seeded in to pure pine stands. This process was 

 recognized as early as 1880 by Dr. Charles Mohr, 

 according to Charles S. Sargent's Report on the For- 



FiGURE 7. — The history of 



upland farming in Missis- PPWF***" 



sippi is largely the story of '. ^"'*' ^ 



cotton production. /i 



