Mississippi: The Setting 



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A MONG Mississippi's natural resources, forests are 

 /-\ a close second to crop and pasture land as the 

 primary source of income. Occupying more 

 than half of all the land in the State, the second-growth 

 pine and hardwood forests are the mainstay of 

 numerous Mississippi communities. No resident of 

 the State is unaffected by the many benefits which 

 flow from the forests. 



Forest Survey Regions 



Four regions — north, central, south, and Delta — 

 have been recognized by the Forest Survey in Missis- 

 sippi (fig. 1). They have been distinguished pri- 

 marily on the basis of forest types and economic 

 conditions, although their boundaries follow county 

 lines for convenience in compiling data. The regions 

 also conform, to some extent, to the major physio- 

 graphic areas of the State (fig. 2) . 



Except for a narrow strip of the Bluff and Brown 

 Loam area included within its boundaries, the Delta 

 Region is entirely within the alluvial plain of the 

 Mississippi River. It contains some very fertile 

 alluvial deposits, 35 feet deep in places, and supports 

 a rich cotton agriculture (fig. 3) . However, recurrent 

 flooding and inadequate drainage, especially in the 

 extensive backwater areas of the Mississippi and Yazoo 

 Rivers above Vicksburg, limit the extent to which the 

 land can be tilled. Much of the land has never been 



^ Historical material in this section is drawn largely from 

 the following sources: (1) Federal Writers' Project. 



MISSISSIPPI, A GUIDE TO THE MAGNOLIA STATE. 545 pp., 



illus. New York. 1938. (2) Sargent, Charles S., re- 

 port ON THE FORESTS OF NORTH AMERICA. U. S. CcnSUS 



Office, Dept. of the Interior. 1884. (3) Hilgard, Eugene 



W., REPORT ON COTTON PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES, 



part 1. U. S. Census Office, Dept. of the Interior. 1884. 

 (4) Various other Census reports, particularly the tenth 



CENSUS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1880. 



cleared, and many fields laboriously claimed from the 

 forest on poor farming soils have been allowed to 

 revert to trees again. Despite the enthusiasm of the 

 Delta for cotton, more than a third of the land is still 

 forested. 



South Mississippi also lies almost entirely within 

 a single physiographic area — in this instance, the Piney 

 Woods (known also as the longleaf pine area) com- 

 prising level to gently rolling lands of the lower Coastal 

 Plain (fig. 4). The sandy soils of the Piney Woods 

 never stimulated widespread agriculture. People did 

 not move into the region in large numbers until heavy 

 timber exploitation began at the end of the 19th cen- 

 tury. As the original forest was cut down, many stayed 

 for subsistence farming, but even today, after a large 

 recent expansion in specialty crops and livestock, 

 only one acre out of six is cropland or open pasture. 

 More than three-fourths of the land remains forest 

 land, although in some places where the forest is 

 heavily grazed, livestock rivals timber as a forest 

 product. 



Central Mississippi is chai'acterized mainly by the 

 Central Hills and the lower half of the Bluff and 

 Brown Loam area, although it contains also a narrow 

 strip of the Mississippi alluvial plain, and parts of the 

 Piney Woods, the Prairies, and the Flatwoods areas 

 (fig. 5). The Bluff and Brown Loam area is a belt 

 some 20 to 40 miles wide fronting the Delta. Its 

 loessial soil is piled high in the rugged Bluff hills 

 alongside the Delta, in places as much as 90 feet deep; 

 but it thins out in the rolling hills to the east and 

 disappears in a broad zone of thin, scattered remnants 

 overlying the Coastal Plain. 



The Bluff and Brown Loam area once produced 

 luxuriant crops, but severe gully erosion made large 

 areas impossible to cultivate and caused their abandon- 

 ment. The Central Hills is an area of low hills and 

 small faiTns. Its characteristic soil is a fertile silt-clay 



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