VOL. VIII.

No. 4.

AFTER many weeks of journeying in the South, through regions where hardly a house is to be seen, where the villages, looming up between patches of forest or canebrake, seem deserted and worm-eaten, and the people reckless and idle, the traveler is struck with astonishment and delight when he emerges into the busy belt extending from Aiken, in South Carolina, to Augusta, in Georgia. There he sees manufacturing villages, hears the whirring of spindles, notes on every hand evidences of progressive industry, and wonders why it was not so years before. Alas! who can compute the sum of the lost opportunities of the Southern States? The traveler will certainly give it up as too formidable a task, and our friends of the South do not like to think much upon it.

This "Sand Hill region," extending from the north-eastern border of South Carolina to the south-eastern border of Georgia, has many noteworthy aspects. Its climate has wonderful life-renewing properties for the invalid worn down with the incessant fatigues and changes of severer latitudes, and its resources for the establishment of manufactures, and for the growth of some of the VOL. VIII.-25

STREET SCENE IN AUGUSTA, GA.

most remarkable and valuable of the fruits of the earth, are unrivaled. The upper limit of the Sand Hills in South Carolina is very clearly defined. They are usually found close to the rivers, and are supposed to be ancient sand-banks once not far from the sea-shore. They pass through the State, half way between the ocean and the Blue Ridge, and are most thoroughly developed near Aiken, Columbia, Camden, and Cheraw. They are usually clothed in aromatic pine forests. Down the slopes of these hills, in Georgia and South Carolina, run rivers, which in winter and spring are turbid with the washings from the red clay hills to the northward; and in the flat valleys scattered along these streams

cotton and corn grow with remarkable luxuriance. In Georgia the hills run from the falls of the Savannah River at Augusta, south-west and north-east, as far as the Ogeechee River. The highest point in this curious range, at the United States Arsenal at Summerville, near Augusta, is hardly more than six hundred feet above the sea level. It is the home of the yellow and the "short-leaved" pine, the Spanish and water-oak, the red maple, the sweet gum, the haw, the persimmon, the wild orange, and the China tree; the lovely Kalmia Latifolia clothes the acclivities each spring in garments of pink and white; the flaming azalea, the honey-suckle, the white locust, the China burr and other evergreens, the iris, the phlox, the silk grass, are there at home. In the gardens japonicas grow ten feet high in the open air, and blossom late in winter; and the "fringe tree" and the Lagerstremia Indica dot the lawns with a dense array of blossoms. Although the unstimulated surface soil of all this section will not produce cotton and the cereals more than two years in succession, yet it is prolific of the peach, the apricot, the pomegranite, the fig, the pear, all kinds of berries, and the grape, which grows there with surprising luxuriance; and

A pleasant land, one is forced to declare. But this productiveness is the least of its advantages. The beneficial nature of the climate for invalids is the chief glory of the Sand Hill country. Aiken has achieved a great reputation as a winter residence for pulmonary invalids; the equable temperature, and dryness of the air, as well as the mildness, which allows the patient to pass most of his winter under the open sky, inhaling the fragrance of the pine woods, have, year after year, drawn hundreds of exhausted Northerners thither. Before the war the planter of the lowlands, and the merchants of New York and Boston alike, went to Aiken to recuperate; the planter occupied a pleasant cottage during the summer, the Northerner arrived with the first hint of winter; but now the planter comes no more with the splendor and spendthrift profusion of old, and the Northerner has the little town very much to himself. The accommodations have, for several years since the war, been insufficient; but as the inhabitants creep back towards their old prosperity, they are giving Aiken the bright appearance of a northern town, and the ill-looking, unpainted, rickety houses of the past are disappearing. Originally laid out by a railroad company, in 1833, as a future station of commercial importance, Aiken prospered until fire swallowed it up a few years later. When the war came great numbers of refugees rushed into it, and the misery and distress there were great. The tide of battle never swept through the town; Kilpatrick contented himself with a partially successful raid in that direction when Sherman was on the road to Columbia, and as soon as peace was declared the invalids flocked back again to haunt the springs and the pleasant woody paths, over which the jessamine day and night showers its delicious fragrance.

all vegetables practicable in a northern climate ripen there in the months of April and May.

Aiken is situated seventeen miles from the Savannah River and from Augusta, on the South Carolina railroad, which extends southward to Charleston. The inhabitants of the hill-country, a little remote from the towns, are decidedly primitive in their habits, and the sobriquet of "sand-hiller" is applied by South Carolinians to some specimens of poor white trash, whom nothing but a slave-aristocracy system could. ever have produced. The lean and scrawny women, without any symptoms of life in their unlovely frames, and with their faces discolored by illness, and the lank and hungry men, have their counterparts

nowhere among native Americans at the North; it is incapable of producing such a peasantry. The houses of the better class of this folk,-the prosperous farmers, as distinguished from the lazy and dissolute plebeians, to whom the word "sand-hiller" is perhaps too indiscriminately applied, are loosely built, as the climate demands little more than shelter. At night, immense logs burn in the fire-place, while the house door remains open. The diet is as barbarous as elsewhere among the agricultural classes in the South-corn bread, pork and "chick'n;" farmers rarely think of killing a cow for beef, or a sheep for mutton; hot and bitter coffee smokes morning and night on the tables where purest spring water, or best of Scuppernong wine might be daily placed the latter with almost as little expense as the former. But the invalid visiting this region in search of health, and frequenting a town of reasonable size, encounters none of these miseries. At Augusta and at Aiken he can secure the comforts to which he is accustomed in the North, and can add thereto a climate in which existence is a veritable joy. In the vicinity of Aiken many hundreds of acres are now planted with the grape; and twentyfive hundred gallons of wine to the acre have been guaranteed in some cases, al

though the average production must, of course, fall very much below that.

The development of the resources for manufacturing in the region extending between and including Aiken and Augusta merits especial mention, and shows what may be done by judicious enterprise in the South. The extensive cotton manufactories at Augusta aud Graniteville employ many hundreds of hands. Scarcely a quarter of a century ago the Augusta cotton manufacturing enterprise was inaugurated with a small capital. It was the outgrowth of a demand for labor for the surplus white population-labor which should accrue at once to the benefit of the State, and of that population; and in due time the canal at Augusta was constructed. The Augusta cotton factory, which was not at first prosperous, now has a capital stock of $600,000, upon which a quarterly dividend of five per cent. is paid. Thousands of spindles and hundreds of looms are now busy along the banks of the canal, where, also, have sprung up four flour mills and tobacco factories. The cotton mill is filled with the newest and finest machinery, and has received the high compliment, from Senator Sprague, of Rhode Island, of being "the best arranged one in the United States." At Graniteville, in South Carolina,

two or three miles beyond the Savannah River extensive mills have also been erected, and eight million yards of cotton are annually made there. The manufacturing village is as tidy and thrifty as any in the North, and there is none in the South which excels it in general aspect of comfort, unless it be that of the Eagle and Phoenix Company at Columbus, Georgia. Six miles from Augusta is an extensive kaolin manufactory.

Early on a bright summer morning, while the inhabitants were still asleep, I entered Augusta, and walked through the broad, beautifully shaded avenues of the lovely Southern city. The birds gossiped languidly in the dense foliage through which the sun was just peering; here and there the sand of the streets was mottled with delicate light and shade; the omnipresent negro was fawning and yawning on doorsteps, luxuriously abandoning himself to his favorite attitude of slouch. I wandered to the banks of the Savannah, which sweeps past the city in a broad and sluggish current, between high banks bordered, at intervals, with enormous mulberry trees. Clambering down among the giant boles of these sylvan monarchs, and stumbling from time to time over a somnolent negro fisherman, I could see the broad and fertile Carolinian fields opposite, and could scent the perfume which the slight breeze sent from the dense masses of trees in the town above me.

Returning, an hour later, into the city,

I found that it had awakened to a life and energy worthy of the brightest of Northern cities of its size. The superb Greene street, with its grand double-rows of shade trees, whose broad boughs almost interlocked above, was filled with active pedestrians; the noise of wagons and drays was beginning; the cheery markets were thronged with gossiping negro women; and around the Cotton Exchange groups were already gathered busily discussing the previous day's receipts. Augusta's excellent railroad facilities, and her advantageous situation have made her an extensive cotton market. The Georgia railroad is largely tributary to the town, although Savannah is of late years receiving much of the cotton which properly belongs to Augusta. The new railway stretching from Port Royal, in South Carolina, to Augusta furnishes a convenient outlet, and the South Carolina and Central roads give communication with Charleston and Savannah. The Cotton Exchange was founded in 1872. For the cotton years of 1872-3, Augusta received 180,789 bales. The cotton factories in the city consume two hundred bales daily, and the Langley and the Hickman factories in South Carolina, and the Richmond mills in Georgia are also supplied from this point. Cotton culture throughout all this section has greatly increased since the war. I was told that one man in Jackson county now grows a larger number of bales than the whole county produced previous to 1860. duced previous to 1860. The use of fer

tilizers, once so utterly disregarded, is now producing the most remarkable results. But the planters in all the surrounding country give but little attention to a rotation or diversity of crops, and so any year's failure of the cotton brings them to financial distress, as they depend entirely upon the outer world for their supplies. In some of the northern sections of the State planters show a greater inclination to grow their own supplies. Conversation with representative men from various sections of the State, who naturally flock into Augusta to inspect the market, showed, however, that there was a steady and genuine improvement in agriculture through all that section, and, indeed throughout Georgia. Lands which heretofore have been considered of superior quality for cotton growing have, under the new régime, with careful fertilizing and culture, produced twice as much as during the epoch of slavery. The negro on these cotton lands usually works well, according to universal testimony, "and when he does not," said a planter to me, "it is because he is poorly paid.' Small farms seem to be increasing in Middle Georgia, and much of the cotton brought into Augusta is raised exclusively by white labor. The small farmers, who were before the war unable to produce a crop in competition with those richer ones who possessed larger numbers of slaves, now find no difficulty in getting their crop to market, and in securing good prices for it.

Broad

Augusta, like Savannah, is a town built in the midst of a beautiful wood. The public buildings are embowered in foliage; the pretty City Hall, the Medical College, the Masonic and Odd Fellows' Halls peer out from knots of trees. Street, the main thoroughfare, is well lined with commodious stores and residences, and the streets leading from it are well kept and shaded. In front of the City Hall stands a simple but massive monument, erected to the memory of the Georgian signers of the Declaration of American Independence. Tall men, as well as tall and graceful trees, abound in the streets, for the Georgian is dowered with a generous height. The policemen are clad in an amicable mingling of gray and blue. On the road to Summerville, the pretty suburb on one of

the sand hills three miles away, one sees the powder mill, once disused, which supplied the Confederates with ammunition. for many a day; and in a lovely location, at the hill's top, is the extensive United States arsenal, around which are grouped many workshops, built and occupied by the Confederates during the war.

Nothing can exceed in quiet and reverent beauty the floral decoration of the principal cemetery of Augusta. Loving hands have lingered long over the Confederate soldiers' graves, and the white headstones, neatly surrounded with boxwood hedges, nearly all bear inscriptions like the following, which show that the young were the first to go, and first to fall, even as in the North:

A SOLDIER'S GRAVE AT AUGUSTA, GA.

own particular ground. The old town had a stormy revolutionary history. Named after one of the royal princesses of England by Oglethorpe, it was an Indian outpost after 1735, and in constant danger from the savages, until taken and retaken by Briton and American during the re