The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910

This first book-length examination of the Georgia Pine Belt challenges the conventional view of this area as an unchanging economic backwater by examining its postbellum evolution from an independent agricultural economy to one entirely dependent upon a single unstable crop: cotton. Before the Civil War, the Georgia Piney Woods region easily supported a population of mostly self-sufficient yeomen and livestock herders. After the war, a variety of external forces invaded the region, propelli...