CLOSING OF THE SCHOOLS IN 1873.

343 nominally apportioned impartially to the whites and blacks in each county, and the trustees in each township are informed what their share is. Under this system, the average attendance at the various schools opened throughout the State, has been 150,000; but in 1873 the schools were all closed (save those in the large cities) on account of the inability of the State to pay teachers! This cessation has been productive of much harm and disorganization. Efforts have, however, been made to resuscitate the State University at Tuscaloosa, which is not in a flourishing condition, and a normal college, for teachers of both sexes, has been started at Florence, in the northern part of the State. In Western Alabama, a colored university and normal college has been established at Marion, and a colored normal school is opened at Huntsville. The American Missionary Society also maintains a college for colored people at Talladega.

THE SAND-HILL REGION-AIKEN-AUGUSTA.

FTER many weeks of journeying in the South, through regions where

A 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 whir of spindles, notes on every hand evidences of progressive industry, and wonders why it was

THE SAND-HILL REGION—AIKEN,

SOUTH CAROLINA.

345

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, 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. The sand-hills are 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, flourish there.

In the open air, in the gardens, japonicas grow ten feet high 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 pomegranate, the fig, the pear, all kinds of berries, and the grape, which grows there with surprising luxuriance; and all vegetables practicable in a northern climate ripen there in the months of April and May.

A pleasant land, one is forced to declare. But this productiveness is the least of its advantages. The kindly climate is the chief glory of the sand-hill country. Aiken has achieved a great reputation as a winter residence for pulmonary invalids. The mild and equable temperature, and the dryness of the air, 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 occupying a pleasant cottage during the summer, and the Northerner arriving 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 toward 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

346

"SAND-HILLERS"-MANUFACTURES.

of refugees rushed into it, and the misery and distress there were great. The tide of battle never swept through the town, Kilpatrick contenting 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.

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 specimens of poor white trash, which nothing but a system of slave-aristocracy could ever have produced. The lean and scrawny women, without animation, 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 "sandhiller" is perhaps too indiscriminately given, are loosely built, as the climate demands little more than shelter. At night, immense logs burn in the fireplace, while the house door remains open. The diet is barbarous as elsewhere among the agricultural classes in the South-corn-bread, pork and "chick'n;" farmers rarely 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, to which will be added 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 2,500 gallons of wine to the acre have been guaranteed in some cases, although 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 and Graniteville employ many hundreds of hands. Scarcely a quarter of a century ago the Augusta cotton manufacturing enterprise was inaugurated with but a small capital. It was the outgrowth of a demand for labor for the surplus white population-labor whose results should accrue at once to the benefit of the State, and of that population. 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 noble canal, where, also, have sprung up fine flour-mills and

ALONG THE SAVANNAH RIVER AUGUSTA.

347

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 a general aspect of comfort, unless it be that of the Eagle and Phoenix Company at Columbus, Georgia. Six miles from Augusta there is an extensive kaolin factory.

Early on a bright summer morning, while the inhabitants were still asleep, I entered Augusta, and walked through the broad, beautifully shaded avenues of this 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 door-steps, abandoning himself to his favorite attitude of slouch.

A Bell-Tower in Augusta, Georgia.

I wandered to the banks of the Savannah, which sweeps, 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 Carolina fields opposite, and scent the perfume which the slight breeze sent from the dense masses of trees in the town above me.

Returning, an hour later, I found the place 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.