THE EASTERN COTTON BELT The Eastern Cotton Belt is divided into five subregions differing in soil, characteristic, vegetation, and extent of cotton culture. In this region the cotton acreage begins at the southern border of Virginia and swings southwest ward through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in two unequal strips, separated by the Sand Hills. This region is the oldest of the Cotton Belt, cot ton culture in parts of the Carolinas dating back to colonial times. Many rivers fed by rains from the coast and melting snows from the Appalachians make this re gion less liable to dry spells. On the other hand, the Piedmont nearer the mountains is more liable to suffer from early frost." The soils range from grayish sand along the coast to red clay in the Piedmont Plateau. The Atlantic Coast Flatwoods with its gray and mottled sand, poorly drained land, and characteristic vegetation of long-leaf pine and grassy undergrowth has only 3.5 per cent of its land area in cotton." The farms are the smallest in the belt, and 52 per cent of them are operated by white and black owners.
On the coast of the mainland and on the islands out side the sounds, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida was grown the Sea Island crop before its destruction by the boll weevil.
The Middle Coastal Plain is much more devoted to cot ton culture, over 13 per cent of the land being in cotton." The soil is a grayish sandy loam with yellow clay sub soils, characterized by pine and wire grass vegetation. With the aid of fertilizers the twenty million acres pro duce on the average an annual yield of over a million bales, with about 205 pounds of lint to the acre of cotton. Twenty-eight per cent of the land area is in plantations with 44.8 of the farms operated by Negro tenants and 16.79 by white renters.
The Sand Hills, a long narrow strip slanting to the southwest, separate the Middle and Upper Coastal Plains from the Piedmont Plateau. The soil is deep loam sand, the vegetation pine and black jack oak. The crop in the sand areas is most successful during wet years when the clay does not do so well. Potash is needed to hold the bolls on the plant in the heat of midsummer. High winds are likely to blow sand into the open cotton, pro ducing the "sandies" much disliked by spinners.' The holdings are small, about 9 per cent of the land is in cot ton and 24 per cent in plantations?' The Piedmont Plateau is a clay belt whose character istic red tinge can be traced, as Hubbard suggests, by a railway traveler all the way from New Jersey to the red clay hills of Georgia.' The vegetation is short leaf pine,
oak, and hickory. The average yield of cotton is 180 pounds, and the area produces about 1,800,000 bales a year." The hills and rolling surface prevent the long straight furrows of the coastal plain, making necessary curving rows that help in terracing. The cotton is the upland short staple, although better varieties are being introduced by experimental farms such as that of the Coker Company at Hartsville, South Carolina. The lower red lands need much less potash than the sand hills and coast land. In the upper Piedmont the cotton plants grow so short as to be called "Bumblebee" from the rustic quip that a bumblebee can stand on his hind legs and drink from the bloom. The farms average a little over thirty five acres, about 20 per cent of the land area is in cotton, and almost 70 per cent of the farms are operated by tenants. The arrival of the weevil has pushed cotton cul ture north, and North Carolina has had the largest cotton yield per acre for several years. Her best producing cot ton county lies in the Piedmont. In the southern tip of the red clay belt, southwest Georgia often produces the earliest cotton outside southwest Texas.
Much of this Eastern Belt has been planted to cotton for over a hundred years. This fact is responsible both for the lack of soil fertility and for the prevalence of the plantation which has been accepted as a heritage from slavery. A study of the expenditures for fertilizer in the United States shows the extent to which soil exhaustion has gone in this division. "The Eastern Cotton Belt, no tably the Middle and Upper Coastal Plains and the Piedmont subregions, use more fertilizer than any other portions of the United States." According to the 1920 Census, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia spent approximately one and a half billion dollars on commercial fertilizer, almost as much as all the other states combined. Much of this expenditure is, of course, to be charged against tobacco culture.