228. Resort cities.—People in Pennsyl vania, the Ohio Valley, Chicago, and many other places in the interior of North America find that the seashore resort they can reach most easily is somewhere along the shore of the North Atlantic Coast Plain. Although Atlantic City is the greatest of them all, there are many other resorts. In fact there is a chain of them along the New Jersey shore, from Cape May at the south to Sandy Hook at the north, and there are seashore towns on Long Island too. On' Cape Cod are thousands of cottages where families go to spend a pleasant summer.
229. A good rainfall.— The sea breeze does not blow far inland. It does not disturb the big cyclones (Secs. 59-70). Since the cyclones come in summer and in winter, the Coastal Plain has rainfall through out the year, and its climate is very well suited to agri culture.
230. Cities for manu facture and trade.—There are but few cities on the North Atlantic Coastal Plain. Other than shore re sorts, the largest cities are near Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the James River. There, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Newport News cluster around one of the finest harbors in the world and have a growing foreign trade. During the World War this harbor was one of the great naval bases for sending supplies to the armies in Europe. Newport News has one of the largest shipyards in the world.
Norfolk is a great trucking center and also a great peanut market, because there are many peanut farms on the neighboring coastal plain.
There is plenty of raw material for the glass industry in some parts of the Coastal Plain, for glass is made of little else but melted sand. At Glassboro and other towns in southern New Jersey, skilful glassblowers make wonderful glass retorts and queer shaped bottles that are used in chemical laboratories. Glass is blown or molded into shape while it is still soft like molasses candy.
Baltimore, at the edge of the Coastal Plain, is much larger than any city on the plain. It is a distributing center for supplies which are carried out by many small steamboats and sail boats. It also has ship
yards, iron furnaces, steel mills, and many factories. Its furnaces are supplied with coal from Penn sylvania. Some of the iron ore comes from Cuba.
231. The future of the North Atlantic Coast Plain.
—The possible future of this sandy land is indicated by a garden made on sandy Cape Cod by a college pro fessor of botany. When he first started to make it, the neighbors told him that the soil was so sandy that he could not make a garden 1-11JIV there. But the professor kept on planting. Then the people shook their heads and told one another what a stupid man he was, because no one could make a garden in such sand. But for two years his garden had big, strong, green potato plants, and fine corn. Then you may be sure the neighbors came around and asked him how he did it. This is how it happened. The professor had found out from old books how the Indians raised corn there. He learned that they dug trenches in the light sand, and in the bottom of each they put a layer of seaweed from the beach and a fish for each hill of corn. Then they put back the sand, and planted corn. The professor used seaweed and dried sheep manure. The rotting seaweed not only holds moisture, but it helps to furnish phosphorus, potash, and nitrogen, the things that plants get from a complete fertilizer. By some what similar treatment, that of plowing under green crops, millions of sandy acres may be made to produce crops where now there is only a poor, burnt forest or a swamp.
232. A land for meat and truck crop yields so much per acre that a small part of the Coastal Plain can grow all tne vegetables which the neighboring city markets will take in a season. From our study of Florida (Sec. 31) and the Cotton Belt (Sec. 43), how do you think this region might become a land of meat and milk? The climate of this plain is so good that it is a pity for men to let any of the land remain covered with only poor pine trees. The swamps that now raise so many mosquitoes should be drained and turned into fields.