269. Smaller Piedmont cities. —The inland Pied mont cities, having no im portant minerals near them, and no access to ships, are all smaller than Richmond, Wilmington, or Trenton. The largest is Lancaster, Penn sylvania, situated in the center of a rich limestone district which is the best culti vated agricultural section in the whole Piedmont. Lancaster has many factories, and books and magazines are printed in her printing shops for the publishing houses in New York and other cities.
York, Pennsylvania; Frederick, Maryland; and Charlottesville, Virginia, are in the midst of good fanning country. Each has many stores, some factories, and two or three railroads. Charlottesville is an impor tant shipping center for apples. It was there that Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia.
The Piedmont towns of Lynchburg and Danville, Virginia; Durham and Winston Salem, North Carolina, are busy with to bacco that is grown near by. Cotton mills and furniture factories have grown up very rapidly in Greensboro, High Point, and other Piedmont towns.
270. Future—manufacturing and water power.—In the early days there were many little grist mills, saw mills, and woolen mills on the small creeks of the Piedmont. At best these little mills did not have much power, and sometimes they could only run an hour or two a day, or per haps they had to stop en tirely because there was so little water in the streams.
The little mills are now gone. Their work is done in other regions (Sec. 99) or in the larger towns, where the mills have coal-driven engines. Since coal is get ting so costly, and engineers have learned to harness the big rivers and carry power on wires, the Pied mont has a new source of power. Every river that crosses the Piedmont may be made to send power to cities many miles away. Name some of these rivers. Balti more now gets power from the Susquehanna River and the Southern Power Co. (Fig. 234) is already the second largest hydro electric power maker in the world.
271. The future—agriculture.—The roll ing hills of the Piedmont are beautiful and the climate is healthful. If the fertile hillside soils could be held in place by grass and the roots of fruit and nut trees, and if the level uplands and valley lands were intensively cul tivated, this district could comfortably sup port many more people than now live there (Sec. 87). In some places the soil-saving tree crop agriculture has been started by the grow ing of apples in grass-covered unplowed land.