Manufacturing Moved South, Then Moved Out

The Southern U.S. was, for the first century of the nation’s existence, a bunch of farms. It was a bunch of farms before then, too, but so was the North. After independence, though, manufacturing began to take off north of the Mason-Dixon line, while the states south of it stuck with agriculture and slavery. The Civil War ended the slavery. And finally, in the 1880s, “New South” boosters such as Atlanta’s Henry W. Grady began pushing the region to shift its focus from crops to industry.

It was a long, strange process. In the early days, wrote University of Georgia historian James C. Cobb, Southern recruiters targeted “mobile, footloose industries that required little more than a roof and a cheap work force to put under it in order to begin operation.”1444244298634 Another nice quote from the same source: “The South took on the role of health spa for manufacturing industries in their declining years.”