CHAPTER VIII.----Agriculture.

From the foundation of the colony, South Carolina has been an agricultural State, the population engaging in the growing of cotton, rice, corn and tobacco principally. Indigo was in the early days a staple crop, and of late years tobacco and trucking have become leading crops, though cotton and corn are still the chief staple crops. Agriculture was supreme in the State until the coming of the marvelous development of the cotton manufacturing industry, and as this volume is being prepared it is a close contest between these two great industries in the matter of the value of annual production-agriculture, however, having the advantage that its competitor is dependent upon its maintenance and ever-increasing development. Though cotton manufactured products had exceeded in value the agricultural products in 1905 by $3,000,000, in 1907 the values were almost balanced. Agriculture has not developed with the phenomenal rapidity of the

cotton manufacturing industry, but in the last few years there has been a general and substantial revival of interest, and the trucking branch of the industry has developed with remarkable speed. The immediate future is full of promise to the honest and ambitious tiller of the soil.

Climatic, soil and shipping conditions are ideal for yielding large returns from intensive and diversified modes of agriculture, and all indications point to the dawn of a new era in the agricultural history of the State. After scourge of civil war had passed, the people of this State-distinctly an agricultural peoplewere forced to face, with empty purses, entirely new social and economic conditions, and it has taken some decades for them to adapt themselves to the new conditions.

A SUMMARY of Actual aND ESTIMATED Values of Agriculture and

cultural products

68,266,912

76,721,789

10.8 78,412,764 14.8

Farm Life More Attractive.-The tendency has been for two decades for the farmer's son to leave the farm for the city, and for the farmer to turn his farm over to negro renters, tenants or share-croppers. This has gone on until the agricultural industry, particularly during the period of the rapid development of cotton manufacturing, has been left almost entirely to the inferior race. But with the increase of manufacturing population the opportunity for the ambitious young man to rise higher than an operative without a bitter struggle gradually decreased. The glamour of greater variety in social life in the city died in the full realization of what a clerkship in an office or a store meant at a salary insufficient almost for board and lodging.

The people in the cities became so numerous and the people on the farms so few that there was created a great demand for vegetable, fruit, poultry, dairy

⚫Estimated.