Climatic requirements, furthermore, confined its culture within a strip thirty or forty miles wide along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.

In the first flush of the movement some of the rice fields were converted to cotton;[10] but experience taught the community ere long that the labor expense in the new industry absorbed too much of the gross return for it to displace rice from its primacy in the district.
[Footnote 10: F.A.Michaux, _Travels_, in R.G.Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III, 303.] In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast with those on the seaboard.

These uplands, locally known as the Piedmont, were separated from the tide-water tract by a flat and sandy region, the "pine barrens," a hundred miles or more in breadth, where the soil was generally too light for prosperous agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came into use.

The Piedmont itself is a rolling country, extending without a break from Virginia to Alabama and from the mountains of the Blue Ridge to the line of the lowest falls on the rivers.

The soil of mingled clay and sand was originally covered with rich forest mold.