buy Ivermectin for humans I drove out of Atlanta this morning. The Atlanta suburbs peter out around the latitude of Fayetteville, twenty-five miles to the south, although there are scattered housing developments among the pine trees for another fifteen miles. Around Zebulon I was in the countryside; there were scattered farms and fields. But for the most part I found miles of pine trees, all young, reclaiming old fields or old clear-cuts. Clearcutting is still the dominant mode of timber harvesting in this area, to judge by the fact that almost all the woodlots in the area had trees of the same age. Many were recently cut, and I passed at least half a dozen trucks bearing timber north on the road from Thomaston.
buy prednisone india I stopped in both Thomaston and Butler to get myself a drink, but was unable to do so. Each town had about fifty or so storefronts, but the majority were closed and about a third were completely empty. In neither town was there a coffee shop, luncheonette, pizzeria, deli or other place to get a coffee or soda (and I did not patronize the gas stations, which probably offered something like this). The general feel was of decay. A few shops had signs in Spanish.
Thomaston and Butler had a layout common in Southern towns: a series of shops gather around a fairly large central square, in the center of which is the courthouse. It was standard even by 1840 or so; Appomattox features this pattern in miniature. I would imagine that there are northern towns which feature this pattern but I cannot think of any offhand. It appears to have grown out of the fact that Southern life centered on the plantation more than the town, which was reserved for legal business and specialty shops. The absence of churches on the town square is especially striking. The law is the center of the society.
Thomaston, Butler, and the next town (Ellaville) had almost identical Civil War monuments, which probably indicate some form of mass production.
Around Ellaville the land changed. The pine trees gave way to green fields and pecan orchards. I stopped off at a roadside stand to buy some fresh pecans, which I’m eating as I write this. Talk about fresh – you can almost taste the chlorophyll still in them. And they are large and almost juicy. The man I bought them from, a soft-spoken older black man, called them “fruits” and you can taste why. I mentioned to him that I noticed the pecan trees beginning about fifteen miles north of his stand, and he nodded in agreement, as if I had noticed something obvious and well-known.
Well, it ends up that I had seen in the landscape a fairly important geological shift. I had entered real cotton country, the rich soil deposits (with black soil, not red) which mark the boundaries of a late Cretaceous coastline. This part of the country got some attention after the presidential election. The Cretaceous coastal deposits led to rich soil; the rich soil led to intensive farming; the intensive farming led to large slave populations; the large slave populations led to large numbers of African-Americans; the large numbers of African-Americans led to impressive results in these areas for Barack Obama. The full story, with maps, is here.
I am spending the night in Americus, a pretty little Victorian town whose quondam prosperity is evident. It’s still doing nicely today, too. It’s where Habitat for Humanity was started and where its headquarters are located today.
Post a Comment