Sublime

The cotton gin ramped up what had been a dying institution. Eli Whitney, a New Englander staying at the Mulberry Grove Plantation in Savannah, had tried and tried, and quit, disillusioned. Then Black people, slaves, helped him identify the problems with the gin and refined the process of technologizing agricultural society, to their great

I kept comparing the rocks and the sky with what we have down South and kind of gloating to think that the South, though lacking in chamber-of-commerce promotion, has the subtlest colors and teasingest smells a man could want. Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it’s as if all the colors in the ground are

the veil lifted. Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack? Page introduced Stiles to John D. Rockefeller’s aide, who arranged for the oil baron to give a million dollars to deworm the South. This was an early venture by Rockefeller into philanthropy, which would

“I feel greatly saddened by this business. It has revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for this generation.”

The largest farm was Colonia Florida,

There had been almost no railroad construction in Florida since the end of the Civil War. The aftermath of the conflict had sent most of the operators into bankruptcy and the ensuing litigation had tied up much of the state-owned right-of-way in court battles. The lines that did exist had been built without regulation and with no regard for