Carolina Piedmont Country

14. Synthesis

C H A P T E R 14 Synthesis The gravel road stretched to the horizon, running due north along the township line. On both sides, aligned in perfect rows like green soldiers, marched tall cornstalks, genetically engineered and thus almost precisely the same size. Black soil, perfectly free of any rocks, anchored the goldentasseled corn, framing the fields with a dark border. On the distant horizon, along low ridges, grain elevators marked the locations of small country towns, strung like beads along railroad lines. Like the cotton Piedmont, southwestern Illinois presents a marked contrast of vivid colors. However, unlike the Upstate, the prairie's pattern consists of different squares, symmetrically organized into sections of contrasting crops, bordered by perfectly aligned roads. As I stood by the lane in the warm, humid afternoon, I thought about the intersection of geography, history, and culture that combine to create distinct regions in the United States. In southwestern Illinois, heavily glaciated during North America's ice ages, no mountains edge the horizon. Instead, above the limestone and loess bluffs of the Mississippi River, extensive prairies lay between long ridges, the remains of glacial moraines. Otherwise the land has been bulldozed flat by the power of prehistoric ice, presenting farmers with ideal plowing conditions. The coal-black soil, partly a by-product of that same glaciation, provides an extremely fertile medium for crops. With distinct growing seasons and severe winters, fields yield valuable crops of corn and soybeans, much of which serve as feed for the region's hog and cattle farmers . Bumper crops are stored in the "prairie skyscrapers" of grain silos, which (along with church steeples) punctuate the skylines of every town in the area. Shipped by rail or road, most agricultural products arrive at another gift of the glaciers, the prairie rivers—flat, muddy internâtes for inexpensive transportation. 219 220 Carolina Piedmont Country The geography of the Upstate offers a distinct contrast to that of southwestern Illinois. Never glaciated, the region's bright orange clays have formed near the Blue Ridge, whosefoothills constitute the Piedmont itself. Generally blocking colder continental weather, the mountains help provide milder winters and a longer growing season. With a different settlement history and less fertile soils, the area succumbed earlier to agricultural disaster , exacerbated by monocrop overproduction of cotton. To help stem disastrous erosion during the Depression, sages advised importing kudzu, too sensitive to northern frosts but which thrived in the Piedmont's hot, humid summers. Above the Fall Line and below the BlueRidge, Piedmont farms remained less accessible to easy transportation until the arrival of railroads and (later) highways. Virtually unsettled frontier until a decade or so after the Revolutionary War, the southwestern Illinois prairie attracted a fewFrench from the Mississippi bottomlands across from St. Louis, many emigrants from the Old Southwest (Kentucky and Tennessee), and also some from eastern communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Surveyedafter President Jefferson's landdivision system in the early iSoos, most farms werebased on township and range lines that ran due east-west and north-south. Thus, many roads in Illinois, particularly the country lanes, follow these land division lines.By the eveof the Civil War,thousands of German immigrants had selected the region for settlement as well. As the home state of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, Illinois remained in the Union; after 1865, most communities erected monuments to local heroes who had fought in the War of the Rebellion. Today, over a century later, the war and its monuments lie overlooked in city cemeteries and in northern memories. The Carolina Piedmont, with Scots-Irish and other Europeans having already eliminated NativeAmericans from the region before American Independence , has a much longer history. As part of the original Thirteen Colonies, the area had been surveyed using the English metes and bounds system, which divided fields on the basis of landmarks rather than mathematical units. Thus, farms and roads take apparently haphazard twists and turns or cut diagonally and directly from one place to another, unbound by imaginary geometric lines. As the home state of Fort Sumter and the first to secede, South Carolina boldly led the others out of the Union, while at Bennett Place in North Carolina Joseph Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman after Appomattox. Following the disasters of the War of Northern Aggression and the equally ruinous Reconstruction, the states raised monuments to their heroes of the "late unpleasantness." Today, as the Confederate battle flag flies from homes and adorns bumper stickers, monuments to "the...