The Montgomery and Selma division opens up to her the rich agricultural districts of West Alabama and Mississippi, giving her a valuable trade.
The Montgomery and Eufaula Railroad, runs southeast from Montgomery, through rich, black prairie lands to Eufaula, where it connects with steamers on the Chattahoochee river. This road is a part of the Georgia Central system, and forms a direct line from Montgomery to Savannah. It offers unsurpassed facilities to Montgomery shippers, giving through bills of lading over its own rail and steamship lines, to New York and Europe. It is the most popular through route from the West to all Florida resorts.
The Florida and Northwest Railroad is being built south from Montgomery, and is now running fifty miles through a rich agricultural section to Luvern. From Luvern it will pass through the finest timber belt in the country, to some point on the Chattahoochee river. While this road will be a great feeder to Montgomery, it will also form the most direct route to Florida. Its extension from Montgomery, northwest to Maplesville, is generally conceded, where it will connect with the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia system, that great artery of commerce, that stretches its arms of steel from the Atlantic to the lakes, and from the mountains of Virginia to the plains of Texas. This system now enters Montgomery over the track of the Louisville and Nashville road.
The above is but a meager statement of Montgomery’s transportation facilities.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Our public schools consist of the Boys’ High School, the Girls’ High School, the Capital Hill Grammar School and the Sayre Street Grammar School for white children, and Swayne College and Cemetery Hill School for colored children.
There are employed in the white schools, twenty-six regular teachers and one supernumerary, and in the colored schools, ten teachers.