time, upon the ever-changing display of beauty. “This,” said my friend, interrupting the silence, “is all very impressive. No one, whose feelings have any communion with nature, can escape the charm of these bold precipices, robed with vines, and crowned with golden forest. These curves are the materialization of beauty. That surging, dashing, foaming, torrent, gradually eroding its channel deeper into the adamantine granite, is a grand demonstration of the superiority of force over matter. The great drawback to this valley is its poverty of useful productions. Western North Carolina, it strikes me, may be compared to a great picture or poem; we never fail to derive pleasure from it, yet there is nothing in it to make money out of, or even to furnish a respectable living. While the scenery here is all that can possibly be desired, and the climate is almost perfect, this country can never be anything more than it is now, except, perhaps, in the number and size of its summer hotels. It hasn’t the resources.”
“What is the extent of your knowledge of this country?” I inquired.
“Oh, merely what I’ve seen from the railroad line, but I suppose it’s pretty much all alike.”
My friend was mistaken, in supposing that the wealth of the Southern Alleghanies consists wholly in scenery and climate. He was also mistaken in supposing that railroad views had afforded him any considerable knowledge of the country.
Madison county, back of the river bluffs, is almost wholly a succession of hills, coves and narrow valleys, nine-tenths of it timbered with a heavy growth of hard and soft woods. The slopes are remarkable for fertility, there being small particles of lime percolated through the soil. The cultivated grasses grow rank, and the cereals yield satisfactory harvests. But owing to the limited area of the valleys, and the almost entire absence of level land, ordinary farming can never be carried on in Madison with remunerative results. Too much labor is required to cultivate an acre of the slopes for the ordinary return in wheat or corn. It is in tobacco that the Madison county farmer has found his Eldorado. I know of no industry which offers so much inducement to the poor laborer as the cultivation of this crop. There is no staple product which derives its value so exclusively from labor, or yields to that labor a larger return. A few figures will serve to illustrate. Uncleared land can be purchased at an average price of $3 per acre, in small tracts. About one-third of the purchase will be found adapted to tobacco, making the cost of tillable land $9 an acre. Basing our estimates upon the production of the last three years, a yield of $200 from each acre planted may be expected. In addition to such other small crops as are needed to yield food for his family, an industrious man and two small boys can clear, prepare the soil, and cultivate four and one-half acres a year, which, if properly cured, will bring in the market $900—money enough to pay for three hundred acres of land.
The sunny slopes are considered by planters best adapted to the crop. Sand and gravel is the needed composition of soil, and a forest growth of white pine indicates auspicious conditions. The east side of the French Broad has been found to have more good tobacco land than the west, but the ratio we have given is not too great for either side. The crop leaves the soil in excellent condition for wheat and grass after four years’ cultivation, though at the present prices of land, planters would find it economical to sow in wheat and seed to grass after two years’ cultivation in tobacco. The gross aggregate of the crop of 1882 in Madison county will probably be $250,000. W. W. Rollins, of Marshall, is extensively engaged in the business, the number of his tenant families being about sixty.
Up the river, into Buncombe county, the valleys widen, and the acreage of comparatively level land increases; the settlement becomes denser, and the proportion of cleared land to native forest, is greater than in any county west of the Blue Ridge.
The valleys of Hominy creek, Swannanoa, and Upper French Broad, contain several thousand acres which could be cultivated with improved machinery. The soil is of average fertility—well adapted to the cereals, grasses and tobacco—but in many localities its capacity has been lowered by use and abuse. Some valleys, naturally fertile, are almost wholly exhausted. There has been, however, marked improvement, both in farming methods and farming machinery, within the last five years.
Above Buncombe, in the French Broad valley, are Henderson and Transylvania counties, embraced within high mountain chains, and formed of a basin-like territory, which bears some evidence of having once been a lake. It is a surprise, to most people, to find, within a few miles of the crest of the Blue Ridge, a marsh of such extent as exists in Henderson county.
The French Broad changes its character at Asheville, below which place it is a torrent, and above a placid, almost immobile stream, rising to the slightly higher altitude of the upper valley, in terraces, rather than by gradual ascent. Its shallow channel is bordered by alluvial bottoms—deposits carried from the mountain slopes—varying in width from a few rods to five miles, making, with a background of mountains rising massively in the distance, a landscape of surpassing beauty. A conservative estimate places the number of acres of first bottom land along the upper valley of the French Broad and its tributaries at 20,000, and twice that number of acres could be cultivated with sulky plows and harvested with self-binding reapers. Cane creek, followed by the Henderson and Buncombe county line, drains considerable low land—at places near its mouth almost marshy. On the opposite side of the French Broad there is a wide expanse of alluvial land, cut by Mill’s river, and extending for a distance of two miles up that stream, where the valley becomes second bottom and slope.