If you ask many of us who live and work in Plant City, where our family roots are, a frequent answer will be Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi.
I recently took a 2,700-mile road trip with my sister through these states and the seven others that make up the southeastern United States. We visited a cousin in Pikeville, Kentucky, who is still practicing medicine at age 86. And we traveled to eastern Louisiana to do some genealogical research on a great-grandfather, who lived and worked there for a few years before the Civil War.
I had never had the chance to see so much of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. In the center of these states runs the Appalachian Mountain chain, and the land close to the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines is fairly flat. This leaves a surprising amount of the South that is made up of rolling hills, called the Piedmont, in some states.
Many of these states have been heavily rural since before the Civil War. There are many more small towns than cities, and most states have only one or two big cities.
By far the greatest land use is agricultural and forestry. Those industries benefitted greatly by the creation of two systems of land-grant colleges after the Civil War, and each of those states has at least one such college to educate farmers and research agricultural efficiency.
Most of those states have invested significant funds to build excellent roads through miles and miles of open land to connect the larger metropolitan areas. Interstate highways connect most of the cities, and where a road is not part of the interstate highway system it is frequently a dual highway.
It was not unusual to drive 30 or 40 miles and see no towns or cities, very few cars and even fewer people. This was even truer for the significant mountainous areas in states like Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, and it was easy to imagine the improvements which those roads provided in travel through those mountainous areas.
These states suffered economically from the Civil War through the lean Depression years. Even in the Roaring ‘20s, when most of the U.S. economy flourished, the agricultural South did not.
I was pleased to see, however, that most of these states and cities have recovered from those lean years and now boast many modern or renovated buildings and good road systems.
That recovery was jump-started during the Depression by federal government projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Natchez Trace Parkway, the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive. A beautiful rural road, the Natchez Trace runs for 444 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. Beginning in the 1820s, Midwestern farmers who had shipped their grain and livestock south on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to sell in New Orleans used it to return to their homes. It contains no commercial development.
Traveling on the Natchez Trace Parkway, we were able to see some of the hydroelectric dams and other improvements constructed in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Those facilities provided the first source of electrical power for many residents of the South and raised their quality of life in a big way.
I have been privileged to travel to Europe four times, but this trip taught me to appreciate the travel opportunities in our own Southeastern United States.
Felix Haynes is a co-owner of the Plant City Times & Observer.