1 Changes in agriculture
North Carolina farmers grew many of the same crops after the Civil War, but new technology and economic pressures changed the ways they lived and worked. Photo by Martin LaBar.
After the Civil War, new technology began to transform American agriculture, while railroads and the growth of cities opened up new markets for cash crops. But farmers faced new economic pressures, and former slaves and many white farmers found themselves tenants or sharecroppers, facing endless cycles of debt. In this chapter, we’ll consider both improvements in agriculture and the difficulties farmers faced in the late nineteenth century.
- 1.1Life on the land: The Piedmont before industrialization
- 1.2A revolution in agriculture
- 1.3Sharecropping and tenant farming
- 1.4Life on the land: Voices
- 1.5A sharecropper's contract
- 1.6The struggles of a tenant farmer
- 1.7The evils of the crop lien system
- 1.8Tobacco farming the old way
- 1.9The history of the state fair
- 1.10The African American State Fair
