Jack made an astute observation below. I abstracted the two Whitfield Collections last week at UNC-CH and one of the letters written from Ms back to NC makes it clear the land in Ms was far superior to that in NC and all the relatives were encouraged to go south. Obviously the Whitfields did well in Ms and Ala - extremely well. Martha >Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 09:34:47 -0600 >From: "Jack D. Elliott, Jr." <jde3@ra.msstate.edu> >Reply-To: jde3@ra.msstate.edu >X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [en] (Win95; U) >To: Martha Marble <mmarble@erols.com> >CC: Ruth Fentress <ruthbf@erols.com> >Subject: Re: Allen Carr, & Westbrooks > >The second trend is for these NC folks to gravitate toward the best >farmland. In the MS/AL area they really gravitated toward the Black >Prairie which was some of the best farmland in the two states. All of >the counties that we discussed in the two states are partially in the >Black Prairie: Greene AL, Marengo AL, Pickens AL, Noxubee MS, Lowndes >MS, Oktibbeha MS, Monore MS,Chickasaw MS. > >Jack >