Late 19^th century urbanization

The immediate impetus for the first phase of urbanization was the rapid and widespread expansion of general stores after the Civil War.

While some general stores had grown up at junctions on Southern railroads in the 1850s, the clientele and impact of those stores remained small. Slaves could buy nothing, and small farmers, who spent most of their energy for their household or local market, had little currency and little need for credit … The situation changed rapidly after emancipation with the rapid emergence of country stores in the late 1860s and 1870s. National laws written during the Civil War put most banks in the North and left stores to dispense the vast majority of credit [something which Southern farmers desperately needed because of the devastation of the war], with unplanted crops [serving] as collateral (Ayers 1992: 13).

The general store, then, served as the link between Northern bankers and Southern farmers and over the course of the last quarter of the 19^th and early part of the 20^th centuries “increasingly stood at the center of the rural economy” (Ayers 1992: 86). As a result of their importance to the rural economy, the growth in the number of stores during the last quarter of the 19^th century was stunning: “by the turn of the century, the South contained 150,653 stores” (Ayers 1992: 81).

General stores not only played an essential role in the post-bellum Southern economy, but they also formed the nucleus of an emerging urban system in the South. Because stores also supplied furnishings for an increasingly less self-sufficient farm population, loose clusterings of houses frequently grew up near them. With the construction of cotton gins, churches, schools, and railroads, these loose clusters often grew into the villages (settled places with populations under 2,500) that began to dot the Southern countryside after 1880. Some of these further evolved into towns (settled places with populations greater than 2,500 – the U. S. Census Bureau’s definition of an urban area) and thus formed the first phase of urbanization in the South. The growth in the number of villages and towns was as stunning as the growth in the number of stores was: “the number of villages doubled between 1870 and 1880 and then doubled again by 1900 (Ayers 1992: 20). Literally “thousands of villages came into existence during the last quarter of the 19^th century, and (as figure 1 shows), hundreds more passed over the line into official ‘urban’ status …” (Ayers 1992:55).

The end result of the rapid growth of villages and towns was a widespread redistribution of the Southern population. At the beginning of the Civil War only 10% of the Southern population lived in urban areas, and most of them were concentrated in only 22 cities and towns (four with populations greater than 25,000 and 18 with populations between 5,000 and 25,000). As late as 1880 urban residents represented only 12% of the Southern population, but after 1880 the urban and village population of the South expanded rapidly.

The village and town population of the South grew by more than five million people between 1880 and 1910. The growth came fastest in the 1880s, slowed in the 1890s, and then accelerated again in the first decade of the new century. Villages … accounted for about a quarter of that increase. In 1900, about one of every six Southerners – in some regions, one of every four – nlived in a village or town (Ayers 1992: 55).

Drawn largely from the surrounding countryside, the urban population of the South (the population living in communities of at least 2,500) reached 18% in 1900 and stood at 37% in 1940.

Two other factors were important in the first phase of urbanization in the South. First, even as the number of villages and towns grew as a consequence of the development of general stores, the emergence of the textile, lumber, tobacco, and mining industries provided the South with an incipient industrial base and an impetus for further urban growth. The incipient industrial base was especially important in the development of larger towns and cities. As a result, by 1910 the South included 33 cities with populations greater than 25,000 and 140 towns with populations greater than 5,000.

Second, the rapid expansion of the rail system paralleled the growth in the number of villages and towns and provided a mechanism that linked the entire urban network in the South. The parallel growth of the rail system meant that “from their very beginning, the villages, towns, and cities of the New South worked as parts of complicated and interdependent networks” (Ayers 1992: 20). This interconnected grid of population clusters stood in stark contrast to the self-sufficient, isolated farms and plantations of the antebellum South.