For a hundred years a settlement has existed there, but it was not until the people discovered the wealth of the turpentine forests and of the sea-island cotton industry that the town became highly prosperous. Since 1890 it has doubled in population every five years, having in 1904 some 2,500 people. Most of the town is newly built. A fine, new court-house stands in the city square, and there are new churches, a large, new academy, a new water-works system and telephones, electric lights, rural free delivery--everywhere the signs of improvement and progress. It is distinctly a town of the New South, developed almost exclusively by the energy of Southerners and with Southern money. Its population is pure American, mostly of old Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia stock. Fully 70 per cent. of the inhabitants are church members--Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists--and the town has not had a saloon in twenty-five years and rarely has a case of drunkenness. There are no beggars and practically no tramps. A poorhouse, built several years ago, had to be sold because no one would go to it. The farms are small, for the most part, and owned by the farmers themselves; only 8 per cent. of them are mortgaged. There are schools for both white and coloured children, though the school year is short and education not compulsory. In short, this is a healthy, temperate, progressive American town--a country city, self-respecting, ambitious, with a good future before it--the future of the New South. _Character of the Negro Population_ About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes. Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of Negroes--as distinct as the classes of white men. The first of these is the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large proportion of the Negroes are of this better class. On the other hand, one finds everywhere many of the so-called "worthless Negroes," perhaps a growing class, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly with the poorer class of white people, whom they often meet as industrial competitors. _Danger from the Floating Negro_