This cotton exhibit was sufficiently gratifying, yet the post-bellum crops might have been far larger had not much energy at the South been happily diverted into manufacturing channels. This was one of the most hopeful features of the New South. Nearly every department of industry in this kind was now pushed there at many points. Nashville became a great manufacturing and commercial city. It boasted one of the largest foundries in the country, and several flourishing cotton factories. Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Anniston were all thrifty with iron and steel industries, which rivalled the most prosperous ones at the North; nor were there wanting those who predicted that the region of those cities, viz., Southern Tennessee with Northern Georgia and Alabama, was speedily to become the centre of iron and steel production for the world. The lumber trade of Chattanooga, particularly in the white woods, was said to be second only to Chicago's. The city also had a tannery believed to be the largest in the world, and more than one fully appointed Bessemer steel manufactory. These steel works and the tannery employed colored operatives almost alone, many of these exceedingly skilful. Birmingham was entirely a creation of the days since the war, yet it had in 1890 more than 26,000 inhabitants against 3,000 in 1880, and enjoyed marvellous prosperity, hindered only by speculation in land. Much of the marble in the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia was finer than any elsewhere to be found in this country. The block of it which was forwarded from Alabama for the Washington monument, experts condemned for the purpose as certainly Italian, nor was it permitted a place in that structure till the Governor of the State and the Members of Congress therefrom had certified upon honor, and the quarry-masters made affidavit, that it came out of the Alabama hills. Atlanta had risen from the ashes in which the war left it, to be a city of over 65,000 people, with every manifestation of great industrial life and progress. Between 1870 and 1880, although the population of Mobile decreased, that of Charleston rose about 1-1/5 per cent., that of Savannah about 5-1/4 per cent., that of New Orleans about thirteen per cent., that of Richmond about twenty-six per cent. Between 1880 and 1890 Mobile advanced about 6-1/2 per cent., Charleston almost 10 per cent., Savannah over 40 per cent., New Orleans over 12 per cent., and Richmond exactly 28 per cent.