The Florida and Northwest Railroad is being built south from Montgomery, and is now running fifty miles through a rich agricultural section to Luvern. From Luvern it will pass through the finest timber belt in the country, to some point on the Chattahoochee river. While this road will be a great feeder to Montgomery, it will also form the most direct route to Florida. Its extension from Montgomery, northwest to Maplesville, is generally conceded, where it will connect with the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia system, that great artery of commerce, that stretches its arms of steel from the Atlantic to the lakes, and from the mountains of Virginia to the plains of Texas. This system now enters Montgomery over the track of the Louisville and Nashville road. The above is but a meager statement of Montgomery's transportation facilities. [Illustration: Residence of Judge D. Clopton] PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Our public schools consist of the Boys' High School, the Girls' High School, the Capital Hill Grammar School and the Sayre Street Grammar School for white children, and Swayne College and Cemetery Hill School for colored children. There are employed in the white schools, twenty-six regular teachers and one supernumerary, and in the colored schools, ten teachers. There has been an attendance during this year of about nine hundred and fifty white children, a larger number than ever before, and about four hundred and fifty colored children. The expenditures for the session 1887-8 have been about twenty-three thousand dollars, besides about four thousand dollars for buildings and repairs. The income of the schools is derived from an annual appropriation by the city, an annual appropriation from the State, regulated by the number of school children in this school district, and from the poll tax collected from the citizens in this district. The schools are in a flourishing condition. The Superintendent is a competent, painstaking gentleman, and his assistants are for the most part well adapted and fitted to be his coadjutors in the good work. [Illustration: Residence of A. A. Wiley] The schools begin on the first Monday in October and end on the last Thursday in May, thus having an eight months' session. The children within the district who are able to pay it, are required to pay a fee of two dollars per session of eight months; those who are unable to pay this fee are admitted free. The students in the Boys' High School and in the highest class of the Girls' High School pay a fee of ten dollars per session of eight months, if able to do so. We have every prospect of continued prosperity in the schools. [Illustration: Moses Building] [Illustration: The Adams Cotton Mill OFFICERS ADAMS COTTON MILL: J. R. ADAMS, PRESIDENT; J. B. SHERROD, SECRETARY AND TREASURER; W. L. DOLPHYN, SUPERINTENDENT. CAPACITY 5000 SPINDLES AND 150 LOOMS.] [Illustration: Noble Boykin & Clopton Bldg.] [Illustration: Hobbie Building] [Illustration: Griel Building]