When these lands were taken into cultivation little or no attention was paid to the direction of the furrows and rows of corn and cotton; most commonly the plowing was done “up-hill and down,” so that the “dead-furrow” afforded a ready opportunity for the formation of washes cutting into the subsoil, during the torrential rains sometimes falling during the summers. Even when filled with soil by plowing, these washes would frequently re-open during rains, shedding the soil in a muddy flood upon the lower lands. The washing-away of the surface soil, thus brought about, of course diminished the production of the higher lands, which were then commonly “turned out” and left without cultivation or care of any kind. The crusted surface shed the rain water into the old furrows, and the latter were quickly deepened and widened into gullies—“red washes”—whose presence rendered any resumption of cultivation difficult. In the course of a few years the soil-stratum of brown loam was penetrated into the loose or loosely cemented sand which underlies it almost everywhere, and is very readily washed away. Soon the water, gaining yearly in volume, undercut the loam stratum so as to cause it to “cave” into gullies in huge masses, which with the sand were carried into the valleys adjacent, filling the beds of the streams so as to cause their flow to disappear under the flood of sand. As the evil progressed, large areas of uplands were denuded completely of their loam or culture stratum, leaving nothing but bare, arid sand, wholly useless for cultivation; while the valleys were little better, the native vegetation having been destroyed and only hardy weeds finding nourishment on the sandy surface. [Illustration: FIG. 40a.—Erosion in Mississippi Table Lands, causing destruction of agricultural value both of Uplands and Valleys. (McGee, 12th Ann. Rept. U. S. G. S., 1890-91.)] In this manner whole sections, and in some portions of the State whole townships of the best class of uplands have been transformed into sandy wastes, hardly reclaimable by any ordinary means, and wholly changing the industrial conditions of entire counties; whose county seats even in some instances had to be changed, the old town and site having, by the same destructive agencies, literally “gone down hill.” This destruction of lands was greatly aggravated by the civil war, during which, and for some time after, large areas of lands once under cultivation were left to the mercy of the elements.