"These settlers brought with them a large degree of knowledge and skill in manufacturing. All along the Piedmont and even in the mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, they not only followed agriculture, but developed varied household manufactures in the period between 1750 and 1800.... In 1800 many charcoal blast furnaces making pig iron and many catlin forges and rolling mills making wrought iron bars, and other products of iron, indicate that a manufacturing development throughout the Piedmont region of the South might have continued parallel with that which has taken place in Pennsylvania, except for the circumstances of the combined influence of the invention of the cotton gin, the institution of slavery, and the checking of this immigration. As late as 1810 the manufactured products of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia exceeded in variety and value those of the entire New England States. By Whitney's invention, and its improvement by Holmes, cotton planting became so profitable, that for a period of forty years the price remained above twenty-five cents a pound. Factories were abandoned, the owners going into the production of cotton with slave labor. Some of the factory workers ... went into a precarious agriculture. The factory workers and small farmers were largely ... located on the mountain sides, and the development of cotton production with slave labor tended further to separate this democracy from the white race aristocracy of the low country. As cotton and slavery advanced, the population of free white work people were driven farther and farther into the mountain country, and thus many of the white industrial workers of 1800 became the poor mountain farmers of 1850.... the owners of factories who operated with free white labor in 1800 had become in 1850 the cotton planters operating with black slave labor.... when the abolition of slavery removed one great difficulty of industries and the white people who had formerly deserted manufacturers for agriculture went back to the pursuits of their fathers, these mountaineers formed the labor supply.... it was found that the descendants of the industrial workers of 1800 could, with a little training, do as good work as their forbears did."[2]