Pawtucket being the pioneer cotton manufacturing place in the North, Providence, which had come to virtually absorb the smaller city, took a great interest in the new mills of the South after the Civil War. A Providence mechanical engineer designed the mills and machinery for some of the most successful plants, and that its men were thinking of setting up mills of their own in the South is evidenced by the visit of Mr. Boyd to Georgia in 1881, when on behalf of New England capitalists he prospected the State for the best location for a large cotton factory.[237] A little later it was given as common knowledge that several of the largest manufacturing firms of Manchester, England, had secured sites for mills in the Southern States.[238] A London correspondent of the New York World remarked a clear disposition of English capital to seek investment in Southern manufactures.[239] The railroads, both the minor lines connecting individual points, and the great systems penetrating the South in this period, were influential in fostering and inaugurating manufactures. The little railroads helped the mills by affording transportation facilities and by making the inland water powers accessible, but the big ones could lend money and did of course make it their business to encourage manufacturing along their lines. President Baldwin, of the Louisville and Nashville, distinguished three ways in which the railroads assisted the sections by aiding mills in reach of their tracks, by uniting the parts of the country, and by affording a strong commercial backbone.[240] Hon. Gabriel Gannon urged the claims of railroads upon South Carolina as bringing capital to the Southern field; he attributed the erection of a mill with $500,000 capital largely to the railroad connections of Spartanburg.[241] An article already referred to said of the railroads in their bearing upon manufactures: "The railroad syndicates are of necessity interested in the general growth of the country through which the lines run, and will spare no pains to bring in immigrants and to encourage the opening of mines and the establishment of factories." In the majority of instances, Northern capitalists subscribed to the stock of Southern mills after a considerable proportion of the shares had been taken at the South. Similarly, a very usual juncture for the investment of Northern capital was a projected enlargement of a plant, machinery manufacturers taking stock in payment for equipment. Thus the Rock Hill Cotton Factory, the $100,000 capital stock of which was owned in Rock Hill and Charleston, South Carolina, in doubling the capital secured a large part of the additional $100,000 at the North.[242]