From North Carolina's great orchards there was shipped throughout the working hours of August, 1923, one carload of peaches every four minutes. These fruit gatherers have come over the border from Kentucky for the harvest season.

junction of Moore, Montgomery, and Randolph counties landed us in a wooded section whose homes were so remotely placed that we called its people the backroads folks.

"Jugtown" is their way of describing this as a pottery district. Certainly, the people of the Five Towns are not more individual than those of the Three Counties. Their potter ancestors from Staffordshire, England, settled here in 1750settled with a firmness of resolve apparent in their descendants, who will tell you, "An' we ain't budged sence.'

This refusal to budge is in part due to local deposits of gravel-free clay, for slicing and hand-picking remain their primitive means of preparing it for the kick wheel (see page 487).

Surrounded by their homemade furniture of the pioneer era and living unchanged within the changeless pine woods, they pass the craft on from grandfather to son and grandson.

The potter's prayer is, “Oh Lord, lead our feet out o' the mud and onto the clean clay o' Thy grace!" And when they are laid by their forefathers, it is literally in a "potter's field," whose headstones consist of inverted, cone-shaped jars, turned on the wheel, bearing roughly scratched inscriptions.

THE STATE NO LONGER LACKS A PRESS
AGENT

We regained the main routes and were picked up by another motor coach. Gracious contours, rising from the plain, resolved themselves into vistas of rolling landscape, while the pine-fringed horizon gave way to sky lines broken by mauve mountains, the footstools of the Blue Ridge. And now we crossed a river by cable ferry whose overhead wire supplied motive power from the stream. In fact, we had entered the piedmont, or foothills, country, with its hydroelectric stations and related industries (see pages 520 and 521).

North Carolina is passing through a renaissance. Due to her steadily intensifying shift from cotton fields to mill centers and from once-idle streams to throbbing dynamos, she has suddenly rediscovered herself on the threshold of industrial power.

The legendary North Carolinian who in the 'sixties called his three daughters Rosin, Tar, and Turpentine would to-day be naming them after cigarette brands, furniture trademarks, and cotton-goods patterns.

Charlotte, situated between the big hydroelectric developments along the Catawba and Yadkin rivers, is a plexus of this new industrialism. In the last 25 years the number of textile mills operating within a 100-mile radius of that city has increased fivefold, with a present spindleage of 10,000,000.

Charlotte was one of the first Southern cities to figure at the Nation's birth and one of the last to figure in the passing of the Confederacy. On May 20, 1775, resolutions dissolving political bonds with Great Britain were read from the courthouse steps. And it was at Charlotte, on April 20, 1865, that Jefferson Davis and his cabinet met for the last time.

COMFORT AND HUMOR IN MOTOR-COACH
TRAVEL

By now we were confirmed motor-coach "fans." You break your journey where you will and sight-see for as long as you want, with the comforting knowledge that at almost any hour you can climb on another big coach and continue your journey until, attracted by some passing town, you decide to drop off again.

An hour's ride beyond Charlotte we entered Gastonia, one of the largest textile Of its centers in the United States. 20,000 people, about three-fourths are workers in the 42 mills whose tall stacks cut the sky. Yet, in the town's broad, tree-shaded streets, lined with neat cottages on well-kept, flower-fringed plots, one felt no oppressive sense of concentrated industry, but rather the restfulness of some model suburb, wide-spread to sun, air, and surrounding countryside.

With mill workers' cottages rentable at $3 a month, with water and electric light free, and a mild climate, necessitating little fuel, which is obtainable at cost, it is not uncommon for mountain families to work at Gastonia long enough to pay off their farm mortgage and then return to the Blue Ridge.

Gaston County contains 98 textile mills. which represent one-sixth of the State's

VENERABLE AUNT LYDIA MAKES BASKETS OUT OF OAK SPLITS

The big block is the mortar of black-gum wood on which she grinds her corn into meal. Aunt Lydia, who lives on the Cherokee Indian Reservation, near Cherokee, at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains, also makes Indian ball rackets, for there are two hanging over her head.

INDIAN SCHOOL GIRLS ON NORTH CAROLINA'S CHEROKEE RESERVATION If there is anything in example, these students should excel, for it was Sequoya, a Cherokee mixed-blood, who reduced his tribe's language to 84 written characters, the only syllabary ever invented by a North American Indian for his people. The Big Trees of California (Sequoia gigantea and Sequoia sempervirens) and the Sequoia National Park were named in his honor.