Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/22

8 warm-temperate productions, to the high levels of the Blue ridge, the Valley, Appalachia and Trans-Appalachia, where are broad areas over 4,000 feet above the sea level, and to the still higher ridges of the southwestern Blue ridge and of western Appalachia, where flourish the pines, the balsams and the larches of the cool-temperate regions of the United States. Her high mountain chains intercept and turn aside the great storm waves of the northwest, but taking from them their moisture, while they intercept the vapor-laden winds from the ocean on the southeast, and from them draw tribute of a larger precipitation. As a whole, it is a State with perennial rains, long growing seasons, and a climate of means rather than of extremes.

Her adaptation to productions, both animal and vegetable, are great and varied. Of the 31,117,036 acres of her land embraced in farms, in 1860, 11,437,821 acres were improved, and 19,679,215 acres were unimproved, leaving an area of over 13,000,000 acres not included in farms, which was mostly embraced in the great patents, embracing much of the Appalachian regions, which were covered with original forests. The cash value of the land embraced in farms at that time was $371,761,661. Of the other States, only New York, Illinois and Ohio had more acres of land under cultivation, and none but Texas had more unimproved land embraced in farm boundaries. Virginia ranked fifth in the cash value of her farms, being only exceeded by Illinois, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Her agricultural productions embraced all the cereals, tubers, pulse, grass and grass seeds of the temperate region, to which were added great quantities of tobacco, considerable cotton and hemp, a large amount of sweet potatoes, the products of the warm-temperate regions, besides all temperate fruits in profusion. She ranked among the leading States of the Union in the production of all the great staples of the country except the rice, cotton and sugar of the far South. She was the leading State in the production of tobacco, and ranked fifth in that of wheat and sixth in Indian corn and oats. Virginia ranked high also in the numbers and quality of her domestic animals, her breeds of all which were among the best in the whole country.

The people of Virginia were of almost unmixed nativity, the foreign-born of her population in 1860 being but