Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/40

 middle classes in the ante-bellum Southern towns, and this would necessarily carry us very far afield. Perhaps the best way to break the train of these suggestions and reflections is to ask the reader whether he would ever have thought it possible for a German immigrant to become a day-laborer in a Southern town, to save enough money in six years to build an important bridge and wharf, to found a town of his own which soon became a flourishing cotton market and actually, as its leading personage, to enter into quasi-diplomatic relations with the government of Hamburg, Germany! Yet all this actually happened in the "unprogressive" ante-bellum South. The man's name was Henry Schultz; the town in which he made his fortune, and, sad to relate, subsequently lost it, was Augusta, Georgia; the town he founded was Hamburg, South Carolina, which it must be confessed has not become a metropolis and is chiefly known in connection with certain important riots.