National Affairs: THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH

In the four-page supplement which follows, TIME pictures four significant aspects of the South’s fast-growing industrial economy: a booming industrial district, a modern port, a multimillion-dollar plant based on the natural resources of the area, and a mighty flood-control and hydroelectric project which will turn new factory wheels and light new homes. These pictures are typical of the industrial development that is going on throughout the region.

Accompanying the pictures is a map based on data compiled by the Southern Association of Science and Industry, which has just finished the first comprehensive survey ever made of Southern industry. The symbols on the map denote areas in which there are at least three $1,000,000 manufacturing plants or one $10,000,000 plant, the sizes of the symbols indicating the relative value of each area’s plants. In addition to the major industries shown on this eleven-state map, the South is dotted with important food processing plants; seafood canning is big business in New Orleans, Mobile and Brunswick, Ga., as is meat and fruit packing in Jacksonville, poultry freezing in Gainesville, Ga., sugar refining in New Orleans, Louisville and Savannah.

Elsewhere, in small local factories and big metropolitan plants (many of them outside the scope of TIME’S map), such traditional Southern agricultural products as cotton, rice, tobacco and peanuts play a leading role in the new industrial economy. Similarly responsible for much of the recent manufacturing expansion (and directly related to the industrial areas on the map) are the South’s natural-resource riches: iron ore and coal in Alabama and Kentucky, natural gas and oil along the Gulf Coast, Georgia’s and South Carolina’s clay, North Carolina’s mica and feldspar, Louisiana’s sulphur, bauxite in Arkansas, Georgia and Alabama, phosphate rock in Tennessee and Florida, commercial forest land in all eleven states.