In a recent column, I briefly examined the national and ethnic origins of people who settled the rural South. In addition to those from the British isles, there were many from Africa, France, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and descendants of the Vikings from various countries. Some came to escape religious persecution and all came to the beacon call of land and opportunity. The ensuing cultural mix was an early American melting pot.

Although it is easy to find families here who arrived more than two centuries ago and longer, some of their kin and others have left the region. Sometimes they departed in significant numbers.

Many never settled for more than a generation before following the moving frontier south and west as Native Americans were pushed off the land. The Civil War took the lives of young farmers, left farms without food or draft animals to work the land. The result was a new exodus to the west.

Some of those who remained had large land holdings, but they also had large families and divided the land among their children. A thousand acres of land – only part of it crop land – divided among 10 children, yields farms too small to sustain a living. By the dawn of the 20th century, some were moving west to the last frontier or to the cities of the new urban era. 

The building of railroads had paved the way for brief periods of local prosperity based on lumber and naval stores. Farmers whose soil was good for growing Sea Island cotton held their own and those who grew the more productive short-staple cotton in the Piedmont continued to do well.

Then came migrants from the west that upended the economy of rural Georgia. Boll weevils! First detected in Georgia in 1915, they overran the state by 1919. They ate bolls and flowers, devastating the yield. They were attacked with molasses spiked with arsenic to no avail. Post World War II chemicals had some impact, but more on wild birds than boll weevils. It was another 20 years before an effective program of control was developed. 

Meanwhile, people had to leave the land. There was no place for sharecroppers, black or white. They went north to build automobiles, serve as porters on trains or anything else available.

There were positive economic changes. Flue-cured tobacco cultivation was introduced in southern Georgia and northern Florida by “demonstrators” from North Carolina. Use of tobacco was expanding rapidly worldwide, mostly smoked but also chewed and dipped. It brought farm income and seasonal money in towns with auction warehouses. In time, peanuts became an important cash crop in the region along with pecans.

The Great Depression pushed more people out their homes in the south Georgia hinterland than any earlier disaster. Thousands of farmers lost their land due to debt. Farm products fetched unprofitable prices, often no sale at all. So, people left their homes in huge numbers. They went to Florida as migrant laborers in citrus groves, to work in juice canning plants, to do any work available. They sought work in the cotton mills of the Carolinas and northeast Georgia.

They went to cities like Savannah. There were a few jobs working for Dixie Crystal Sugar and Union Camp paper mill. Men who had learned a bit about repairing cars back home might become mechanics. Some learned their way about town and became taxi drivers, bootleggers or pimps. Women – usually young – found that their cotton picking skills qualified them for nothing in the city. They worked as waitresses or clerks in retail stores. Some found their way into the world’s oldest profession.

Farm programs of the New Deal brought a trickle of people back to the farms and the economic boom created by World War II forever changed farming. Machines multiplied productivity and reduced physical labor. Veterans of the war received VA benefits to buy farms and learn new skills. Life was good in the back country.

Soon after the war, industry began to move into the region from the north, soon offering employment in most towns, although all of this would eventually move out of the country to places where wages were even lower.

The final push and pull emerged simply from the nature of the modern economy. People, usually young adults, learn skills that match career opportunities, which take them away from home and require them to move regularly. Some resist and practice their professions at or near home and others return after retirement.

Perhaps in time the ability to do all or most of one’s work from home and other technological developments will reduce the impact of economic upheavals that move people against their will. But that which is happening in other countries argues that mass population migrations remain the norm, perhaps forever.

Roger G. Branch Sr. is professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia Southern University and is a retired pastor.