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HEART OF DIXIE AREA: 133,915 sq km (51,705 sq mi). POPULATION: 4,219,000. CAPITAL: Montgomery, pop. 192,100. ECONOMY: Industry: paper, lumber, and wood products, mining, rubber and plastic products, transportation equipment, apparel. Agriculture: poultry and eggs, cattle, nursery stock, peanuts, cotton, vegetables, milk, soybeans. PCI: $18,010. Admission: 1819 as 22nd state.
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Fertile soils made this home of the Creek Indians the heart of the “cotton kingdom” before the Civil War. Today Alabama lies at the center of a revitalized Deep South. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, has become a focus for medical research. The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville is a magnet for high-tech industry and space-related projects. Alabama’s Supercomputer Network, the first such state-funded network in the U.S., links 28 sites.
The 377-kilometer Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, an environmentally controversial project that was opened in 1985, provides access from the interior to the port of Mobile for soybeans, coal, and timber. Nine million hectares of forests supply the leading
industry—pulp and papermaking.
Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World Revised Sixth Edition, 1995
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