School History of North Carolina (From 1584 to the Present Time) | Page 4

or 'Tidewater' section? Point it out on the
map.
7. What are some of the productions of the Mountain section? Of the
Piedmont? Of the Tidewater? What is said of the grapes of North
Carolina?
8. How may the physical characteristics of the State be easily
understood?
9. What is said of the plants and trees? What further is said of this
particular branch of North Carolina's wealth?

CHAPTER II
.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION-Continued.
The mountains of North Carolina may be conveniently classed as four
separate chains: the Smoky, forming the western boundary of the State;
the Blue Ridge, running across the State in a very tortuous course, and
shooting out spurs of great elevation; the Brushy (which divides, for the
greater part of its course, the waters of the Catawba and Yadkin),
beginning at a point near Lenoir and terminating in the Pilot and
Sauratown Mountains; and an inferior range of much lower elevation,
which may be termed, from its local name at different points, the
Uwharrie or Oconeechee Mountains beginning in Montgomery county
and terminating in the heights about Roxboro, in Person county.
2. Each of these mountain ranges is marked by distinct characteristics.
The Smoky chain, as contrasted with the next highest--the Blue
Ridge--is more continuous, more elevated, more regular in its direction
and height, and rises very uniformly from five thousand to nearly six
thousand seven hundred feet. The Blue Ridge is composed of many
fragments scarcely connected into a continuous and regular chain. Its
loftier summits range from five thousand to five thousand nine hundred
feet. The Brushy range presents, throughout the greater part of its
course, a remarkable uniformity in direction and elevation, many of its
peaks rising above two thousand feet. The last, the Oconeechee or

Uwharrie range, sometimes presents a succession of elevated ridges,
then a number of bold and isolated knobs, whose heights are one
thousand feet above the sea level.
3. There are three distinct systems of rivers in the State: those that find
their way to the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi, those that
flow through South Carolina to the sea and those that reach the sea
along our own coast. The divide between the first and the second is the
Blue Ridge chain of mountains; that between the second and third
systems is found in an elevation extending from the Blue Ridge, near
the Virginia line, just between the sources of the Yadkin and the
Roanoke, in a south-easterly direction some two hundred miles, almost
to the sea-coast below Wilmington. In the divide between the first and
second systems, which is also the great watershed between the Atlantic
slope and the Mississippi Valley, a singular anomaly is presented, for it
is formed not by the lofty Smoky range, but by the Blue Ridge--not,
therefore, at the crest of the great slope which the surface of the State
presents, but on a line lower down. On the western flank of this lower
range the beautiful French Broad and the other rivers of the first section,
including the headwaters of the Great Khanawha, have their rise. In
their course through the Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi they pass
along chasms or "gaps" from three thousand to four thousand feet in
depth. These chasms or "gaps" are more than a thousand feet lower
than those of the corresponding parts of the Blue Ridge.
4. The rivers of the second system rise on the eastern flank of the Blue
Ridge. These rivers--the Catawba and the Yadkin, with their tributaries
stretching from the Broad River, near the mountains in the west, to the
Lumber near the seacoast--water some thirty counties in the State, a
fan-shaped territory, embracing much the greater portion of the
Piedmont section of the State.
5. The rivers of the third system are the Chowan, the Roanoke, the Tar,
the Neuse and the Cape Fear, usually navigable some for fifty and
others to near one hundred miles for boats of light draught. Of these the
three last have their rise near the northern boundary of the State, in a
comparatively small area, near the eastern source of the Yadkin. The
Chowan has its rise in Virginia, below Appomattox Court House. The
principal sources of the Roanoke, also, are in Virginia, in the Blue
Ridge, though some of its head streams are in North Carolina, and very

near those of the Yadkin. Only one of these rivers, the Cape Fear, flows
directly into the ocean in this State; the others, after reaching the low
country, move on with diminished current and empty into large bodies
of water known as sounds.
6. The great rivers of these three systems, with their network of
countless tributaries, great and small, afford a truly magnificent water
supply. Flat lands border the streams in every section; they