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

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 are everywhere exceptionally rich, and in the Tidewater section, of great breadth. In their course from the high plateaus to the low country all the rivers of the State have a descent of many hundred feet, made by frequent falls and rapids. These falls and rapids afford all unlimited motive power for machinery of every description; and here many cotton mills and