The most notable New South initiative was the introduction of textile mills in the South. Beginning in the early 1880s, northern capitalists invested in building textile mills in the southern Appalachian foothills of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, drawn to the region by the fact that they could pay southern mill workers at half the rate of workers in northern mills. Due to these low wages, the mills gave only a modest boost to the southern economies in which they were built.^3
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