Cultivating leisure: agriculture, tourism, and industrial modernity in the North Carolina sandhills, 1870-1930

This project is an environmental and cultural history of the sandhills region of North Carolina as it was transformed after the Civil War. It brings together agricultural science and the creation of a leisure industry in the sandhills to argue that they were interdependent in the transformation of the region. Chapter One narrates the gradual emergence and transformation of agricultural science in North Carolina from a venture of learned planters to a state-run institution, located in universities and government buildings, but still heavily influenced by the heirs of planters. Chapter Two examines the trajectory of resort creation in the sandhills after the region had been tapped out and cutover by naval stores producers and loggers. Its remained an agricultural problem area, while its acres of sandy land were available to be remade by developers. Importantly these new investors, like Pinehurst’s James and Leonard Tufts, reconstructed the sandhills to reflect a fantasy of yeoman agriculture—while deploying scientific findings and commercial fertilizers as advocated by state agricultural experts. Chapter Three analyzes a community that developed in the vicinity of Pinehurst after 1910, when a generation of idealistic Northern progressives turned to the sandhills, both to uplift the region and to escape the nervous problems they had experienced in the industrial North. Just as Pinehurst used agricultural science to create a leisure landscape, this group of Ivy Leaguers was inspired by visions of using agricultural technologies to turn the “sand barrens” into a state-of-the-art farmscape. Chapter Four turns to a literary account of the sandhills in the work of Charles Chesnutt, taking Chesnutt’s motif of gift-giving as a lens for understanding the author’s short stories set in the sandhills. This chapter focuses especially on Chesnutt’s conception of usufruct and an economy based in local social connections as an alternative to the version of commodity agriculture that had animated so many other projects in the sandhills. This dissertation reveals how the conceptual and material tools of an industrializing culture reconfigured this region, long seen as barren, from a cutover turpentine district into a tourist paradise.