Georgia Cotton Kingdom

Modes of Transportation

Sea ports were an important mode of transportation because it was cheap and it would transport extremely large amounts of cotton from the south to the north and from the United States to foreign countries. The Port of Savannah located in Savannah, Georgia is an example of a port used for cotton trade and it is still active even in modern time. The Port of Savannah is actually the twentieth largest port in the United States. The port was founded by James Oglethorpe, a prominent slave owner. It was initially used to bring goods in and out of Georgia. It was a large factor in Georgia becoming a large colony that it was at the time. By the mid-1800s, most of the goods that interacted with the port was about ninety percent cotton. In the Early 1800s, it was famously known as "The King Cotton Port of the World."

Cotton from were south were usually not shipped directly from the plantations to foreign countries but rather they are transported to the north and then processed before they are sold. This was one of the reasons why the north depended on the south during this time. To transport the cotton to the north, plantation owners either used ports or they would travel on roads since railways were not prominent in the south until after the 1860s. Roads in the South were not as developed as the paved roads in the north. Turnpikes existed in the south but are more prominent in the north. Turnpikes are tollgates that prevented travelers from crossing unless they paid a certain amount of money. Few major turnpikes were reconstructed into modern roads in the early twentieth century. One was the Valley Turnpike in Virginia, which was turned into U.S. Route 11.