North Carolina is second only to Massachusetts in the value of its cotton products, South Carolina comes third, Georgia fourth, and Alabama eighth.

Virginia and Tennessee are lower on the list.

In quantity of cotton consumed, the cotton growing States passed all others in 1905; and in 1916 the consumption was twenty-five per cent greater, in spite of the fact that New England had been increasing her spindles.

Some Southern mills are built in cities, but usually they are in the smaller towns and in little villages which have grown up around the mills and owe their existence to them.

There is some localization of industry: a very large number of mills, for instance, may be found in a radius of one hundred miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, and one North Carolina county has more than fifty mills, though the total number of spindles in that county is not much greater than in some single New England establishment.
In the allied knitting industry the production of the South is increasing in importance.