The state of Georgia earned the nickname the "Empire State of the South" in the antebellum period, largely due to its textile industry. From the 1840s to the 1890s the state consistently led the South in textile production, antebellum towns including Macon, Milledgeville, Madison, and Greensboro experimented with steam-powered cotton factories, with varying degrees of success. The steam factories in Madison and Greensboro failed in 1850, while those in Milledgeville and Macon survived to serve the Confederacy. The Macon Cotton Factory, the major manufacturing sector in the United States in the years before the Civil War. Georgia entrepreneurs began experimenting with factory-based industry between 1809 and 1820, but failed in their first three attempts: the Bolton factory in Wilkes County, the Schley factory in Jefferson County, and Jacob Gregg's factory in Morgan County. While the details of these failures remain unclear, it is possible that the sparse population in these counties near the Indian frontier proved too small a market for profitable industrialization. Only after 1820 did Georgians push that frontier far enough west to develop suitable sites for water power factories along the fall line in Georgia. , pushed Georgian entrepreneurs to seriously industrialize textile production. In the late 1820s, Augustin Smith Clayton of Athens built a cotton mill near his hometown, hoping to demonstrate that protective tariffs that subsidized Northern industry at the expense of Southerners were unnecessary. of the important politics of Georgia......middle of paper......industrial production. Others created industries auxiliary to ongoing textile industrialization, such as bobbin factories and foundries. The thirty-year boom-and-bust cycle of Georgia's antebellum textile industry demonstrated that the success of Southern textile mills was inversely related to long-term trends in the price of textile products. cotton. When agriculture suffered, mill building flourished. As agricultural profits increased, Georgia's textile industry faltered. Georgians rationally pursued profits in both agriculture and industry, but were aware of market forces and the history of risks in each area. However, despite the setbacks of the late antebellum period, the industrial structures and skills developed by the Georgians before the war contributed to the Confederacy's logistical ability to fight a truly modern four-year war against the industrial giant of the North..