lvania continued to be the most heavily industrialized sectionof the United States, but there was a substantial development ofmanufacturing in the states adjacent to the Great Lakes and incertain sections of the South. The experience of the steel industry reflected this new pattern ofdiffusion. Two-thirds of the iron and steel industry was concentratedin the area of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. After 1880,however, the development of iron mines in northern Minnesota (theVermilion Range in 1884 and the Mesabi Range in 1892) and inTennessee and northern Alabama was followed by the expansion ofthe iron and steel industry in the Chicago area and by theestablishment of steel mills in northern Alabama and in Tennessee. Most manufacturing in the Midwest was in enterprises closelyassociated with agriculture and represented expansion of industriesthat had first been established before 1860. Meat-packing, which inthe years after 1875 became one of the major industries of thenation in terms of the value of its products, was almost aMidwestern monopoly, with a large part of the industryconcentrated in Chicago. Flour milling, brewing, and themanufacture of farm machinery and lumber products were otherimportant Midwestern industries. The industrial invasion of the South was spearheaded by textiles.Cotton mills became the symbol of the New South, and mills andmill towns sprang up in the Piedmont region from Virginia toGeorgia and into Alabama. By 1900 almost one-quarter of all thecotton spindles in the United States were in the South, and Southernmills were expanding their operations more rapidly than were theirwell-established competitors in New England. The development oflumbering in the South was even more impressive, though lesspublicized; by the end of the century the South led the nation inlumber production, contributing almost one-third of the annualsupply.Industrial combinationsThe geographic dispersal of industry was part of a moveme...
