Although Franklin's wealth was concentrated in its rural agricultural commodities, the county was a commercial hub with numerous businesses and shops more densely concentrated than its Southern counterpart.

Overall, Franklin's per capita number of commercial establishments was higher than Augusta's by 50 percent--for every 49 persons in Franklin there was one business, in Augusta the ratio was 75 to one. Augusta, however, possessed a higher concentration of mills and mines, nearly double the per capita number of Franklin's.

Both communities were closely connected to their respective trading cities--Richmond for Augusta and Philadelphia for Franklin. In both places the vast majority of advertisements in the newspapers were local (75 to 80 percent). In Augusta the next largest group of advertisers came from Richmond (14 percent), while in Franklin Philadelphia advertisers took up 10 percent of the ads. Augusta and Franklin looked for business and for leadership in the regional economy to Richmond and Philadelphia respectively, not to Baltimore.

Franklin and Augusta were both central places for the surrounding counties, and their per capita investment in manufacturing was similar to other counties in the Border region. Border counties from Virginia west to Ohio (61 counties) averaged $37.90 manufacturing capital per free person. Slaveholding counties along the border averaged $27.43 of capital investment per person while nonslaveholding counties averaged slightly higher ($29.92). The border region, then, included a range of counties with investment in manufacturing. Augusta's capital investment was significantly higher than the average of its contiguous neighbors, but Franklin's was only slightly higher than its neighbors, which included a county with slaves, Washington County, Maryland. Franklin, then, was surrounded by counties with similar levels of manufacturing investment. Augusta was, by contrast, a hub in a broader local area that had little or no capital investment in manufacturing.

Annual Value of Manufacturing Per Capita, 1860 (graph)

Capital Investment by Industry, 1860 (table)

Comparative Stores and Establishments Per Capita, Augusta and Franklin (table)

Industries Using Enslaved Labor (table)

Profitability of Business Sectors, 1860 (graph)

Regional Comparison (table)

Value of Manufacturing, 1860 (table)

Related Historiography

John D. Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Edward Pessen, "How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 1119-1149.

Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: MacMillan Company, 1927).

Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).