The WPA Guide describes Thomasville, Georgia, as one of those quaint Southern towns where winters are "short and mild," a fragrant, rose-garlanded small city where "the streets are lined with Red Radiances," a beneficiary of the disposable income of northern capitalists who "built palatial winter homes, which are maintained in the manner of old southern plantations and provide employment for an average of three hundred people each." In Thomasville, Henry Grady’s new southern chickens came home to roost: in 1940 the county could claim "sawmills, tobacco markets, cotton gins, an iron foundry, a concrete-pipe plant, and a crate and basket factory," and apparently not even the irresistible march of enlightened northern progress could resist the allure of packaged southern nostalgia.