The Piedmont

The Piedmont is the rolling plateau of foothill country that lies between the Appalachian Mountains and the flat Atlantic Coastal Plain, running from New Jersey down through Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia and Alabama. Its name means "foot of the mountain," and its gently hilly terrain of hard crystalline rock and red clay soils forms a transitional belt up to a few hundred miles wide.

Its eastern edge is the fall line, the abrupt drop where rivers leave the Piedmont's hard rock for the soft coastal plain - the head of navigation where cities from Trenton to Richmond to Columbus grew up around waterpower. That waterpower drove the textile mills that made the southern Piedmont an industrial belt, and today the same corridor holds booming metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, and the Research Triangle.

• The Atlantic Coastal Plain
  The flat lowland fringing the Atlantic and Gulf related
• The Deep South
  The historic cotton heart of the South related
• The Mid-Atlantic
  The dense middle of the eastern seaboard, New York to Washington related