Diminishing Returns

...The holdings of the fathers of one generation had continually to be divided among multiple heirs in the next -- a plantation of, say, a thousand acres, a farm of two hundred, was likely to be split up among a half-dozen, even a dozen or more, children or other claimants.
In the single decade between 1900 and 1910, according to the United States Census, the number of Southern farms containing less than a hundred acres increased by nearly 350,000. And by 1930 almost eighty percent of all Southern farms contained less than a hundred acres, while less than one percent contained more than 500! -- W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, p. 284.