Poor white trash were generally only able to locate themselves on the worst land in the South, since the best land was taken by the slaveholders, large and small. They lived and attempted to survive on land that was sandy or swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this, they became known as "sandhillers" and "pineys". These "hard-scratch" inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were "stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on."