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Porterdale Mill on the Yellow
River |
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Porterdale Mill on the Yellow
River |
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DOWN
MEMORY LANE |
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Most of you younger folks learned in school about cotton and its importance to our lives. But I doubt that you learned how cotton affected everyone who lived in the South in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. During this period cotton was KING. Cotton was the main agricultural product during this period. As cotton went so went everyone’s life. If the cotton crops failed lots of people went hungry. Every where you went you saw cotton growing. It was planted on both sides of every road. It was a beautiful crop once it was in full bloom. A sea of white, with a tinge of brown from the stalks. To give you an idea of how important cotton was to the survival of the South, we would get out of school to go help the farmers pick their cotton. However, there were not many kids eager to leave the fairly cool class room for the sweltering heat out in the cotton fields. Especially, when you were paid only one penny per pound picked. You had to pick 100 pounds to earn a dollar. One hundred pounds of cotton is a lot of cotton. If you don’t believe it, go find some cotton balls you might have around the house, hold them and look at the weight on the box. But some of us brave souls did venture out into the sun, dragging a long sack strapped over our shoulder to place the cotton in. If a kid like myself picked a hundred pounds in one day, you had done a days work. A little off the serious side they tell a story about me crying and screaming, wanting to take home all the cotton that I had picked at Grandpa Chapman’s. I guess I thought it belonged to me since I had picked it. I do remember after I was a little older, maybe about six, that when I took my sack of cotton up to Grandpa to be weighed to determine my pay, one of the older boys would put several rocks into my bag so that it would weigh more. After the rocks where placed in the bag I think I would earn about three or four cents. Also I remember while we were visiting out in Arkansas and it would be cotton picking time, the older folks would tell me to get up early and pick the cotton while the dew was still on the cotton, that way it would weigh more. Then I could lay out in the hot afternoons and still make as much money as picking all day in the hot sun. All of you see all of these abandoned Railroad Stations at every little wide place in the road. Most of them are now Restaurants or Antique Shops. But when cotton was KING there was cotton bales everywhere in all directions around these Railroad Station. These were very busy places. All the farmers wanting to get their cotton on the trains heading toward the cotton mills. Two primary things caused cotton to disappear from Georgia, first a little bug called the boll-weevil, and lack of knowledge in crop rotation causing the soil to lose its nutrients. I don’t wish any of you the pleasure of picking cotton for it was some real hard work. |