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Here is my offering for this edition of the Texas Sunday Post. I bet most of y'all can subscribe to it, even if just in memory!
To start, when talking about the land of cotton and old times there are not forgotten?
Texas may not be the first state that comes to mind. But it really might should be.
Black gold is oil and the subject of the movie "Giant". And there are so many
John Wayne type movies on western cowboys to even start to name them all. They were great in their own right for sure!
But? It seems to me that the Cotton boll doesn't get its proper pick. The real king in Texas was not cattle, but cotton. Go back to the days when our
grandparents and great-grandparents worked from dawn to setting sun, and chances are that it involved something to do with Texas white gold. Cotton. Picking, chopping, ginning it. Whatever. Cotton was, literally, in many cases, what stood between them and no money at all.
I went to visit my grandmother recently. She is 92. Still fiesty, and when we
talk, she always remembers her days of picking cotton when she was a young girl-woman. I remember family reunions when I was a kid...and when the old folks would gather, invariably something about cotton came up.
Now, meanwhile, here was young me sitting down by my grandparent's knees and listening...and full of the heroic notions of the Old South and all. How neato!
Well, I got put in my place in THAT regard, fairly early on. They tolerated me, but disabused me of any false ideals in no uncertain terms. A dismissal went along the line of "Son, we got paid four bits a day to pick it and tote a sack along a row that stretched from here to yonder, and that thing got awful heavy time the day was over..."
I understand it all better now. I admit I probably wouldn't have lasted five minutes. It was like they were part of an exclusive group that is closed off to anybody who was not a child of the poor South cotton-picking Depression era. Black or White. They wouldn't want to do it again...but they damn sure earned their right to joke about it later on.
Almost all of that generation of my kinfolk has passed way. My grandmother is still hanging on, and she still speaks with a bit of pride about the days when she, and all she knew, spent long hours in the old cotton fields back home. For that reason alone, I fill up with love everytime I think of her as a young woman in a sun-bonnet and going out to do what she had to do. There is a movie titled Places in The Heart. Texas. 1935. That heroine in the film could easily have been my grandma.
Cattle and Oil gets most of the Texas movie credits, but let's give cotton its place in the Lone Star sun as well.
Any of y'all got any good personal or family stories about Texas white gold?
One summer in between my 6th and 7th grades of school I pulled bolls right up until school started. I was able to spend the money I made on the school clothes I wanted rather than the ones my Mother picked out for me. LOL She still had the last say so in the matter.
It was back breaking work for sure. I tied a knot in my cotton sack so I didn't fill the entire thing up...whew...talk about trip doing the entire bag! I did it only once. Lord, I thought I was never going to get it pulled back to the wagons (where the scales were). I felt like some old broken down mule ready to kick the bucket. There were times I would try to raise up and literally couldn't. I'd have to fall back on my cotton sack and slowly get my back stretch to where I could stand up for a minute.
My mother let me know that she picked cotton. Now, that I don't think I could have done. That's where you have to reach your fingers inside the boll and extract the cotton from it. Yep, that's be mighty tough to do. I tried it once just to see if I could do it. I found out real quick how difficult (and painful) that could be! We just ripped the entire boll off when I was doing it.
I remember stories my Daddy told of when he was a young boy in East Texas and he'd hop freight trains to West Texas to pull cotton. It depended on the crops. Sometimes due to weather, etc. there wouldn't be good cotton crops in East Texas, but West Texas cotton would be flourishing.
I was lucky when I did it. Even then, there were some large families that the entire family worked in the fields both in the spring chopping cotton and in the late summer/fall pulling bolls. The kids were just pulled out of school during those times because the families needed every bit of income possible just to survive. And we think we've got it tough today.
The prices right now are very high. These days I believe everything is mechanized in the industry in the US. The vast majority in state is now grown in West Texas (I think close to 20% of the world's cotton is grown there).
Cotton has played an enormous role in the development of West Texas, particularly Lubbock. There's a drawing of a cotton plant on the seal of Texas Tech, and the band sometimes plays an arrangement of "Cotton Fields." Today the city has a diverse economy, but cotton still plays a key role.
The prices right now are very high. These days I believe everything is mechanized in the industry in the US. The vast majority in state is now grown in West Texas (I think close to 20% of the world's cotton is grown there).
Cotton has played an enormous role in the development of West Texas, particularly Lubbock. There's a drawing of a cotton plant on the seal of Texas Tech, and the band sometimes plays an arrangement of "Cotton Fields." Today the city has a diverse economy, but cotton still plays a key role.
About 300 yards outside my bedroom window is a dryland cotton field. Based on what I am seeing this year, cotton prices will soon be dropping. This year's crop looks extremely good out here on the Texas southern High Plains.
Someone mentioned the east Texas cotton of the past and I will mention here that it was primarily the cottonboll weevil that ran many of the east Texas cotton farming families out to the High Plains of Texas where the weevil could not survive the harsh winter temperatures. It has only been in recent years that mild winters here on the High Plains have allowed the bollweevil to move into areas where it has never been found.
Most people don't realize that cotton is a perennial plant although it is grown as an annual. In a suitable climate, if allowed to grow year after year, it will produce a nice shade tree. It is related to Hibiscus.
But as to amusing stories about cotton, several years ago I encountered a young woman working a checkout at a clothing store in the High Plains Mall at Lubbock. In casual conversation I asked her if she thought cotton had any affect on her personal economy. She thought for a second, then replied she didn't think so but it certainly affected her allergies.
My now deceased east Texas dad once told me, no matter what I did in life, never, never never pick cotton. He will never know how deep in the cotton patch I have been.
I remember my grandfather telling stories about picking cotton. He was from East Texas but he and my great grandparents and my grandfather's brothers and sisters moved to Lamesa up on the South Plains back during the late 1930's or so. They worked picking cotton there in the Lamesa area by hand. I remember him saying how painful it was to manually pick the cotton and extract it from the bolls. They wore gloves as much as they could so that helped. They worked from early in the morning until late in the evening just about every day during the picking season. My grandfather absolutely hated the work and often said that was the worst period of his life. For most of my life I have worked indoors so I can't even imagine how hard they must have worked back then.
Most people don't realize that cotton is a perennial plant although it is grown as an annual. In a suitable climate, if allowed to grow year after year, it will produce a nice shade tree. It is related to Hibiscus.
I had no idea! You learn something new everyday.
Quote:
Originally Posted by High_Plains_Retired
But as to amusing stories about cotton, several years ago I encountered a young woman working a checkout at a clothing store in the High Plains Mall at Lubbock. In casual conversation I asked her if she thought cotton had any affect on her personal economy. She thought for a second, then replied she didn't think so but it certainly affected her allergies.
Must've been a college kid not from West Texas.
My great-grandfather spent the first part of his childhood in Granbury where his family tenant farmed cotton. His dad was able to buy some land in Wheeler County, and they moved across Texas in a covered wagon. They were able to better their lives, survived the Dust Bowl fairly well, and my great-grandfather farmed cotton until the day he died. My grandmother and her sisters helped weed the fields during the summer, but I don't think they helped with the harvest that much because their parents stressed education (great-grandfather never went past 8th grade) and wouldn't have them miss school. I wish I knew him better because I'm sure he had some great stories, but he died when I was quite young.
I'm in my early 40s and one time ask a bit older friend of mine's mom (she could be about my grandmoms age) what brought her family out to far west Texas and she replied "the boll weevil"......it really made me think about what Ag was like back then
when the boll weevil hit east and central Texas that was that you got out of cotton or you moved...that and seeing all the old cotton gins around east and central Texas and thinking "damn they grew cotton on that little bitty field"
and it is not a cotton plant on the Tech seal it is cotton bolls....they were going to change it a few years back about 2008 or 2007 and everyone around here went crazy and they should have cotton is as big right now as ever
the reason the price is high even with the big crop in Texas is because of the flooding in pock-e-ston (Pakistan for you non-obamabots) and India and poor crops in China, lack of water because of small fish in California (though their cotton is different than west Texas cotton except for the cotton from out by El Paso) and because the Deep South USA has shifted away from cotton because of the higher prices of corn and soy and the ease of growing and harvesting it VS cotton......and for every farmer in any area of the USA that gets out of cotton when enough do and the infrastructure starts to leave that area it usually does not come back
lastly yes cotton would grow like a bush or some like a tree with hard bark and all (it is relatively smooth but hard)
there is all types with many types and sizes of blooms....I have seen some that is sticky to the touch on the stems and bolls.....there is naturally colored cotton as well that gets talked about in the greenie weenie pseudo farmer magazines from time to time, but it will cross with the plants in the fields next door and it screws up the seeds for next year (there is still a lot of "catch seed" cotton in west Texas where the farmer gets his seed back from the gin and has it delinted because it is an older variety before "traits" and patents on seeds with "traits").....so the natural colored cotton does not go over well with the rest of the cotton farmers
should be a huge crop for Texas this year and there is some opportunity to capture the prices, but a lot of cotton is sold in "pools" because of grading needs and volume so a lot of cotton was sold already although there is a lot of cotton in storage as well (you can store bales for quite a while with little quality loss a year or more at least) so some that is in storage can be moved for a price and every bit of empty storage is just that much to hold prices higher for the future
My great-grandfather spent the first part of his childhood in Granbury where his family tenant farmed cotton. His dad was able to buy some land in Wheeler County, and they moved across Texas in a covered wagon. They were able to better their lives, survived the Dust Bowl fairly well, and my great-grandfather farmed cotton until the day he died. My grandmother and her sisters helped weed the fields during the summer, but I don't think they helped with the harvest that much because their parents stressed education (great-grandfather never went past 8th grade) and wouldn't have them miss school. I wish I knew him better because I'm sure he had some great stories, but he died when I was quite young.
It was my great grandfather (my namesake) who came to deep east Texas ca 1860. Some of my other great grandparents came to east Texas prior to the Republic. My early families raised sugar cane and worked in the timber and railroad industries. As a very young man, I was the first to leave the Pineywoods and come out to the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico. Neither my mom or dad had the opportunity to finish high school but I recall that they both emphasized education to their children. It was my education that placed me in a job where much of my days was spent dealing with the environmental and pest control aspects in the cotton industry at first at Lubbock and later at a national level.
I am now retired but a few months ago I had the opportunity to attend a local meeting relating to a proposed wind turbine farm in southern Hale County. I knew there would be mostly cotton farmers at this meeting so I knew it would be an interesting meeting. It was especially interesting when a younger farmer made a derogatory remark about cotton, a much older fellow almost jumped out of his chair in cotton's defense. I've always suspected that when a Lubbock area cotton grower finally has to go to the retirement home, he keeps a cotton plant in a vase beside his bed.
In all seriousness though, some of the finest people I have ever met in my life were cotton farmers.
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