With a few days to explore this area of South Carolina before our granddaughter’s soccer game, we saw that the local town of Bishopville had a Cotton Museum. Since we really didn’t know much about this popular crop in the South, we figured we should go check out what we could learn at the museum. Eddie Grant, the executive director, met us at the door. He was retired from a career in textiles so was the perfect person to introduce us to what we were going to see.
Cotton is one of the earliest domesticated nonfood plants that started growing over 7000 years ago. In 1492, Columbus discovered cotton growing in the Bahamas, and by 1607, Colonists in Virginia were planting fields of cotton. We’ll learn more about how it was grown in the South as we walk through the displays.
The plant starts out as a silky white cotton bloom that is a perfect flower, but it only lasts for a day or so. The white petals gradually darken to a vibrant fuchsia over a 2-3 day period. A field of these flowers must be beautiful.
As the seed and fiber grow within, the boll expands and finally changes its color to brown. As the dry, brown boll becomes a mature size, it slowly cracks open and starts to pull apart to expose its white cotton fiber. All of this happens within a week or so. It takes about 3 more months until it’s time for harvest in the fall.
history of cotton
In ancient times, cotton was considered to be a sort of wool. In Europe’s Middle Ages, people believed that cotton was a lamb’s wool that grew on trees. Arabs were cotton traders of ancient times and introduced the cotton to European countries.
history of cotton in South Carolina
The museum’s brochure stated that in 1671, Joseph West was the first documented grower of cotton in what later would become South Carolina.
From weighing the cotton this way, the landlord figured out how much to pay each worker and how much he was going to make when he took the cotton to gin.
As we’ve learned, cotton is the overcoat of a seed that is planted and grown in places where the land is perfect for this crop.
The fiber could vary in color and weight, and the men who could accurately guess the weight were called cotton men by the public.
Several varieties of cotton are native to the Americas, and all require a warm, moist climate like what we have in the Southeast.
This variety was the first to be commercially successful and grew near to the coast in loose, sandy soil. It was used mainly for delicate fabrics since its silky fibers separated easily from the seeds.
This Upland cotton became commercially important when the cotton gin was invented in the 1790s since this cotton was more difficult to separate from the seeds, and this separation is what the cotton gin did.
cotton gins
This gin could separate the same amount of cotton fiber that it would take 50 enslaved workers to produce by hand. His invention enabled SC to become the world leader in cotton production for a short time in the early 1800s. By then many others were using Whitney’s idea or perfected his work.
Eli Whitney’s invention made it possible to supply large quantities of cotton fiber to the fast-growing textile industry. Within 10 years the value of the U.S. cotton crop rose from $150,000 to more than $8 million. (In today’s numbers that would be $3,757,904 to more than $200,421,587.)
Cotton plantations were developed in vast areas of the Upcountry and Lowcountry because of this invention.
Eli Whitney
But who was Eli Whitney, and how did this Massachusetts man make it to the South and revolutionize the cotton industry in the late 1700s. The museum had a handout that told us what we wanted/needed to know about him.
When he finally received his degree from Yale when he was in his late 20s, he couldn’t find an engineering job so settled for a teaching position in South Carolina.
While sailing on a coasting packet, he was befriended by Katherine Greene, the widow of the Revolutionary war General Nathaniel Greene. When his teaching job fell through, she invited him to stay at her plantation, Mulberry Groove, near Savannah.
As Whitney soon realized, most cotton plantations were on the brink of insolvency since the only cotton strain that would grow inland took too long to cull from its seed. To sift out a single “point” of cotton lint from all the seeds required 10 hard hours of hand labor. The solution would be a machine to do this work, but no one had been able to make one.
Within 10 days of his arrival, Whitney built such a machine after observing the manual process. His 2nd version was a complete success, thanks to thin wire hooks replacing the wooden teeth, and a moving brush that constantly cleared away the collected fibers. Gin was a short version of engine.
Life wasn’t pleasant since others broke into his shop and copied his machine. He wasn’t able to get a patent until 1794.
In 1804, he left the South frustrated with what he had had to go through and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. His goal was to train unskilled laborers to make complex products by designing products with interchangeable parts. His test case was rifles. Mass production allowed for an unprecedented boom in American industry and eventually provided jobs for thousands of workers. He treated his workers with appreciation and respect.
The cotton hoe was needed to thin out the plants and cut away grass from the cotton stalk.
Thinning the rows until each hill had only 2 or 3 plants every 9-14 inches gave the farmer a healthier and more productive crop.
more early inventions
With a single hand-crank operation, a “spin-ginner” in one day could turn raw cotton in the pod into enough spun yard to make 7-10 yards of cloth that was 1-yard wide. By 1845, more than 2500 of these machines were being used on southern plantations. They sold for about $100 each (which would be worth $4,153 today).
transporting cotton around the state
South Carolina’s major river systems were a boon for economic development since towns, farms, and plantations generally were located along rivers.
With impassable swamps covering the 125 miles between Camden and Charleston, cotton had to be transported using navigable rivers in boats, barges, and flats. From Charleston’s ports, cotton was shipped on ocean-going vessels to the cotton mills of the New England states or exported to Europe. River navigation flourished until the first railroad reached Camden in 1848.
Riverboats were first used starting in 1786 using teams of mules for propulsion. Starting in 1821, a “teamboat” began operating from Camden to Charles. The boat used 11 mules in relays, walking around in a circle attached to a wheel to transfer power to the propeller; all of this happened while the boat was on the river. The boat made a record trip in 93 hours loaded with cotton and towing another boat with 240 bales. To have all of these mules walking around means it must have been a large boat. So creative.
The engineer, Christian Senf, also constructed locks between Camden and the North Carolina border so barges could avoid shoals along the way.
Steamboats started operating in 1835, and eventually roads and railroads superseded rivers for transportation.
In 1818, the legislature appropriated $1 million (today that would be $24,855,433) to help solve the problem of difficult roads on which to travel. Like the rivers, the roads extended northwest to southeast across the inner coastal plain.
In 1833, a railroad line connected Charleston to Hamburg (Augusta area). With a length of 136 miles, it was the first real American railroad and the longest in the world at the time.
By the end of the Civil War (1861-1865), cotton production fell to 4% of pre-war output. The war dramatically affected how cotton was grown and processed in the South. The next post will talk about these changes.
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