The Civil War changed our country dramatically. Within the textile industry, the North and South started to work together as inventions made processing cotton into cloth so much easier and faster. People moved to where the jobs were and upended generations of family living. Let’s look at what we learned as we walked through this museum.
tenant era – 1865 to 1940
At the end of the Civil War, the enslaved slaves were set free, but what were they to do? All they knew was the work they had done on the plantations. And the plantation owners were left with lots of land but no workers, and they had to start paying wages instead of just providing meager housing and food for their workers. Small farmers began to rent land from the plantation owners and hire workers to do the work they had previously known. Payment for renting this land was either in cash or a portion of their crops.
The high prices, knowledge of cotton production, available transportation, markets, and access to commercial fertilizer encouraged South Carolina farmers to continue the state’s economic system. But as we’ve learned over the years, growing cotton year after year depletes the soil quality and structure. Eventually farmers learned to practice crop rotation and leave fields without crops for a year or so.
Mr. Outlaw painted rural scenes of black cotton farm workers and the world in which they lived. He knew this world firsthand since he was the son of farm workers who grew up on a two-room shack in SC.
tenant farming during the depression – 1920 to 1940
Life was good for tenant farmers until the fall of 1920 when the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Since farmers relied on high prices to make their profits, they couldn’t pay off their debts. Banks suffered losses when the loans couldn’t be repaid.
By 1940, relief was on the horizon. While war is horrible, these tenants found that service in the military in WWII provided a way out of poverty and ignorance. The Federal government has influenced cotton prices and acreage controls since the Depression of 1929.
These workers paid for the houses and some acreage with part of their crops, cash, or a combination.
Coker seed
The local university where our granddaughter’s soccer team was going to be playing in Hartsville is named Coker University. Now we’ll learn why the school honored Mr. Coker.
In the spring of 1898, Coker’s experiments evolved into his seed company, one of the nation’s leading producers of cotton seed varieties.
By 1910 Coker had produced an upland long staple cotton that was practical to plant and cultivate and its yield was comparable with short staple cotton. The premium price for this cotton was because of its extra long length.
In 1915, the company turned to breeding short staple cotton, which was the “bread and butter” cotton of the South. One of the reasons for this switch was the eventual invasion of the nasty boll weevil in South Carolina. This shorter staple cotton was less susceptible to the bug’s damage.
The first time we encountered the idea of boll weevils when we moved to Georgia was when we went to Augusta, Ga., and had lunch at the Boll Weevil restaurant. The food was good, but the dessert items on both sides of a 8.5″ x 14″ menu looked amazing.
So what is a boll weevil? It’s a beetle that damages cotton plants by eating their buds and flowers, and laying eggs inside them. One boll weevil could destroy a whole acre of cotton; no wonder it almost destroyed the cotton industry.
By 1918, the boll weevil had destroyed the long staple Sea Island Cotton on the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Mr. Coker developed a method of mixing boll weevil poison with molasses, which proved more effective against this menace than other methods.
(When we visited Jimmy Carter’s childhood home in Plains, Georgia, we heard a recording of Jimmy talking about having to go into the fields during the heat of summer and putting this sticky mixture on the cotton.)
eradication
Getting rid of the boll weevil was important for cotton growers. Let’s learn about this insect and the war farmers fought against it.
This insect undergoes a complete metamorphosis as it develops from larva to an adult. An egg is laid by the adult female within a square or a boll. A larva feeds and develops into the pupa state before it becomes the adult.
So what does a boll weevil look like?
The cotton farmers had such a huge problem with these insects that they probably thought they were this large.
During the 1983-1985 eradication program and the 1986-1996 containment program, hundreds of thousands of traps were used and paid for primarily by the cotton farmers.
cotton duster and pheromone trap
The boll weevil destroyed 70% of South Carolina’s cotton crop in the 1920s. Early researchers recommended calcium arsenic dust to control the insects, but its use was controversial. It caused damage to the soil and its effectiveness was hard to measure. Prolonged exposure to this dust during hot weather could cause arsenic poisoning for those working in the fields.
The total cost of a dusting application was estimated to be $.75 per acre ($14.18 today). Per an internet AI search, “In 1930, the average farm size was 636 acres” so this could have been a costly expense for planters trying to make a living during the Depression.
These traps in the fields could collect a cup of weevils in a week’s time (and remember, the weevils are really small).
working in the mills
As mills began to be built in South Carolina in the 1880s with the inventions that made transforming cotton to cloth meant that jobs became available for young women (and men) on poor farms who wanted to earn an honest livelihood. These females were often between the ages of 12-25; many were unmarried but would often leave work when they became married. If they were nursing babies, they could go home at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. to nurse.
The typical work day was from 6:25 a.m. to 6:10 p.m., with 45 minutes off for lunch. On Saturdays, work was over at 11:50 a.m., and of course no one worked on Sundays.
The working environment for everyone was characterized as sweat shop conditions, no matter where one was employed. No wonder unions became popular.
The Pacolet Manufacturing Company around Spartanburg, SC, near the North Carolina mountains, had the following sign posted as they looked for 500 workers who work for 300 days each year. Workers were provided with houses at $.50 a room per month. They also were furnished with wood, coal, and provisions at market prices. Healthy air and clean water were an attraction, along with free schools and churches of various denominations.
The mill was heated with steam and was warm and comfortable in the winter. (Perhaps it was too hot during the summer? Being close to the mountains would help.)
For poor families trying to work land that was already overworked, these opportunities must have been appealing. A downside was that families would uprooted from areas where their relatives had lived for generations, and they probably wouldn’t have cousins around.
making cloth
After the cotton went through the ginning process where the seeds were removed, bales of cotton would be shipped to a weaving mill or yard manufacturing plant. At this point, 4 or 5 bales would be opened and cotton taken from part of each bale alternately to be fed into a blender to mix/fluff the fiber. After blending, the cotton was cleaned so the leaves, pieces of dust, and other trash could be removed.
The next step was to feed the cotton into carding machines that act like combs to orient and strengthen the fibers. The cotton came out of these cards in large loose ropes the size of a garden hose.
These roving packages were then fed into a spinning machine that twisted the rope tightly into the desired size yarn.
After spinning, part of the yarn went into warp yarns that were wound onto large beams. The other part of the yarn went into filling yarns that were inserted between the warp yarns to make a woven fabric.
The process was the same in a yarn manufacturing plant, except after the yarn was spun it was shipped to a plant where it was knitted or woven into various types of fabric.
machinery used
While we were almost done walking around the museum, we saw so many pieces of machinery that had been used in the textile industry. But this next loom caught my attention because of the first sentence in the description.
This loom changed the geographic location of the textile industry, and the brothers Charles and Ebnezer Draper changed the course of history. Those statements are pretty amazing.
Their Northrop automatic bobbin changer, considered to be an engineering marvel, automated a series of very intricate tasks that had been done by hand. By WWI, their company made most of the country’s 400,000 mechanized looms that were shipped overseas as well as used in the U.S.
The Draper loom doomed New England’s mills because steam engines for power and fewer trained workers were needed.
With all of these changes, few New England mill owners wanted to automate, so the textile industry moved south in search of cheaper, unskilled labor–and escape New England’s restrictive child labor laws.
Another important piece of machinery was the Picanol “President” loom built in Belgium sometime after 1936. This loom was imported to the Greenwood Mills in 1963.
The loom runs at a speed of 200 picks per minute, with the shuttle crossing from one side to the other 3 times every second. For each inch of fabric, the shuttle must cross, or pick, 56 times.
We’ve looked at the history of cotton in South Carolina for about 300 years. What amazes me are all the pieces of machinery that have been invented to make the process easier and faster.
Next we’ll look at changes in the cotton industry starting with WWII.
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