Summertime
And the living’ is easy,
Fish are jumping’, and the cotton is high
~ Ira Gershwin
A few days ago when discussing schools, I mentioned that a one-room school near Maysville always started school during the summer and then was dismissed for two or three weeks in the fall so the students could help on the farms — usually picking cotton.
If you’ve read this blog over the years, you’ll remember that I’ve mentioned that Lindsay, Oklahoma, just a few miles from Maysville (and Story) billed itself as the broom-corn capital of the world. Broom-corn was, in fact, a very big crop in the area when I was growing up, but the other very big crop was cotton. A lot, if not most, farmers in the area around Maysville planted cotton.
Actually, cotton has been a major agricultural commodity in Oklahoma since the five tribes arrived in what was then “Indian Territory, the Choctaws being the first to plant cotton. Cotton was very profitable until the Civil War came along bringing devastation to farms, large and small, along with general impoverishment and halted any significant cotton production.
After the Civil War, cotton production picked up — while tribal law forbade American Indian citizens to lease their lands to outsiders, many got around the law by “employing” noncitizens for tenants who eventually cultivated 80 percent of the cotton farms in Indian Territory. Indian Territory was “opened” in the late 1800s/early 1900s and called Oklahoma Territory — that led to an influx of even more cotton farmers.
Cotton farmers began each season by tilling the soil and planting the crop in late April or early May. Once the plants sprouted, workers with hoes thinned the rows once to prevent overcrowding and again later to control weeds. You heard the term “hoeing cotton” a lot around Maysville when I was growing up. At harvest time, normally beginning in late September, family members and other workers put the hand picked cotton in cloth bags (or “sacks” as they were called in Oklahoma.) The sacks were weighed when full — workers got paid by “the pound.” The crop was dumped into a wagon and delivered to nearby gins.
When I lived in Maysville, one of the major “industries” was the cotton gin. Most everyone knows that the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney — the term “gin” was derived from “engine.” Cotton is easily grown, and since it isn’t a “food” crop, its fibers can be stored for long periods of time. The problem is that cotton plants contain seeds that are difficult to separate from the soft fibers. Before the cotton gin was invented, the cotton had to be cleaned by hand. The average cotton picker could remove the seeds from only about a pound of cotton per day. The cotton gin can quickly and easily separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, increasing productivity dramatically. The fibers are are then processed into various cotton goods, usually textiles like clothing. The separated seed can be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil. The cotton gin in Maysville turned out the cotton fibers in 500 pound bales and I think the seed was loaded into trucks. The bales from Maysville were sent to compressing plants in either Ardmore or Oklahoma City. I remember that at certain times of the year there was a lot of “dust” hanging over Maysville because of the cotton gin.
When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, all but three Oklahoma counties raised cotton. At the time there were approximately three hundred cotton gins in the state — I don’t know how many there are today, but it’s nowhere near three hundred. Today, there isn’t all that much cotton grown around Maysville and none of it is “hand-picked.” Cotton picking is now done by machinery.
Anyone that’s picked cotton or is familiar with the process knows the difference between “pulling bolls” and “picking cotton.” For those that have never been in a cotton field… cotton picking means you reach around the cotton ball and pull the fiber from the cotton burr — pulling bolls means you cup your fingers around the cotton burr and pull the whole thing, burr and cotton ball, off together. Again, this operation has been automated. No one pocks cotton — or pulls bolls anymore. If school returns to normal, I wonder if Story will still get some time off in September/October….
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