Posted on 12/26/2009 6:33:27 PM PST by DGHoodini
Just a quick question, that I am pretty sure I already know the answer to, but have a nagging doubt about:
Was cotton ever a cash crop in Texas?
I keep thinking 'No', but as I said, I'm getting a little voice in my head saying:"it might'a been...".
Anyone know the answer?
This thread brings back a lot of memories. Back in the 50’s my Daddy had quit farming and was working at Eglin AFB, but our Uncle Buck grew a lot of cotton and I was glad of the chance to make money.
It really was hard work tho. I remember the first trip to the cotton gin in Geneva, Alabama which is just across the state line. Uncle Buck paid us in cash and the first thing I bought with my money was a monopoly set.
Yes.........Carson County Cotton Gin has truck bales laying all over the place right now up in the Panhandle and South of Lubbock cotton as far as ya can see !
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-123764993.html
Been up and running in Carson County Cotton Gin for last two or three years or more I believe.
What did the Silk Worm ever do for Texas?
Yes, indeed, it was.
Cotton root rot is a problem and is one reason that much land has been taken out of cotton production, particularly in the blacklands of North Texas.
In addition to The Lone Star State, California is also a major cotton producing state. I remember driving through the Central Valley in early November, 1991, and seeing these giant rectangular “piles” of cotton here and there. Each pile was the size of a semi-trailer and had a tarp tied to the top of the pile. A number was spray painted on the side of each rectangular “pile” of cotton.
Unfortunately, about two weeks later a dust storm blew through this same area. There was a massive pile-up of cars and trucks on Interstate 5, and around 19 people lost their lives.
Probably because the Ewings only dealt in oil and misbehavior.
Those are called "modules". You see them everywhere in Texas/
“My daddy was a cotton picker when he was a kid, the whole family did it. Yes, they were poor.”
So was mine...he grew up on a share-cropping farm, picked cotton from sun up to sun down for 50 cents a day. Said it made every job he had after that seem easy by comparison.
The breakfast at Cotton Gin are awesome!!!
Let me introduce you to the South Plains of Texas...
I truly enjoy that place.
And now I have a wifi laptop thaks to Santa to drip gravy on while I have breakfast there LoL
No. One cotton crop per farm per year.
The answer is yes, but IIRC (and I might err) slavery itself wasn't a factor in the economy, or even society (unless you count the Spanish/Mexican versions).
Texas had horses, cows, and cotton, it was a major trade center for the South (and sold to the north as well) until the very end of the war. Then it gave birth to much of the post war cowboy mythology because all those famous trails started there.
You can still see cotton fields southwest of Houston.
The modules are picked up by a large truck with a tilt bed and rows of chains that drag that module of cotton into the back of the truck. Reversing the chains deposits the module back on the ground at the gin.
If my memory serves me, Geneva has switched from cotton to meth production.
While you are right, that I did a poor job of phasing my question, it was not that I wanted to know if Texas had been a “slave state”, I knew it was. My question would have been better asked as: ‘Was Texas a major Cotton producer pre-Civil War?’ It was more about economy and employmet in Texas, than about slavery, per se. I just didn’t think that cotton was produced in great amounts in Texas before there was suitable transportation routes developed to get the cotton crops to market. Unlike the SE & SC areas that had easy river and ocean/Gulf access to shipping.
We hoed it, sprayed for boll weevils, and picked it from dawn til dark.
When I was a kid it seemed like the toe sack was a mile long. I remember it held about 50 lbs.
My mother hated picking it too.
When I was a boy in Texas we used to sing this song in school, “the boll weevil”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc9wfJ5mw6Y
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