My earliest memory of Greenville from childhood, passing through on the way to the beach, was thinking that it was awfully messy with all that trash blowing around. It wasn’t trash, it was cotton bolls, not that it looked much different from a distance.
I don’t remember cotton but I do remember tobacco. There were fields and fields of it all around and all of my male friends would pick tobacco in the summer. We grew up with tobacco barns behind our house where the leaves were hung up to dry.