Cotton Picking Time Brings Back Memories
John Nelson graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York in 1965 and enjoyed a long career at sea on commercial and military support ships. After retiring from his seagoing career, he continued working in various capacities in the maritime industry until a final retirement in 2012. Since then he has been active in researching local history and restoring and operating steam engines and antique mills.
He lives in neighboring Panola County and is a long-time member of the Yalobusha Historical Society. He writes about his experiences in the Panolian, Oxford Eagle and Herald. He is also the uncle of Herald publisher David Howell.
When scraps of cotton began appearing along the highways this fall, I thought about the vast changes in the cotton harvest I’ve seen in my lifetime. Men and women pulling long sacks down field rows have been replaced by big machines leaving behind neatly packaged modules ready for transport to the gin.
Thoughts of cotton picking made me remember a short clipping that I had saved years ago from the Commercial Appeal’s “Bygone Days”. According to the column, in 1889, a Cunningham Cotton Harvester being operated daily near Lake Cormorant, MS, could with two mules, a driver, and an attendant, harvest six to eight acres a day while doing the work of one hundred hands.
That’s pretty big doings as my grandfather used to say, and if the machine had been that successful and the improvements and innovations one would expect had been made through the years, the 1940s cotton culture that I was born into would have been different.
Since by the 1880s successful threshing machines had been around for decades, it might seem that it was high time for a mechanical picker to come along. But such thinking would not take into account the relative ease of separating grain from the chaff and straw compared to plucking cotton out of an open boll.
Despite the difficulties involved, inventors pushed forward in developing a practical mechanical picker with the attempts falling mainly into two categories: strippers and spindle pickers.
The strippers removed both open and unopened bolls along with leaves and trash that had to be separated by later actions in the picker or at the gin. Strippers have never disappeared from the scene, but they have not been as popular as spindle pickers which use rotating spindles to lift cotton fibers out of the open bowls without damaging the plant and unopened bowls.
Beginning in 1850, a number of inventors have been awarded patents for spindle cotton pickers, but a look at the efforts of Angus Campbell, an agricultural engineer from Chicago, is worthwhile since his innovations were to play a role in later picker development. Angus took his machines to Texas each year for a couple of decades to test his latest improvements, and in 1912, he joined with Theodore Price to form the Price-Campbell Cotton Picker Corporation. Their pickers were never deemed successful and were often ridiculed by Texas farmers, but they were on the right track.
The Rust brothers, John and Mack, from Texas are often credited with the development of the first practical picker. Spindle pickers had previously used barbed spindles to remove the lint from the boll, but the barbs became clogged with lint and leaves. The Rusts used a smooth spindle that was moistened to make the lint adhere to the spindle while making it easy to remove.
Early on, Texas had been the scene of much experimentation with mechanical pickers, but Memphis soon became the center for cotton picker development, and the Rust Brothers moved there in 1935. The following year, a Rust picker was featured in a public trial at the Delta Experiment Station near Leland. It had some imperfections but it proved capable of harvesting cotton.
It’s interesting that the development of the mechanical picker was very much interconnected with the socioeconomic concerns of the time. After the North destroyed the South’s economy during the War Between the States, capital for experimentation and development came mostly from Northern investors. There is some evidence that these investors were reluctant to finance picker development because they didn’t want their cities overrun with displaced Southern sharecroppers and field hands.
Concerns about upsetting the sharecropping system were also evident in the South. After the partial success of the Rust picker, an editorial in the Jackson Daily News stated that the “Rust machine should be driven out of the field and sunk in the Mississippi River.”
Despite mechanical obstacles and some foot-dragging by those not keen on seeing a successful picker, advances continued until the International Harvester Corporation developed what is considered the first commercially successful picker.
After some of its own ideas didn’t pan out, Harvester bought up the Price-Campbell patents, and focused on spindle picker development. By employing spindles with teeth and using a device called a doffer to strip cotton and trash from the spindles, the company made a breakthrough. And since Harvester had introduced its line of Farmall tractors in the 1920s, it had the means to mobilize its picker.
By the early 1940s, the company abandoned the idea of pulling its machine through the field and mounted a one-row picker on a Farmall H tractor with the transmission gears reversed and the clutch and gear shifter relocated so that it moved backwards down the rows. And then just as Harvester was getting close to production, much of its manufacturing efforts were diverted to producing military hardware during World War II.
By the time the war was over and steel was again available for the commercial market, Harvester had perfected its picker, and by 1949, the company had a modern factory built in Memphis ready to churn out pickers for the mid-South market.
These were the mechanical pickers that came on scene in Yalobusha County in the early 1950s – more than sixty years after the Commercial Appeal reporter had witnessed their mule-drawn ancestor at work near Lake Cormorant.
