Cotton picker

“ If subjected unduly to wind and rain the cotton, drooping in the bolls, would be blown to the ground or tangled with dead leaves or stained with mildew. It was expedient accordingly to send the pickers through the fields as early and as often as there was crop enough open to reward the labor.
Four or five compartments held the contents of each boll; from sixty to eighty bolls were required to yield a pound in the seed; and three or four pounds of seed cotton furnished one pound of lint. When a boll was wide open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of the fingers ”

“ There are a large number of cotton pickeries in that city. Their business is to buy up damaged cotton, such as has been through a fire and has been water-soaked, or otherwise damaged. They pick this cotton over very carefully, eliminating the parts that have been damaged by fire, or some like cause, and sell the salvage for a good price. In other words, these cotton pickeries conduct a business similar to that of junk dealers in other cities.
Poyneer ran a car load of cotton into one of these pickeries and sold it much below its market value. ”

“ He had arranged to take to Boston to lay before the New England Cotton Manufactures' Association samples of cotton from all the gins on the grounds. "Mr. Atkinson has proposed another trial of every kind of gin, cleaner, press and picker, to be made in the building of the New England Mechanics' Institute in Boston, in December, 1882. Every man in the South who is especially interested in cotton production and manufacture will be invited to plant a specific acre for use at this trial, which will be the second step in what has been so well begun in Atlanta. ”

“ When the bolls are ripe, they open, and then the picking commences. As a rule, the first pickings are the best as to color and cleanness, and the longer the bolls are exposed to the inclemencies of the weather in Autumn and Winter, the more the quality will deteriorate. The picked cotton consists of two thirds of seed and one third of actual cotton. In order to obtain the fibre, the cotton is passed through a ginning machine. From the seeds, edible oil is gained and the residue is manufactured into food for cattle, while the cotton is formed into bales in specially constructed presses. ”

“ But the best pickers rarely average more than a hundred pounds a day, and most of them pull much less. Careless work plays its part, too, for cotton is easily dropped from the boll and soiled or lost altogether. Leaves and twigs as well as the shell of the boll frequently cling to the fiber, and are picked with it, and all these things tend to dirty and discolor it, and lessen its marketability. It 43 requires about three pounds of cotton with the seed in it, as picked, to produce one pound of ginned or lint cotton. ”

“ This is to put the cotton in when the sack is filled. The baskets are carried to the field and placed at the beginning of the rows.
When a new hand, one unaccustomed to the business, is sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly, and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At night it is weighed, so that his capability in cotton picking is known. He must bring in the same weight each night following. If it falls short, it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty. ”

“ Comparatively few farmers or planters select their seed, though several of the Southern agricultural colleges have set up cotton schools, and the president of the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College has actually begun to hold farmers’ institutes for the negro farmers. The cotton bale is probably the most careless package used for a valuable product. It sometimes literally drops to pieces before it reaches the consumer; and of course the grower, in the long run, loses by the poor quality or the poor packing of his product. ”

“ A simple method of increasing the yield is that practised with success by some growers in the States. Pickers are trained to recognize the best plants, “that is, those most productive, earliest in ripening, and having the largest, best formed and most numerous bolls.” These pickers go carefully over the field, usually just before the second picking, and gather ripe cotton from the best plants only; this selected seed cotton is ginned separately, and the seed used for sowing the next year’s crop. ”

“ In all of them the fiber is really an appendage of the seeds, and each pod as it splits open is found to be packed full of a white cottony mass of these fibers with the seeds attached. These white masses of cotton, or bolls, have to be picked by hand, as no really successful machine has ever been found for this purpose. Women and children do a large part of the picking, and the wastage due to careless picking is tremendous. The whole value of the cotton crop depends upon an invention by Eli Whitney, an American, of a machine to separate the cotton from its seed. ”

“ The expense of manufacturing, in a country where machinery is of the rudest kind, and manual labour is very cheap, is curiously exhibited in the price of cotton cloth in the island of Java. The cotton, in the seed, is sold by the picul, which is a weight of about 133 lbs. Not above one fourth or one fifth of this weight, however, is cotton: the natives, by means of rude wooden rollers, can only separate about 1 1/4 lb. of cotton from the seed by one day's labour. ”

“ The American, short stapled cottons can be cultivated as easily and with equal certainty of success in these districts, but are actually discouraged, though they succeed well, as being more troublesome and expensive to clean, and much less valuable, both as an article of export commerce, and for domestic consumption among themselves, than the Bourbon cotton. ”

“ Two kinds of the black-seed or long-staple variety thrived in the sea-islands and along the coast from Delaware to Georgia, but only the hardier and more prolific green-seed or short-staple cotton could be raised inland. The labor of cultivating and harvesting cotton of any kind was very great. The fiber, growing in bolls resembling a walnut in size and shape, had to be taken by hand from every boll, as it has to be today, for no satisfactory cotton harvester has yet been invented. ”

“ Cotton, the fibre chiefly concerned in these improvements, was obtained in limited quantities from various countries; but, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, not a single pound was exported from the United States. What was grown here was for domestic consumption. Every good housewife had her spinning-wheel, every plantation its hand-loom. The difficulty of supplying cotton fibre in quantity sufficient to meet the demands of the new machinery was due to the imperfect means in use for separating the cotton from its seeds—a tedious operation, for the picking was done by hand. ”

“ It has frequently been noted that even well-fertilized plants upon good soil will mature only 15 or 20% of the bolls produced. No means are known so far for preventing this great waste. Experts are at an entire loss to form a correct idea of the cause, or to apply any effective remedy.
Cotton-picking is at once the most difficult and most expensive operation in cotton production. It is paid for at the rate of from 45 to 50 cents per cwt. of seed cotton. The work is light, and is effectually performed by women and even children, as well as men ”

“ From the axle-tree often hung a gourd, or an iron kettle. One man carried a rifle on his pommel. Sometimes, these carts would contain a single bale of cotton, more commonly, an assorted cargo of maize, sweet potatoes, poultry, game, hides, and peltry, with, always, some bundles of corn-leaves, to be fed to the horse. Women and children were often passengers, or travelled on foot, in company with the carts, which were usually furnished with a low tilt. Many of them, I found, had been two or three days on the road, bringing down a little crop to market ”

“ It is difficult to speak intelligently about or against machinery, and my comments made no great stir—e.g. "Why has it to be pressed?" and "Do the different people's cotton not get mixed?" and "What I like is, it is so primitive." To this last indeed it was somewhat severely replied that the process I had viewed was anything but primitive—nay, that it was the last word on cotton-pressing, or it would not have been adopted at Alexandria. ”

“ As a general rule, cotton-seed brought to the United States, from where it is a native to where it is an exotic, will produce a better cotton than where it is grown, the tendency being continually to a longer and better staple. ”

“ The foreman asked my opinion upon various points of plantation management, but I deferred making answer until a subsequent occasion. In every case I told him to do for the present as they had been accustomed, and I would make such changes as I saw fit from time to time.
Cotton-picking requires skill rather than strength. The young women are usually the best pickers, on account of their superior dexterity. The cotton-stalk, or bush, is from two to five or six feet high. It is unlike any plant with which we are familiar in the North. ”

“ Daily in the early mornings he is to be seen casting his eyes down the pod-laden rows of cotton plants, to see if he can count a few ripe open bolls as he stands at the head of a row. If this be so, he knows that his harvest is close at hand, and his pickers must be ready at any moment to begin what is certainly the most tedious and difficult work of the plantation, namely, picking the raw cotton from the bursting bolls. ”

“ There is in the cotton states a rural population of over 7,000,000, more or less occupied in cotton-growing, and capable, at the low average of 100 ℔ a day, of picking daily nearly 500,000 bales. It is evident, therefore, that if this number could work through the whole season of 100 days, they could pick three or four times as much cotton as the largest crop ever made. Great efforts have been made to devise cotton-picking machines, but, as yet, complete success has not been attained. Lowne’s machine is useful in specially wide-planted fields and when the ground is sufficiently hard. ”

“ In mills where strength and evenness of yarn are at a premium, the sheets from three or four laps may be fed through another opener, usually called a "scutcher," which breaks them all apart again, mixes up the fibers, cleans out more of the dirt, and produces a more even lap.
The cotton, as it comes from the opener and the scutcher, is much cleaner and 46 more attractive. It begins to look like the riches it contains. ”

“ Under such circumstances, the picking season becomes one of fun and frolic, to which our co-operators, look forward with rejoicing. Six hours in each day spent in such light, pleasant work, is hardly regarded as toil. Yet, the amount of cotton picked by each individual, measured by the number of hours employed, is fully up to the standard set by good pickers, under the old system of long hours. The nimble-fingered women easily bear off the palm, as the expert pickers. If they were paid by the pound, their earnings would be greater than those of the men. ”

“ The movement of the cotton trade, like that of civilisation, has ever been westward. India is recognised as having been from time immemorial its home, and although there cotton has probably been in use for ages as clothing, there is no evidence to show that the substance was even known in Europe till the tenth, or that its manufacture was commenced in England till the end of the sixteenth, century. At that time the weavers used yarn made from “cotton wool,” as it was called, but which yarn was furnished by the Levant and only used for weft, linen forming the warp. ”

“ In the four hundred pounds of lint in a bale of cotton there are but four pounds of chemical elements taken from the soil; in the oil there is little more; but in the seed-cake and hulls there are forty pounds of potash and phosphate of lime. But admirable as is the disposition of the cotton seed for manufacture, ample as is the margin of profit, and rapid as has been the growth in the industry, there exists the same disorganization that is noticeable in the handling of the whole cotton question. ”

“ Even when the South has passed beyond the proper handling of cotton seed, she has very important ground to cover before she arrives at what is generally known as cotton manufacturing. “The manufacture of this staple,” says a very eminent authority, “is a unit, beginning at the field where the cotton is picked, and ending at the factory from which the cloth is sent to the merchant.” ”

“ On a Moderate calculation the Invention has given employment for many years to thousands of Machine makers and Spinners, and perhaps to 50,000 Weavers and in the agregate reconing from the raw material not less than 300,000 Men, Women & Children, its extencive use has caused the increased growth and import of cotton to an immence extent to the great advantage of landowners, merchants, and planters. ”

“ They (the Southern States) have the advantage of cotton location, and, when they have secured new and improved machinery, will do any unrivalled business. They can save freights, buy cheaper and hire cheaper labor. They save buyers' commission, and warehouse delivery and cartage, sampling, classing, pressing, shipping, marine risks and freight and cartage to interior towns, which amounts in all to some seven dollars per bale. The Northern mills also lose from receiving cotton poorly ginned, containing a good deal of leaf and sand, which is computed at six per cent. ”

“ Some have not done well owing to defective management. But others are working day and night. The importation of raw cotton has quadrupled in the last three years, while that of cotton on the seeds has doubled. A million dollars worth of the most improved British spinning machinery was laid down last year, and much attention is being given to the cultivation of the cotton plant, although, owing to the typhoons, with indifferent success. ”