Cotton

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. On my travels to and from Sumter I pass the fertile fields of Fort Motte. This year the cotton crop seems phenomenal. It’s the closest thing to a snow-covered landscape I’m likely to see in these days of changing weather patterns. In the forties and fifties cotton was still picked by hand in Calhoun County, Domestic workers would take off from those jobs and pick cotton to supplement their meager wages. An older friend told me he picked cotton on his knees aiming for over two hundred pounds a day. There was a push back on mechanical cotton harvesting machines at one time as the cotton belt states feared massive unemployment of sharecroppers. When the second world war came and the need for workers in factories, use of these machines became widespread.