The namesake attraction for the Cotton Ginning Days was a wooden building which housed a 1920 model diesel engine downstairs and a cotton gin upstairs.
For the types of people who enjoy mechanical things, the diesel engine was quite an exciting piece of equipment. At first, Roger, Caleb, and I all toured the building while the engine was shut off. The operator said he would restart the engine in a half an hour or so. While Caleb was setting up with his band, Roger and I headed back to the cotton gin once more. As we started up the hill, the engine began belching smoke heavenward in neat little rings. If one could read smoke signals, he would have probably understood the message that we've become industrialized.
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The steep steps on the side of the building led to the small room upstairs with the gin.
You can see a diagram of the gin on the wall. The man in overalls has his right hand on the edge of the hopper where the cotton is fed into the gin.
The basket is full of cotton that is ready to be ginned. It is in the state that it comes from the field--with the seeds still in the boll.
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Here is the hopper full of cotton.
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The seed spilled out onto the floor at the right end of the gin. I was surprised there wasn't a bin or chute for the seed. I guess they scooped it up by a shovel to fill the bags. Cottonseed is used in all sorts of things from cattle feed to food to cosmetics. One of our road snacks, potato chips, had cottonseed oil as the second ingredient.
After the seed has been separated from the cotton lint, the cotton loops back through the machine, and the cotton batt comes out the left end and enters the wooden chute.
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A volunteer is sweeping the batt down the chute and into the press.
Another person has a wooden tool to stuff the cotton down into the press. The press will compact the cotton into a bale.
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A bale weighs 500 lbs. That little song we sang in school, "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale o' cotton; jump down, turn around pick a bale a day!" had to be an exaggeration. In order to end up with a bale (500 lbs. of lint), a person would have to pick about 1250 lbs. of cotton. There would be about 750 lbs. of seed and 500 lbs. of lint. (The ratios might vary some depending on the cotton.)
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In one corner of the room were the sheets filled with cotton. It was a vivid reminder that slaves, sharecroppers, and farm families have spent countless hours of back-breaking toil in the cotton fields. Roger's family sharecropped. His father was known to pick close to 200 lbs. of cotton in one day, so I'm told. Roger would pick for a few weeks each season and get paid 10 cents per lb. My mother's family farmed cotton, too. It was their money crop. In summer, the cotton was chopped. Then there was the laborious chore of picking up the "squares," the immature bolls that had been spoiled by weevils and dropped to the ground. They were destroyed to interrupt the boll weevil life cycle. Then when the cotton ripened, Mom and her siblings would come home from school and pick cotton until dark. They usually were done around Thanksgiving. Just last week, I went by the farm where my mother grew up. Cotton was still being grown in the bottoms along the creek. It will be harvested these days with a mechanical harvester, and should my mother see it, she will be compelled to say, "Those machines leave a lot of cotton in the field."
I left with a handful of seeds which I might plant in the garden next year.
For some "cotton ginning days" were a way of life, not just an excursion to a fairground on a sunny autumn day.
