The Cotton Patch

Have you ever had to 'chop, pick or pull' cotton? If you were raised on a farm in West TN, and over the age of 50, I'd just bet the answer to that question would be, "Yes"! That was one job I hated to do as a young girl. I can remember 'riding' on my momma's cotton sack, as she picked cotton and dragged the sack packed with cotton down the rows, to the cotton trailer, parked at the end of the row. (I was only about 3 or 4 years old.) That is where the cotton was lifted up to a pea scale, which was attached to the trailer, and weighed. There was different size pea's, which was a heavy bell shaped weight, moved from side to side for the correct weight. There would be a green cotton bole in the bottom of one corner of your cotton sack. A piece of baling wire was wrapped around the bole, then looped around. Therefore, the wire  from the bottom and the shoulder strap at the top, was brought together to hang it on to the cotton scale. If you were really good at "pickin' cotton", and packed your sack well, you could easily get 150 pounds of cotton in your sack. When I became 6 years old, momma made me my very own cotton sack. (Thrill-thrill)  She made it on her Singer treadle sewing machine, from the cloth of a 25 pound bag of flour, which then was purchased in a cloth sack. It was about the size of a standard pillow case. I could get approx 7 to 8 pounds of cotton in it.
School would be out for 6 weeks in the summer for "cotton chopping". Then we went back to school until fall arrived, and we would be out for another 6 weeks for "cotton picking". The final stage of the harvest was to strip the cotton stalks by "pulling cotton". That would be done by pulling the entire boles and cotton.
My daddy would pull the trailer to the cotton gin, which was about 4 miles from the cotton patch, with either a team of mules or the little 8-N Ford tractor. I remember riding on the cotton and playing in it. Momma would always tell daddy, "Don't let her go to sleep in there, and get sucked up at the gin."
Those were the good old days, so much like the Amish live their daily lives today.

These photo's show the cotton field of my next door neighbor. Modern technology has changed the way cotton is picked and baled today. Needless to say, the Amish have to get English farmers to get the cotton ready for market, but they do still plant and maintain the cotton crop with mules and horse drawn farm equipment.

Thanks for reading my "Trip Down Memory Lane".