Cotton: The Long and Short of It

Mammy's little baby loves shot'nin', short'nin',

Mammy's little baby loves short'nin' bread...

If those lyrics don't immediately bring the song to mind, you can here a version here. It's one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano many, many moons ago.

Most people believe this to be a song sung by slaves on the plantation, but it was actually first published with the lyrics I mention above in 1915.  It is considered to be a folk song.

James Whitcomb Riley is credited with creating an even earlier version in 1900.

Shortening Bread is a  wonderful mixture of cornmeal, flour, hot water, eggs, baking powder, milk and shortening and instead of baking it you serve it fried.   Shortening is used to make various types of pastry and used for frying foods.  One of my favorite uses that I try to stay away from as much as possible is frosting such as the type of frosting on wedding cakes.

Oh my!   What a wicked little pleasure that stuff is....

Did you know shortening and cotton are connected?

Yes, they are...really.

Cotton begins showing up in my curriculum early on when we discuss the British Colonies - the Southern Colonies in particular - as we examine the plantation system and look at the various crops that were raised in the fields of Georgia and other southern colonies.

Around the 1840s and 1850s, the South heads to the front of the curriculum again as we explore the Missiouri Compromise and other events leading up to the Civil War.

Sometimes the continued importance of cotton as a staple in the southern economy is missed.  Oh sure, students are taught cotton was king in the south, but I think we often help students overlook how integral the cotton crop was to the economy before the Civil War and afterwards by ending the cotton conversation after the war has been fought as we launch into Reconstruction.

The afterwards part is where I think the mark is missed in many classrooms.  Cotton remained king in the South even after the Civil War - even after the emancipation of the slaves.  For example, in 1919 in Laurens County, Georgia they ginned 37,323 bales of cotton which ended up weighing 18.7 million pounds.  In 1912, the amount increased to 30 million pounds of cotton.

No, cotton didn't go away at all.   Once cotton is ginned, and the fluffy white fibers are separated from the seeds the cotton farmer ends up with a lot of seeds, too. 

The cotton gin owners were drowning in seeds and figured there had to be some uses of them...uses that might make a few extra dollars.   They were right, of course.

The hull from a cottonseed can be fed to animals for roughage.  Ground cottonseeds can be used for fertilizer, but they can also be crushed for cottonseed oil.  30 million pounds of cotton has the potential to produce tons of seeds and gallons of cottonseed oil.

Crude cottonseed oil is dark red in color and has a very distasteful flavor and odor, but several industrious people decided there had to be a use for the oil - there had to be a way to work around the color, flavor, and odor, and ....care had to be taken since left untreated cottonseed oil could become a paralytic pesticide.

Enter The Southern Oil Company formed in 1887 who took on the cottonseed oil in order to create viable consumer products. There had to be a way to make cottonseed oil more appetizing.   They hired David  Wesson, a food chemist who was a graduate as well as faculty member at MIT.  It too Doc Wesson, as he was fondly called, 16 years to develop the process to deodorize cottonseed oil. 

The process Doc Wesson finally hit upon involved a high-temperature vacuum process that became known as the Wesson Process.

If you haven't guessed by now...the resulting product of course, was Wesson Oil currently owned by ConAgra, but when it first hit the market Wesson Oil was created by The Southern Oil Company.

Several forms of Wesson Oil exist today, but in the earliest days of Wesson Oil was made from cottonseed oil only. 

The company also wanted to develop a product that would be an alternative to hog lard.  Doc Wesson used the process of hydrogenation with the cottonseed oil and created the product they marketed as Snowdrift Shortening.

Hydrogenation involves adding a little hydrogen to help make a solid fat from the liquid oil and then it is chilled.

But the marketing department at The Southern Oil Company had a problem.  Cooks were used to using hog fat and were fairly stubborn regarding changing to an all vegetable shortening. 

Housewives across America had to be persuaded to use products like Snowdrift.  Hence the need for magazine ads posing as articles such as this one that says at one point, "Snowdrift is made entirely of this pure vegetable oil - nothing else - hardened into a creamy looking fat by hydrogenating, because - frankly - the women of this country didn't want to cook with liquid fat, but wanted it to be white and solid and look like the old fashioned hog fat they were accustomed to."

Snowdrift was advertised all over the South. One such outdoor advertisement still exist including this one in Douglasville, Georgia where I happen to live.

Yes, the Wesson Process enabled shortening to be made as well as other products such as mayonnaise, margarine, and salad dressing.

The 50th anniversary of Snowdrift was celebrated in 1951.   At that time the makers of Wesson Oil stated, "It is a story of how the crushing and refining industry made many products from cottonseed, once considered a useless part of the cotton industry, except for planting.   It is a story of a development that brought more income to the farmer of the south."

Don't shortchange students regarding the life of cotton in the South.   It continued to be a major crop that held an important role in the South on into the New South Era and the rise of the cotton mill economy.

Demolition by Neglect

This past week I performed a little experiment. I threw the word “history” out to various people–friends, waitresses, store clerks, even a couple of surprised strangers–and asked them to tell me what immediately popped into their minds.

Various words were thrown back to me–events, dates, maps, wars, battles–and the list goes on.

None of the responses really surprised me, but there are other words to parallel with the word history. Words like preservation, remember, and trust come to mind and unfortunately, the words failure, greed, demolish, surrender, neglect, and ignore are on the flipside as I continue examining the winding path of history a cotton mill where I live has taken.

I shared the story over at Douglasville Patch last week where I have a weekly column regarding how Douglasville ended up with the cotton mill and how important the mill was to our economic health over most of the last century. You can see my column from last week here.

Now I want to share the rest of the story regarding how history can be neglected and forgotten by the very people we trust to preserve it. Sometimes in their attempts to improve the lives of citizens in the here and now they actually betray the trust handed to them by citizens who took their leave a long time ago. They also end up cheating future generations regarding our historical record.

History can also be used by folks who are just looking for easy outs in business in order to leverage property or satisfy some misguided need to collect historic properties, and then allow them to die a slow death of neglect for some strange reason I simply cannot fathom.

You can see the entire article here.

The New South: Railroads and Mill Towns

Lanett and Opelika in Alabama….Amity in Arkansas…..Hogansville, Canton, and Douglasville in Georgia….Concord and Carrboro in North Carolina and Cherokee Falls, Piedmont and Whitmire in South Carolina…..All of these places including many other cities and towns across the South were all major mill towns birthed during the New South era.

The New South Era has as many definitions as other historical periods such as the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, but for my purposes here I’m going with Edward L. Ayers.   In his book The Promise of the New South:  Life after Reconstruction he states the New South era began in the 1880s after the biracial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction had ended and the conservative white Democrats had taken power throughout the southern states.

A fellow Georgian, Henry W. Grady, is credited with the term “New South” which represents an ideology that emphasized a new reliance upon railroads and industrialization to modernize the South. 

Many Southerners jumped on Grady’s bandwagon and became New South boosters.  New South advocates espoused a renewal of the Southern economy, a bridge to reconcile differences with the North, racial harmony and a support of hard work.  

The first area of focus for New South boosters were the existing railroads that had been damaged or neglected during the Civil War.  They also wanted to extend new lines to criss-cross the South making important trade connections with cities and towns all across the country. 

Ayers states between 1865 and the 1870s there were nearly 8,000 miles of track in the South.   By 1880, the number of miles jumped to 20,000 and by the end of the decade the South boasted 40,000 miles of track carrying not only passengers but manufactured goods as well. 

Henry W. Grady and other New South boosters worked tirelessly to engage investors from the South as well as the North.   I’ve always felt it was important to make sure students understand the United States’ habit of rebuilding former enemy territory didn’t just begin after World War I or II – most of the money and resources used to revitalize the South following the Civil War came from northern investments.

Other than the railroads, New South boosters also focused on establishing cotton mills not only in the larger cities such as Atlanta or New Orleans but in smaller towns all across the South.

Cotton mills became a symbol of economic health, and every little town wanted one.  When outside investors were slow to respond townspeople would scrimp and save to get a mill going.   According to Ayers though, by 1870, the bulk of investment dollars came from northern and foreign investors.

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Ayers further states in 1880 there were 160 cotton mills in the South.  By 1890, there were 400.

In his book Creating the Modern South:  Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, Douglas Flamming advises the rise of southern railroad towns and the farmers’ shift to cash crop agriculture were mutually reinforcing trends that fostered a spirit of entrepreneurial boosterism among local businessmen and professionals.

Don Harrison Doyle author of Toward a New South Urbanization and Southern Culture Economic Elites in Four New South Cities agrees with Flamming stating most boosters worked in the most vigorous sections of the local economy such as trade and rail transportation and included doctors, lawyers, planters, and even clergymen.

This website states since New England already had a firmly established textile industry, southern businessmen benefitted from the most-up-to-date technologies and equipment from the start of their endeavors without wasting investments on outdated methods.   These technological advancements meant that workers unschooled in the craft tradition could be recruited to perform jobs such as making cloth.

New South advocates espoused a renewal of the Southern economy, a bridge to reconcile differences with the North, racial harmony and a support of hard work to achieve the goals. Unfortunately, racial harmony proved to be the most difficult goal to achieve, and I assert here that even today it has not been achieved in many circles, but the New South Era did see tremendous positive changes regarding the Southern economy.

Looking back on the political and social events leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction I still wonder why it had to take a war and terrible devastation to help people to understand there had to be a better way to grow the Southern economy

New South ideology has been my focus over the last two weeks regarding a column I write for a local website.

You can view my previous two columns focusing on the growth of the railroad in my little town during the New South Era here and here

Other articles focusing on mill towns can be found here and here.

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