Sep

2010

11:14am, EDT

National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress

Eli Whitney's cotton gin [between 1909 and 1920]. A cotton mill in Augusta, Georgia is closing after being operated since 1868 by descendants of the cotton gin's inventor.

Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia. They produce little, sell little, buy little. June 1937

Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

The cotton sharecropper's unit is one mule and the land he can cultivate with a one-horse plow. Greene County, Georgia, July 1937

F.E. Lee Co. / Library of Congress

A Georgia cotton plantation, 1917

F.E. Lee Co. / Library of Congress

Picking cotton in Georgia, 1917.

Lewis Wickes Hine / National Child Labor Committee / Library of Congress

Some adolescents in a Georgia Cotton Mill. 1909.

Lewis Wickes Hine / National Child Labor Committee / Library of Congress

Doffer boys in Georgia Cotton Mill. 1909

Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

Farm boy with sack full of boll weevils which he has picked off of cotton plants. Macon County, Georgia, July 1937

End of (another) cotton era in South?

By Stokes Young, nbcnews.com

Sometimes a news story with historical resonance prompts us to dig through the Library of Congress archive for visual context. That's the case here.

As NPR reports, a cotton mill in Augusta, Georgia run by descendants of cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney is shutting down, and some folks are noting the symbolic and historic importance of the event:

Between 2006 and '09, U.S. cotton acreage dropped by 40 percent. That's exactly when Whitney's business dried up.

"The old world of cotton is probably dead," says Darren Hudson, director of the Cotton Economics Research Institute at Texas Tech University.

According to Hudson, S.M. Whitney's closing is the symbolic end of an era. He says today's market is all about export sales, not business relationships.

Read more about the closing here.

It's worth seeing the F.E. Lee Co. panoramic images from 1917 at larger size on the Library of Congress site:
A Georgia Cotton plantation
Picking Cotton in Georgia

We have previously published pictures by Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

Explore related topics: cotton, from-the-archive, cotton-gin

SBPhrog

Stokes, you've done it again.

These pics grab me and bring emotion. Of course I do have musical roots, so the Land of the Blues is dear to me, but this goes beyond that, and makes me wonder what replaces Cotton? So many good clothing items are manufactured out of this natural, organic fiber that any substitute is puzzling.

Gotta break out my Alan Lomax, Smithsonian Recordings and vibe on this.