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September/October 2022 SOUTHERN SAMPLER
Treasured Times of Stomping Cotton While the fall is a time for football games, festivals, and other merry-making, it is also harvest time for farmers. After the expenses of planting in the spring and the follow-up expenses of protecting the summer crop from insects, fungi, and weather, harvest is the culmination of a year of work. Harvest time has changed drastically from when I was a child. Where it once took many people to harvest corn, soybeans, and cotton, now relatively few are needed. Huge machines have replaced small machines and people, and are much more efficient in gathering the crops. One activity that has gone by the wayside is stomping cotton. For those not familiar with this term, let me enlighten you. Once upon a time, long, long ago in the mid-twentieth century, cotton was harvested this way: cotton was picked by hand, dumped into the back of a pickup truck with wooden sides added to it, and pressed down by the repeated stomping of several people. Later, with the advent of the one-row cotton picker, cotton was picked, then dumped into a metal trailer to be hauled to the gin. Said trailer would sit in line while waiting to be emptied to bring it back to the field to be loaded again. Before it went to the gin, the cotton was stomped down by several someones in order to get the maximum amount on the trailer. The next improvement came with two-row pickers and a machine that mechanically stomped the cotton down. It was noisy and clumsy, but effective, and required just one man whose job was to operate the machine attached to a tractor. Then came bigger pickers and the new method of getting cotton to the gin in modules that held generally 10-12 bales of cotton. The module builder had built-in presses that the operator moved up and down to press the cotton as much as possible. Now, there are round bale pickers that pick, compress, and roll out round bales of cotton. Four of these bales are the equivalent of one large module but much easier to move and to load on module trucks. One man is doing the work that it formerly took three men to do per module builder. Automation, ain’t it grand. When my brothers and I were children, we would help stomp cotton in the trailers; or at least we considered ourselves helpers. There was always a man or two in the trailer, but we stomped and played and dug holes and had a load of fun every afternoon after school. James Duncan was usually the man in the trailer; and besides us, he had a bunch of sons who would help him stomp, too. I remember one fall when the cows were turned into the cotton fields where the cotton had been picked but while the picker was on the next field. Cows being cows, sometimes they would get pretty close to the trailers filled with cotton. There was one mean Brahma cow named Eloise that did not like cotton pickers or trailers in her way. If she saw kids picking up spilled cotton by a trailer, she would charge in that direction. All someone had to do was shout “Eloise!” and kids would be clinging to the sides of the trailer quicker than you could believe. After I went to college, some of my friends, especially Becki Merritt, would come here for a fall weekend where they got the chance to stomp cotton, a rare and special experience for them. When I had children of my own, they, too, got to play in the cotton as we had done decades back. Even after we switched over to the big modules, the youngsters could still get down in the cotton and play as kids had done for years. When Miss Liza came along, she, too, was put in the cotton to play. She was most uneasy about that operation; and when her Aunt Jorie asked how she liked it, her little face, which showed absolute terror, replied, “Fun!” when she really was thinking, “Get me out of here!” After a bit, she learned that it was just a place to play for a while; and she began to enjoy the experience, too. The fun of stomping cotton and the smell of the picked cotton were things that farm kids in the South used to take for granted, but that time has passed. Now, they’re just a memory of what life used to be, down on the farm at cotton-picking time.

by Alma M. Womack

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