I should tell you that I wasn’t raised around cotton, and am a transplant to the area. I’ve only been here for about 25 years, so I’ll need to be careful that I don’t guess at how things were done in the cotton harvest back when they did it by hand. I’ve talked to several people who have picked cotton by hand, but I never have myself. All I know is what I’ve been told.
I bought the two (authentic) cotton sacks at the auction, because they announced what farm that they came from. I had helped harvest cotton on that farm (working for a farmer that had it leased) with modern machinery in 2005. My job was operating the Module Builder. Instead of dumping the cotton from the Stripper (harvester) into 4-wheel wagons with high sides as they had done for years between hand-picking and modules, they dumped it into a machine that uses hydraulics to press the cotton into a large module setting on the ground. The Module Builder back door is opened and the machine is moved by farm tractor to another location to build another module. A large truck with a self-loader from the gin arrives later to take the module to the gin.
I don’t think very many in this area still use the 4-wheel cotton trailers anymore, and I think that I saw in the newspaper a while back that the gin even took out their giant vacuum machine that they used to suck the cotton out of the trailers. My wife and I used to like it when cotton harvest came back in the trailer days. The roadsides would be white with the cotton that blew out of the trailers on the way to the gin, and it looked like we had snow. I imagine that the farmers are glad to not see all of that cotton going to waste anymore (the module trucks are enclosed except for the rear). There’s a little bit of cotton along the roads these days, but not like it used to be.
On the flip side, the trailer days included a lot more slow-moving vehicles to watch out for on the roads. Farmers would hitch several trailers together end-to-end and pull them to the gin with a pickup truck. The slack in the steering axles on the older trailers would allow the trailers to wonder from side to side across the road, and seldom in synchronization with each other, so the string of trailers resembled a snake going down the road. LOL
CD in Oklahoma