Cotton Facts

We're all big cotton consumers but we don't know much about it---at least it looks that way from the kind of comments I get about the price, importation, trade and the fabric advertised as "made in America," etc.

Cotton is so bound up in American identity that we seem to hear more myth than facts.

To understand the current industry you have to know the history---

Subtleties of different cotton plants, grades of fiber and geography

are not easy to understand.

French painter Edgar Degas worked in his family's cotton business

in Louisiana in the mid-19th-century. He painted a man grading cotton.

Marion Post Wolcott photo, Library of Congress

Same job, a century later

I  found a good summary of American cotton production in a history of Charleston. Walter J. Fraser, Jr. wrote Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City about 30 years ago.

Some quotes from the book:

"Sea-island cotton was a very fine, strong cotton that came to be grown near the coast from Florida to Georgetown, South Carolina. Although susceptible to damage by spring frost and autumn fog, it was grown successfully and shipped abroad through Charleston, Beaufort and Savanna until the boll weevil ruined the crop in the early twentieth century.

The Sea Islands are a barrier reef/tidal island chain from the Santee River

down to Florida in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Short staple or 'upland cotton', more difficult to weave in mechanical looms, was neither as strong nor felt as luxurious as sea-island cotton, and therefore never commanded as high a price. Methods of extracting seed for long-staple or sea-island cotton had been perfected earlier, but short-staple cotton remained of no commercial value until the new ginning technology introduced in the early 1790s by Eli Whitney.

Man operating a cotton gin (engine) that combs out the seeds

Freed slaves working at a cotton gin during the Civil War

Library of Congress

"Thereafter, since short-staple cotton could be grown in a far wider region than the sea-island cotton, it spread, and slavery with it...

Dark green shows sea island cotton areas. 

Short staple, upland cotton areas in lightest yellow-green.

Today's cottons range from Egyptian cotton's longest staple (fiber length)

down to American Upland. 

We do not grow Sea Island Cotton anymore.

"For years the upland cotton was exported almost exclusively through Charleston.... Cotton crops were planted in the spring, picked from September to October, ginned and compressed during October and November, and then carried to local ports for shipment to English and European manufacturing centers. 

Shipping cotton out of New Orleans, 1880s

Photo by William Henry Jackson, Library of Congress 

"After the collapse of the indigo market in the late 1790s because of the competition from British India, the [Charleston] export trade was based primarily on rice and cotton. In 1791 South Carolina grew 1,500,000 pounds of cotton, a decade later, 20 million and production doubled again within the next ten years."

Production drove the price down

The book:
Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City. University of South Carolina Press, 1990

https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/pre1993/9797.html

Cotton prices over a year 2018-2019

About 90 cents a pound last summer

The last I looked cotton was a little below 60 cents a pound, down 30% from the summer of 2018. The price of quilting cotton per yard may not drop but I'll be optimistic that it won't be going up soon.