Lay by time has ended.  Summer school began in July after the crop was finished and ran for six weeks, ending in mid-August. The cotton had opened enough for picking to begin. This was the busiest time of the year for everyone involved with cotton. This process continued throughout August, September, and October, until the cotton harvest was completed. Some were finished after the Christmas holiday.

The world was white. The shoulders of the road were all white with cotton that blew off the wagons and trucks. The fields were filled with men, women and children picking cotton. Children from the mills in the small towns all came to pick cotton for the two cents a pound it paid. Big farmers who had trucks went to town and brought a load of cotton pickers for the day. Each picker had a two-hundred-pound burlap fertilizer bag with a strap attached to the top hanging around his neck, and a "sheet" made from four such bags sewed together. Sheets were placed at the end of the row, and full bags of cotton were emptied onto them.  (My cousin Henry Peden told me that when he was a boy in the forties and fifties living on Fairview Road at the intersection of Peden Road, they put their sheets out in Fairview Road, and the few cars that came along just drove around them.) At the conclusion of the day, the four corners were gathered and securely fastened together.  

The patriarch of the family would weigh each sheet on a beam scale supported by a tripod with a long lever to raise the weight. People were customarily paid at the end of each day.

The cotton gins ran all day and night on a good year. Wagons and trucks lined up at the gin. Some were left there and pulled up to the gin when their turn came. The load was transported into an open lean-to adjacent to the gin, where a movable suction pipe approximately one foot in diameter was used to draw the cotton into the gin.  

I remember my grandfather's gin, which burned in 1939. It was powered by a big single cylinder gasoline engine with a piston about a foot in diameter. It sat on a concrete pad behind the gin and had a flywheel about ten feet in diameter.  It had a belt about twenty-five feet long running into the gin. Every morning four or five men would grasp that belt and run toward the gin to start it. After the cotton was processed in the gin and seeds removed, the seeds were sent to another warehouse.  The cotton went into a tall press, and when ready, a huge screw pressed the cotton into a bale, secured with ties. The bale went out to the dock; the ginner weighed it with a beam scale and recorded the weight. He calculated the price and told the owner. Most farmers sold him cotton; others stored it hoping for higher prices.  A few strong farmers could back up to the four-foot dock, take a bale of cotton on their back, and walk around with it.

I was in the Lion's Club in Piedmont in 1965, and a speaker predicted what this area would look like in twenty-five years. He said that the agricultural economy would be gone, and that Greenville would look more like Cincinnati, Ohio, with factories and industry driving the economy. 

Few believed it, but in fact it was my father's last year of raising cotton, and that man was a visionary. Modern farming typically demands large land holdings and costly equipment.●