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Living in White County's past: When cotton was king
By Tim Bousquet
The Daily Citizen
Sunday, March 21, 2004 12:43 AM CST
Cotton was once king in these parts.
As recently as 1954, there were 3,423 farms in the White County supplying at least 27 cotton gins. But if anyone is still growing cotton in the county, it's in such small amounts that it doesn't warrant mention on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's commodity report. And when a survey team from the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program came through last week, they could find just two of the old gins, both slowly rotting away on the side of the road, fading testimonies to their rich past.
The best-preserved of the gins is the Stipe Cotton Gin in Beebe, near the intersection of Florida and South Cypress roads. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and as such is protected from demolition.
"The Stipes Gin was built around 1930, when cotton was the predominate crop in White County and White County was the top producer in the state," said Ralph Wilcox, the National Register and Survey coordinator with the state Preservation Program. "Beebe was the site of one of five large gin complexes in the county, and the Stipes Gin was instrumental in the development of Beebe as a town."
The second old gin can be found in Sunnydale, just west of the intersection of Highways 124 and 157. That gin, known as the Osborne Gin, is not yet a recognized historic structure and has no legal protection. The survey team couldn't determine much about it, and made no special notice of it, said Wilcox.
"It's just kind of sitting there on the side of the road."
It's been nearly 20 years since the state last catalogued the historic structures, said Wilcox. In the late 1980s, a similar survey team found four cotton gins, but then-standing gins in Bald Knob and Higginson have subsequently disappeared.
Last week's survey was conducted in part with hopes of preventing any further loss of historic gins. The Historic Preservation Program is writing a history of cotton in Arkansas, to be submitted to the National Register of Historic Places. If approved for publication by that organization, the history will be used to help nominate historic sites for the register.
"The history will give context for the importance of the individual gins in the history of cotton in Arkansas," said Wilcox.
He expects the history to be finished later this summer, while the survey will continue into next year.
Picking cotton was rough work, recalled Neal Gregory, who worked the farms as a youngster and later became the director of the county Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service.
"To this day, I think it is the most miserable job to be done," he wrote in White County Heritage, the newsletter for the White County Historical Society, in 1981. "Days began early, before daylight, and usually ran until sunset. Overalls and jean bottoms were soon wet from the dew; by mid-morning the only relief from the heat was a fruit jar of icewater wrapped in newspaper and cloth. You spent your days in a half-bend or crawling on your knees as the sack dragged behind. Usually by the end of the first day my fingers were bleeding from the opened bolls."
Cotton production in White County declined substantially in the 1960s, and then died out completely.
"Farmers moved away from cotton production until by 1979 there was only one farmer growing cotton in the county," wrote Gregory. "And that was the first year anyone could recall that White County did not have a single cotton gin operating anywhere. A combination of the entry of the boll weevil, scarcity of hired labor and unstable prices finally turned White County farmers from cotton and strawberry production to producing other crops."
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