OK, the picture of Eli Whitney yesterday should have clued you in that this was going to be Cotton Week here at OPOD. You see, all those riverboat pictures yesterday really put me in a Southern State of Mind, and I was taken back to the days of my childhood. Most of you probably don't realize that I grew up on a Cotton Plantation, and I spent the earliest days of my childhood picking cotton.
Now, it is a little bit of an exaggeration to say that I grew up on a Cotton Plantation. Really, I grew up on a Farm/Ranch that grew cotton. Also, by the time I came along, most of the cotton was picked with a combine. However, there still was a little cotton picked by hand, and I did go along a row dragging a big bag picking cotton bowls, but I think it was not so much that my help was needed as my dad wanted me to learn early in life that there were better things to do than pick cotton.
Anyway, I really love the picture above, showing women sorting some cotton. I am really not exactly sure what they are doing. There are bales in the background, which tells me that they are at or near the gin. The cotton gin can take the raw cotton bolls in at one end, and then strip the hard covering off, take the seeds out, and then compress into bales. I am not sure what the manual sorting is that the women appear to be doing.
