Driving by a cotton field for the first time down south I had to stop the car and get out to touch and feel the cotton flower. The sea of white cotton was stunning and seeing a cotton field was a very thought provoking moment for me. So much history.Up north we learned two thing about cotton: 1) Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and 2) with this invention the South became more dependent on slaves and plantations. Oh and a song we would hear from time to time.
When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In those old cotton fields back home
When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In those old cotton fields back home
Oh, when those cotton ball get rotten
You can't pick very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home
It was back in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back home
(wikipedia) The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth of the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. The growth of cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. By 1860 the United States' South was providing eighty percent of Great Britain’s cotton and also providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton.
Cotton had formerly required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds; the cotton gin revolutionized the process. With Eli Whitney’s introduction of “teeth” in his cotton gin to comb out the cotton and separate the seeds, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the Antebellum South. New Orleans and Galveston were shipping points that derived substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout the South.
I am sure you can imagine with the history of this soft fluffy fiber, it would be intense seeing it up close for the first time. I even gathered a few shrubs and took them home as a souvenir. They still sit atop one of our bookcases in the living room. I might add that they have since perfected even more the harvesting of cotton:
Now about cranberries:
My home state of Massachusetts was once a thriving cranberry producer and while growing up, I had the opportunity to work in a cranberry cannery for the ocean spray company. I was lucky I did not have to work on the bog.
But instead worked indoors where they made cranberry sauce.
They first would harvest the little red berries in a bog, ship them to the cannery and move them to huge cooking vats. As you can imagine, this process could also include little critters that were living in the bogs, like frogs. I will always remember the lead sauce cook exclaim jokingly, this can contains at least one frog leg :)
My first job was to put the empty cans on the assembly line so they could fill up with the sauce down the line and then be moved to large refrigerators to be frozen. Sounds easy? Picture that Lucile ball bit where she is trying to keep up with a chocolate Assembly line,
that was me.
Cranberries really don't compare to cotton when it comes to American history and such, but via wikipedia, I will submit to you a little cranberry history:
The name cranberry derives from "craneberry", first named by early European settlers in America who felt the expanding flower, stem, calyx, and petals resembled the neck, head, and bill of a crane. Another name used in northeastern Canada is mossberry. The traditional English name for Vaccinium oxycoccos, fenberry, originated from plants found growing in fen (marsh) lands.
In North America, Native Americans were the first to use cranberries as food. Native Americans used cranberries in a variety of foods, especially for pemmican, wound medicine and dye. Calling the red berries Sassamanash, natives may have introduced cranberries to starving English settlers in Massachusetts who incorporated the berries into traditional Thanksgiving feasts.American Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall is credited as first to farm cranberries in the Cape Cod town of Dennis around 1816. In the 1820s cranberries were shipped to Europe.[5] Cranberries became popular for wild harvesting in the Nordic countries and Russia. In Scotland, the berries were originally wild-harvested but with the loss of suitable habitat.
I do remember “stringing" cranberries for Christmas ornaments. You cant really do that with cotton.
