From the “Vanishing Georgia Collection” of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, this photo suggests the flurry of activity as “ginning season” gets underway in the late fall. Notice the overhead electric power lines, a technological contrast with the mule-drawn cotton wagons of the farmers.

If you have been following my blog, you know that I often write about small town Georgia and the events that led to their decline-and along with them their once-emergent, rural middle class. This is also a way of understanding my own roots. I was born in a very small town in east central Georgia’s Burke County. As late as the 1950’s it was but little changed since its founding about 1905. It had once been peopled by families that were often related by blood and marriage, spreading in webs to neighboring small towns. While genealogical researchers plunge into discovering their most remote (or famous) ancestors, I am more fascinated by how tight the horizontal family relationships were.

When tragedy struck any member of one of these extended families, the consequences were widespread. In my own family, I know of at least two suicides, the accidental death of two children and several murders. Even in towns that were served by physicians, there was little beyond penicillin, setting broken bones and the occasional appendectomy that “country” doctors could do to relieve suffering (excepting of course writing prescriptions for opiates or alcohol in an age when both were illegal except by prescription.)

Accidental deaths, particularly those of children, sent shockwaves through family networks and often left deep emotional scars. Cotton farming was still the norm and accidents were not uncommon at track-side cotton gins. My mother’s telling of one such tragedy has stayed with me since I heard it as a child.

“My mother always talked to me as if I were grown, even before I started school. She told me stories that maybe a child should not hear. She began, I remember. It was before Halloween, cooler. The summer heat had let up. The days were getting shorter and the last of the cotton crop was just coming in.”

I can recall most of what she said that day. Sarah Farabee’s boy, Little Ike.  He came to work with his Uncle Wylie-Sarah’s brother- who worked at the cotton gin in Vashti. He must have been about five years old. Anyway, about your age now. Cotton gins are dangerous places. Little Ike’s daddy, Isaac, was killed when he got his overalls caught in the engine flywheel at the gin. It threw him and twisted him over and over. He didn’t die right off. But he was broken up so bad the doctor couldn’t put him back right again. Took him a week to die.”

Looking back, I know that the gin was about the only reason the town of Vashti existed. Most Georgia farmers had no thought but to grow the cotton they had always relied on for cash. Hard times came. Boll weevils destroyed the cotton crops of many farmers, a divine warning some said.

After the Great War you couldn’t borrow money against next year’s crop. Most of the banks all over Georgia failed and many people moved north to jobs in factories. Or, just moved to big towns like Augusta or Macon. Others kept farming, kept on growing cotton, kept the land their families had owned for generations. But now even the land was all but worthless. Farmers couldn’t pay their taxes on the land. The county government was so broke it couldn’t keep the dirt roads graded or pay school teachers. Families got by on cornbread, greens and black-eyed peas, a little pork for flavor. Thank God there was a radio to listen to if you had one. It was free.

Without the gin, there likely would have been no store, no gas station, no icehouse. The gin was like the the church of commerce in most small towns. Armored in corrugated tin, the gin building rattled and sounded like it might blow away when the wind kicked up; and, if you were inside one of these metal-shrouded caverns, a downpour was deafening. The sheets of corrugated tin covered a black skeleton of rough-sawn timbers that smelled of creosote. Long strands of cotton lint hung from every strap and beam like fallen spider webs.

That day, Little Ike got scared when the gin came alive with all the grating sounds and the air filled with choking cotton lint. So, he was glad to follow his uncle outside.  He watched Wylie climb up onto a farm wagon loaded with cotton, waiting to be ginned. A Black farmer sat on the driver’s seat-a pine board- holding his mule’s reins. Most Black farmers-and some whites- still plowed with mules in those days. Only a few farmers could afford a tractor. Even those who could sometimes complained they never cleared any money after buying a tractor and paying to keep it up.

A small and agile man, Wylie grabbed one end of a rope overhead and pulled down what looked like a long stove pipe and began vacuuming the seed cotton up into the gin machinery. Inside, conveyor belts carried the cotton under fans that drove the dirt and debris away and dried the cotton.  A machine with gangs of teeth combed the seeds from the fibers as the cotton bolls passed through. Another conveyor carried the cotton into a big press where the cotton was compacted into bales. Bailing made it easier to store and ship the cotton, easier for the warehousemen, easier for agents at the Cotton Exchange to price and ship to the mills.

Bored with watching, the boy wandered to the loading dock at the railroad siding where a hundred bales of cotton, bound in steel straps, stood in ranks along the wooden loading platform,  each as tall as a man and weighing as much as three or four grown men, each shrouded in jute netting, ready to depart for the brick- walled mills with their spinning machines. Along the dock were empty box cars being loaded by a huge black man of amazing strength, stoic in the lingering heat of a Georgia fall. Certain in his movements, he alone loaded one bail at a time using only a hand truck.

Nearby, on a siding over a low trestle, was a railroad gondola. Standing alone and open to the sky, the rusting red rail car was filled with fertilizer—the life blood for farmers growing crops on spent, sandy soil. Little Ike was curious. He climbed onto the gondola on the steel-rung ladder mounted to the car to look over the side. Drawn by curiosity or a boy’s sense of adventure, he jumped into the sea of fine dust, so soft and dry he could not gain a foothold or find anything to grasp. The dry powder filled his lungs and muffled his cries as he thrashed about with his young wings- like a dove in its sand bath- and disappeared.”