By Jerry Flook, Garland Historian
Published in the Garland-Rowlett Messenger, July 2012
Despite the impression which may have been left by the cowboy theme of recent downtown Garland festivals, the town’s economy during the period between its founding in the 1880s and the mid-1950s was based largely on farming. The rich black clay of the local prairies had much greater value for cultivation of crops than for grazing livestock. The prairie, which had at first been open range, was rapidly fenced into cultivated fields and meadows upon the introduction of barbed wire in the 1880s. With the 1870s and 1880s also came the railroads, providing convenient transportation of crops to market.
Although corn and small grains were important money crops in Garland, cotton was indisputably “king.” The first cotton gin (machinery which removed the fibers from the seed) in Dallas Co. was built by Ben Frost about 1851 or 1852 about 3 1/2 miles north of Garland. Another gin in this area was built in 1868 by R. D. Jones on his farm, probably near the northwest corner of Miller and Shiloh roads. Jones’s gin was horse-powered. It was soon ginning some 16 bales weekly and barely kept up with demand. According to historian Kate Jones James, farmers were often lined up waiting their turn at the gin when lunch time came around and the Jones women were expected to feed them. Before long another local gin was built by Col. T. J. Nash. According to Mrs. James, local farmers “went wild” raising cotton after the railroad reached Dallas in 1872.
Eventually cotton gins were scattered all over this part of Dallas County. Steam engines replaced horses. Gins were usually located on water courses which could be dammed to form gin-ponds. Rural stram gins are known to have been located: 1) where Kingsley Road crossed Duck Creek; 2) on the west side of Shiloh Road about midway between Miller and Kingsley; 3) at Rose Hill; 4) at Locust Grove (east of intersection of Lyons and Bobtown roads); 5) at Morris (intersection of Centerville and Miller Roads); 6) near intersection of Apollo and Shiloh roads; 7) on Spring Creek at Naaman. Gins were also located in town: 10 North Texas (Lyles) Gin (Austin St. east of the Santa Fe tracks), 2) Farmers’ Gin (southwest corner of Walnut and Glenbrook); 3) Tinsley (later Farmer’s Co-op) Gin at Avenue D and Fifth St; 4) the Brick Gin (between avenues A and B on the west side of the Santa Fe tracks). The Co-op Gin was the last to cease operation, closing down sometime in the early 1960s. Note that a cotton gin is not the same as a cotton mill, which manufactures cloth from cotton. One surviving gin building in Rowlett (the Chiesa or Schrade Gin) carries signage erroneously identifying it as “The Old Cotton Mill.”
During ginning season a cotton gin was not a particularly good neighbor. Cotton wagons at times were parked on all the vacant lots around the gins, smoke from the burning trash removed by the ginning process was fetid, and locks of cotton were strewn like snow along the streets leading to the gin from the outlying farms. And gins were dangerous operations. Accidents were all too frequent in which hands and arms were mangled in the knives of the gin mechanism, and breathing the link in the air caused lung problems in many gin workers. Then there was the problem of sparks from the gin mechanism striking hard foreign objects in the cotton and igniting fires in the lint. Yet, all in all, those who made their livelihood directly or indirectly from the crop were happy to see ginning season roll around.
After the cotton was ginned and baled it was sold either to professional cotton buyers or, in the early days, to local merchants, who accepted the bales in payment of accounts incurred by the farmer between harvests. In the early days there was little or no warehouse space to store the bales awaiting transport and the bales were simply stood in row upon row in an open “cotton yard.”
The cotton seeds were planted as early as April and as late as June, depending on weather and soil conditions. After the seeds had come up to a “stand,” the seedlings were thinned with a hoe to about 8 inches apart and the rows weeded. This process was called chopping.” The buds of cotton flowers are referred to as “squares” and the fruits, which contain the seeds and fibers, are “bolls” (pronounced “boles,” not “balls”). Maturing cotton was susceptible to attack by a variety of plagues. The squares and young bolls often fell prey to boll worms and boll weevils. Sometimes army worms, exuding a peculiar stench, stripped the leaves and left stains on the cotton fibers. In some years it was grasshoppers instead of army worms which devoured the cotton plants. And there was even cotton root rot fungus. It is truly a wonder that so many acres were planted to this precarious crop for so many years.
The mature bolls began to split open toward the end of summer, usually by late August. Each boll contained four or five compartments, each filled with fluffy white cotton tufts called “locks.” The cotton picker grasped all the locks in a single boll at once with his fingers, pulling them from the boll, the remainder of which remained on the stack and was called a “bur.” The locks were then deposited in a long canvas sack which the picker dragged along by a shoulder strap. When the sack was full, it was carried to the cotton wagon to be weighed and emptied. A very good picker could weigh as much as 240 pounds of cotton in a day’s work. Pickers were white and black, young and old. Well into the 20th century children of farmers were often kept out of school until most of the crop was harvested. Freshly picked cotton had a pleasant fragrance and the younger children were allowed to play in the mouds of the soft white locks in the cotton wagon while the older family members sweated in the broiling heat, on their knees, dragging their havy sacks down the middles between rows.
The seeds separated by the gin from the cotton fibers in early years were treated as waste, but eventually uses were developed for cotton seed oil. In 1913 a cotton oil mill was built in Garland southwest of the present intersection of Walnut and Glenbrook avenues. It apparently ceased operation around 1925.
Toward the end of cotton farming in this area new ginning machinery was developed which could separate the cotton locks from the bur, making it possible for the pickers to pull off the entire boll. Thereafter “pulling bolls” preplaced cotton picking with a great savings in labor. And eventually the ultimate labor-saving machine began to appear on the scene; the mechanical cotton harvester. Soon even that machine went the way of the pickers in knee pads dragging their sacks down the rows of a white harvest, and the cotton economy of Garland came to an end.