One of my most memorable farming events from the Little House years was a trip to the gin.  In those days, financing was interesting.  For poor farmers, it often involved credit with other people in the farming business.  I think that Daddy had borrowed the money for a crop that year from “Miss Carrie.”  Miss Carrie Carr was a large landowner in the area.  I’m sure that she had tenants.  She owned a store and a gin.  She also financed the farming operations of small land owners.  The details are sketchy in my memory.  But I’m sure that she loaned Daddy money in the spring with the promise of repayment in the fall, from the proceeds of the crop.

We picked the cotton and put in Uncle Earls barn.  From there we loaded onto a wagon.  The wagon “body” was about 4 feet wide and about eight or ten feet long.  There were sides four or five feet high.  It held about enough cotton to make a 500-pound bale.  Axles ran under the wagon, the back one stationary, and the front axle would turn when the mules headed in a new direction.  On the ends of the axles were the wheels, mostly wooden construction, but bound in essential places by iron.  Iron bands circled the outside perimeter of the wheels and that is what made contact with the ground.

The front axle connected to a “tongue”.  On either side of the tongue were “single trees” that hooked onto the frame of the axle/tongue.    They were metal shafts, about 30” long, with hooks on the each end.  When everything was in operation, chains connected the harness on the front of the mules, Pete and Molly, to the single trees.  Bridles hooked to ropes that allowed the driver, back on the wagon, to “drive” the mules. 

The occasion that I remember must have been sometime in 1946-1948.  It was before we got a tractor.  The cotton was loaded, and Pete and Molly hitched to the wagon.  Off to the gin in far away Shorter!  Daddy driving, Wade and me right beside him, on the front of the loaded wagon.  Out past Uncle Earl’s huge Oak tree, Mr. Frank’s magnificent magnolias, the big Sassafras in Uncle R.V.’s field, to the big road.  Down the big road to the corner.  Off to the left toward on the gravel road through Calebee Swamp.  Three bridges.  Up Haden Hill.  Finally, onto US Highway 80.  To the left, just as if we were going to Hardaway and Downs, where Mama’s folks lived.  But not that far.  The gin was on Highway 80, right where the gravel road turned off to the right to go to Hardaway and Downs.  Highway 80 was paved with concrete!  Wade asked if the metal wheels were legal on the paved road, and Daddy said, “Yes, for farmers.”

The gin was amazing.  The gin had a tall canopy, and we drove the wagon right under it.  Once it was under there, there was a sucking tube about 8 inches in diameter that swung down from above, and sucked the cotton right off the wagon and took it into the gin. 

But once we got to the gin, we were off the wagon, and I don’t think we were allowed in there.  Later I came to know one armed or no armed people who lost them in the old cotton gins.  They were dangerous!  But out front of the gin, and off to the side there were lots of bales of cotton.  The bales weighed five hundred pounds, or more.  If they came out less than five hundred, they were considered “bundles” not bales.  They were about five or six feet tall, thirty inches or so thick, and three or four feet wide.  The top, bottom and narrow sides were wrapped with burlap.  The cotton was packed tight, and the whole thing bound tight with metals bands—three or four of them.  They stood upright.  You could climb up on a bale by using the bands.  What a great event it was to climb up, and jump from bale to bale! 

The cotton was ginned and baled.  Daddy settled up with Miss Carrie.  And then back home on an empty wagon!  But with precious memories for the twilight years.

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