King Cotton

While on the way to Statesboro to visit my daughter at GSU I stopped long enough the take these photos of cotton in the field. Much of the wealth of the antebellum south came from cotton sales as the raw cotton fed mills in the United States and in Europe. The process of growing, harvesting and turning the cotton into thread prior to the invention of the cotton gin was very labor intensive and helped make slavery a sad reality in the southern states. This is cotton in its raw state.