High Cotton

We have all seen the commercials, and we all know the jingle. “The touch, the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives.” A pretty common material today thanks to the invention of the Cotton Gin in the 1793 by Eli Whitney, it wasn’t always cheap or available. Been cultivated for at least the last 7,000 years it has helped shape cultures, save and ruin lives and cloth the backs of men.

In 3,000 B.C it was being cultivated in Pakistan and being spun and woven into cloth. By 800 A.D. it was brought into Europe by Arab Merchants.  By the time of Columbus’s adventure to the new World in 1492 where he found it on islands in the Bahama’s it was well known through most of the world. The Industrial Revolution, the Cotton Gin and sadly the building of the slave trade made the south the King of Cotton by the 1800s. It became more available to the masses, and came in a variety of colors and eventually would be dyed with little flowers on them. Something that was extremely expensive in the 1700s soon would become extremely cheap and the most common cloth in a just a few years. Within 10 years it grew from a $150,000 industry to $8 million.

This fluffy little seed is what everyone wanted, once cleaned of the actual seeds the fluff, could be spun and woven. Between the fact it is hard to clean it of the seed by hand, has a very short staple length which makes it very hard to spin by hand and easy to break, which is probably why it took so long to become the common cloth of the world. The cotton gin made it easier to clean but back fired from making the slaves lives easier to harder as the cotton industry to grew. That and the demand for cheap cloth, and the mechanized world of the cloth industry made the south the King of Cotton.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin

So the touch and the feel of cotton has come with its price. Whether it is the expense of coin or the expense of man, history has made it a lasting and renewable cloth. The world of natural fiber, older than anything we can ever imagine.