Corsicana Daily Sun, Corsicana, Texas November 24, 2007 Bill Young - Other cotton producers in Navarro County in 1860 By Bill Young Between 1850 and 1860, the population of Navarro County went from 181 farmers to 512. The overall population of the county grew at an even higher rate because of the size of the families who migrated here and the influx of both slaves and laborers willing to work. With all of this manual labor available, cotton could be planted, harvested, baled and transported to market, somehow! The transportation issue was the main detriment for the county farmers because roads were basically still one-lane trails hacked out of the forested areas. When we read the rules pertaining to the roads back in those days, we see trees and brush were removed from the right-of-way but tree stumps were generally left, providing the stumps were cut no higher than six inches off of the ground. Gravel did not exist except in a few areas where there were deposits of Uvalde gravel on or near the surface. However, these Uvalde deposits do not have any depth or thickness. Instead the lenses are less than a foot thick so if a road happened to pass across one of these deposits, it did not take very long for the weight of the teams and the wagons to push the gravel into the subsoil. Even though the roads were terrible, many of the farmers who had migrated here between 1850 and 1860 decided cotton was a profitable crop to produce and somehow they would get their bales to the market on the Gulf coast. The production of cotton requires a lot of effort. Tilling and then planting, chopping weeds and finally hand picking all the fluffy bolls and placing each into a sack which then had to be transported to a gin. At the gin, the cotton had to be processed and baled. Then each bale, which weighed 400 pounds back in those days, had to be loaded onto a wagon and either transported by wagon and team to Houston or Galveston or hauled over to one of the inland ports on the Trinity River to await a steamboat capable of transporting the bales to market. At least part of the time, cotton growers here in Navarro County hauled some of their bales to Pine Bluff/Troy, a port community on the Trinity River in Freestone County, or even farther down river to Magnolia, another port town located in Anderson County on the Trinity. Water levels in the river at these town locations usually were high enough to allow steamboats to reach the wharfs to load the bales. One thing I have not been able to determine is exactly who was responsible for the losses suffered if the steamboat struck a snag or ran aground down river causing the total loss of the bales on board. We know of 22 different steamboat wrecks located in the Trinity from Dallas County down to Galveston Bay. I feel sure there were others which were never documented. If a steamboat struck a snag and started to sink, would the bales of cotton float long enough to allow the crew of the steamboat a chance to salvage as many bales as possible, pulling them up on one of the banks of the river? Or did the bales immediately sink because of their weight? My own opinion is if the bales were bound tightly enough and the material used to bind each bale was strong enough, the bales probably would float for a while. On the other hand, there probably wasn’t a crew large enough to physically pull each bale out of the water without the aid of a team or a hoist. Bales may have floated for hours and if the current was moving along at a decent rate, the bales might float long enough to be moved downstream on the river to one of the other ports where they might have facilities to remove the bales from the water. However, once cotton has been thoroughly soaked, it might not be useable when dried. With all of these problems facing the cotton growers of Navarro County, they still chose to significantly increase their production of cotton. Navarro County was beginning to enter into the world market place for the consumption of cotton and our farmers were trying to share the profits regardless of the hardship problems facing them to get their cotton to market. Remember last week I stated the total production of cotton in 1850 was six bales. By 1860, the total bale production rose to 2,218 bales. Obviously our local farmers were definitely getting into the production of cotton. Continuing with the list of top growers of cotton. Henry Jones, a plantation owner who had slave labor produced 66 bales. Not far behind him was Joseph Burleson, another plantation owner with slaves who claimed he had produced 58 1/4 bales. One of the historical archeologists we worked with during the Richland/Chambers Lake Project did his Ph.D. dissertation paper on a family by the name of Mingo Burleson. Mingo Burleson was once a slave of Joseph Burleson and after slavery was abolished, Mingo bought some land from Joseph Burleson, started growing cotton and built and operated his own cotton gin. The location of Mingo Burleson’s house and gin located in the Birdston Valley area was partially excavated along with several other African-American house sites in the same area. The archeologist, Dr. Randy Moir, was originally planning to do his dissertation on early ceramics from the 1840s to 1900 but there was so much information acquired about the families, especially Mingo Burleson, living in the area south of Cheneyboro, he decided to write about the Burleson family. Next on the list were two men tied with 50 bales each: William Davidson, who lived on Chambers Creek northeast of present day Eureka, and W.F. Craig. Next on the list is L.C. Lockart with 44 bales followed by John Gallemore, a neighbor of the Ingram brothers, with 43 1/4 bales. We know the Ingrams owned a cotton gin in the community of Rural Shade. Somewhere I read where the Ingrams had shipped cotton down river by boat from the landing owned by J.L. Loughridge but they also shipped by wagon and team to Houston. Next on the list was J.L. McConico with 40 bales. Since both Joseph Burleson and J.L. McConico lived on the south side of Richland Creek, I would not be surprised to find out they transported their bales to Pine Tree for shipment. Samuel Parmley is next on the list with 37 1/2 bales followed by J.W. Abbey with 31 1/4 bales. It is interesting to see how many farmers produced a portion of a bale such as Mr. Parmley’s 37 1/2 and Mr. Abbey’s 31 1/4. Even though they did not have an even number of complete bales, the fractional portion of a bale was still worth reporting, selling and transporting. Next week we will continue down the list with several new names appearing for the first time on the schedule.