The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1900-08-07
COTTON MILLS IN COTTON FIELDS.

peared to the slow-witted, who were
unprepared for any progress in this
normal direction. Yet when the
decade ended, we had only 100000
spindles and something less than &c..
900 looms-nQt 10 per cent. in ag-
gregate, of New England's hand
some showing! Besides, we were
manufacturing only yarns and coarse
goods, and we're still without the
textile institutions which alone can
assure endurance and advancement
in a movement like this.
But once letsuch a tide set through
a country inhabited by a hard, intel
ligent, and progressive people, there
are always vital forces to carry it
onward. The few Southern factories
of 1880 have now grown to be many,
and the many are fast being multi
piled into a host, spreading from the
three States that felt the original
impulse, until all of the ten are
reached and revivified by it.
In the five years from 1890 to 1895
and that they we're difficult years
for the country at large, no one can
have forgotten-the Cotton Belt
doubled it's number of spindles and
looms in the four years since that
time, the maximum of 1895 has been
fairly doubled again. To realize this,
take Charlotte, N. c., Us your center
and travel about a circle whose
radius is only 100 miles. Within this
limited area you will find today over
300 miles, operating, in round num-
bers, 2, 500, 900 spindles, and nearly
twice as many looms as the entire
South had when the last censu was
taken. The major portion of these
mills have been running both day
and night since last summer, thus
doubling their estimated capacity
This makes it easy to understand
how the Old North State will be able
to use every bale of her own cotton
crop of 1899. Yet it is her sister,
South Carolina, that holds the pres
ent supremacy in this manufacture
in our section, and is pressing Rhode
Island close for the next place to
Massachusetts, out of the entire
Union.
It should be remarked, also, that
while cotton factories are springing
up as if by magic in cotton fields,
there is no growth of the industry in
any part of the world remote from
the ields-which may be taken to
mean that, when so plain a law Of
fitness once begins to assert itself, it
meets no challenge of right. Another
point to be noted in this connection
IS that the section which makes about
rs per cent. of the universal cotton
crop has at last claimed the preroga-
tive of setting the price for Lanca-
shire instead of following the reverse
but unnatural rule which has pre-
vailed from our first harvest until
the present me-.
The bare fact that Southern mill
men paid u cents for cotton early
in the season, when Liverpool and
New York were Offering z, speaks
very ~elOquently of a triumph that
has the essential elements of an en-
during gain.
The situation today is full of
promise for the future the long es-
tablished paradox has been over
thrown the normal is asserting it's
sway. An evolution through pro-
cesses so natural can but proceed to
happy consummation. 1t is esti-
mated that, with American labor and
methods, something less than eight
times the present number of spindles
in the South will be needed to con
vert our annual harvest into yarn.
At the rate of progress now main
tanned, the next century viii still be
in its first quarter when it sees every
pound of cotton grown in the United
States transferred direct from the
gins to mills close at hand. X X X
Allusion has been made, elsewhere
in this article, to the great profits
accruing from the operations of the
newly-established mills. If any one
has good reason for requesting it,
conclusive proof can be furnished
him that scores of these factories
earned from so per cent. to. 90 per
cent. during the past year. While
many of the mill-owers are r~eticent