COLUMN: Cotton has colorful history

I realized my brother had been away from the South too long as I drove him to our grandmother’s from the airport one Thanksgiving.

After he made several snide remarks about all the trash on the highway, I laughed and explained it was the cotton that had blown off the trucks as they carried it to the gins.

As I drive past Pee Dee fields once again this time of year, it reminds me of a hard snowfall.

Everything is gleaming white for just a little while, and it softens the harsh contrast of evergreens and changing fall leaves.

I recently came across an old book called “Palmetto Lyrics” that contained the appropriate poem, “The Legend of the Cotton Plant.”

One verse includes the lines, “Two dresses hath the North to show, I have but one; determine that I, too, have an ermine.”

The author continues in the following verses to tell the story of how the goddess Pandora bestows the gift of cotton seeds all across the South. The text ends with, “Hence soon, when all the fields were filled with bolls of fleecy whiteness, the Genius of the South was thrilled, at the sight of all that brightness. ‘Thanks, Father Jove.’ With tenderness She called, ‘thanks for mine ermine dress, of purest white begotten!’ Such was the birth of- COTTON!’”

A fanciful story indeed, but the real origin of cotton is not so well defined. It is said that the word “cotton” comes from the term,“Qutan,” the Arabic name for the plant.

Janson Cox, executive director of the S.C. Cotton Museum in Bishopville, explains the beginning of its cultivation in the Palmetto State.

“The first non-native cotton planter in South Carolina was Joseph West,” Cox said. “He planted the cotton in 1670 at the Lords Proprietors Plantation outside of Charles Towne.”

Around 1790, William Elliot successfully produced Sea Island cotton on Hilton Head Island. The variety that most of us are familiar with is plain white cotton.

There are naturally colored types in other places in the world, however, that sometimes made their way to North America.

It has even been said, “In the United States, slaves grew brown and green cotton in their own gardens since they were forbidden from growing white cotton they could sell.”

In some parts of the world, farmers grew green and brown varieties of cotton during World War II because of the lack of dyes at that time.

Cox explained that naturally colored cotton was too expensive to produce here during that time because every different color required its own gin. Modern technology is now allowing companies to produce organic colored cotton more efficiently.

Green Textiles of Spartanburg produces, among other varieties, color grown cotton fabrics that can be viewed on their Web site, http://www.greentextile.com.

When you see the scattered remnants of cotton floating down the highway or the bits snagged in tree limbs along the route to the local gin, think about the long history of this crop and how it continues to be a major factor in our everyday lives.

South Carolina may not be subject to white winters very often, but we can enjoy the beauty of a blindingly bright field full of cotton if only while driving by.

— Gretchen Huggins is a Francis Marion University history graduate. Her column, “Where We Stand,” appears Mondays in the Morning News and on scnow.com. Contact her at .