Today’s garden tour is actually a “field” trip--a trip through a field of cotton, that is.
The photos accompanying this article were taken along the Mississippi Delta area of west Tennessee, not too very far from the city of Memphis.
However, photos like these could easily be taken in any of a number of fields like these which cover large acreages in many of the agriculturally rich states of the southern part of the United States.
I can remember as a boy long ago, on summer automobile trips through Georgia and into Florida seeing workers picking cotton by hand in the fields along the highways.
Now, most of the work of planting, tending, and harvesting the cotton crop is done with machinery rather than with hand labor.
The story of cotton, its cultivation and rise to prominence as an important marketable commodity has much to do with the economic and social development of much of the southern USA.
This story is well told with a visit to The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange in downtown Memphis, TN.
The museum is today housed in the historic Memphis Cotton Exchange, which was restored in 2004 and is now devoted to telling the story of cotton and its historical, economic, and social significance.
A tour of the museum can help visitors to .....”understand the sometimes profitable, often tragic complexity of the cotton industry....” as their website says. And also to help understand the Civil Rights Movement, the rich musical heritage of Memphis, and that city’s place in history.
Visit their website at memphiscottonmuseum.org
