Planted by Hand

There were no corn or cotton planters then. I can remember seeing the Negro woman walking behind one plow and in front of another, carrying cotton seed in her apron, and strewing great handfuls of cotton in the furrow, to be covered by the plow behind her.

Cotton and Seed

Pa made money in Texas from the very beginning, and continued to buy more land and Negroes until the Civil War. Before the close of the war he owned about 2,000 acres of rich black land and thirty grown Negroes, besides 10 or 12 children. About 1862, when Missouri was overrun with Federal troops, many of the slaveholders moved with their slaves to Northeast Texas. One of these was the Governor of Missouri, who rented Capt. Jim Clark's place on Red River, and put his Negroes to work there.

The cotton was hauled by teamsters to Jefferson and sold. The seed was considered worthless except for feed for the milk cows. The seed in excess of what was fed to the cows was piled near the gin as refuse, where it rotted. There was no thought of using it for fertilizer for the land, which was considered rich enough.

About this time the cotton gins all over the country began to burn. It was thought that the talk of these Missouri Negroes, who had been in closer contact with Northern sympathizers, had