Hopson Plantation

Between 1935 and 1944 Howell Hopson II worked with the International Harvester Company on his plantation south of Clarksdale to finish a machine that could pick cotton. Engineers had been trying since at least 1850, when the first American patent was issued in Memphis, and more than eighteen hundred patents had failed. The hard part was not gripping the cotton but letting go of it: a barbed spindle that could pull the lint from an open boll would not release it cleanly to the doffer, and a smooth one would not pick. Bolls also ripen at different times, so a single pass needed the plants stripped of leaves first, and Hopson dusted his with cyanamid from an aeroplane before the harvest. On 2 October 1944 the machine was demonstrated in a twenty eight acre field in front of several hundred people, and that crop was the first in the United States planted, cultivated and harvested entirely by machine. One picker took six acres a day. The family estimated the cost of a bale fell from thirty nine dollars and forty one cents to five dollars and twenty six cents, and the machine picked a poorer grade of cotton, which the labour saving covered many times over. What that arithmetic did to the Delta is argued over rather than settled. The tidy version has mechanisation emptying the countryside and sending the blues to Chicago, but the Great Migration was already decades old in 1944, factory built pickers only arrived in 1948, and the historian Donald Holley makes the opposite case: that people leaving for northern wages is what forced planters to mechanise. The commissary and about twenty cabins survive on the site, some brought in from elsewhere, and both are trading.