Cotton Row

Cotton Row is the run of brokerage buildings along South Front Street, on the bluff above the Mississippi, where Memphis priced the crop of the Delta. Cotton firms worked this street from before the Civil War, within reach of the steamboat landing below. In 1826, 300 bales came to town by wagon. By the 1880s and 1890s Memphis was handling 400,000 to 700,000 bales a year, and by the end of the century it was the foremost inland cotton market in the world. The buildings were designed around one skill. Many have north-facing skylights, for the natural light a classer needed to grade cotton, and large open rooms with big tables for spreading it out. A sample was cut from each 500-pound bale and carried to a room on Front Street, where a classer assigned it a grade such as strict low middling or good ordinary. Grade, color and staple together gave nearly a thousand possible classifications, and the grade did much to set the price. At the peak, from October to January, cotton lay along the sidewalks. Buyers for spinners and exporters, weighers and clerks all worked the same few blocks, and most deals closed on a handshake. The Memphis Cotton Exchange, restricted to members, moved to its twelve-story building at Union and Front in 1925. The trade began drifting away in the 1950s, and much of Front Street stood empty by the 1980s. Listed on the National Register in 1979 as the Front Row Historic District, many of the buildings now hold housing and offices.