was released, and the bale was ready for market.  Between 1820 and 1860 improvements in the apparatus promoted an increase in the average weight of the bales from 250 to 400 pounds; while in still more recent times the replacement of horse power by steam and the substitution of iron ties for rope have caused the average bale to be yet another hundredweight heavier.  The only other distinctive equipment for cotton harvesting comprised cloth bags with shoulder straps, and baskets of three or four bushels capacity woven of white-oak splits to contain the contents of the pickers’ bags until carried to the gin house to be weighed at the day’s end.

Whether on a one-horse farm or a hundred-hand plantation, the essentials in cotton growing were the same.  In an average year a given force of laborers could plant and cultivate about twice as much cotton as it could pick.  The acreage to be seeded in the staple was accordingly fixed by a calculation of the harvesting capacity, and enough more land was put into other crops to fill out the spare time of the hands in spring and summer.  To this effect it was customary to plant in corn, which required less than half as much work, an acreage at least equal to that in cotton, and to devote the remaining energy to sweet potatoes, peanuts, cow peas and small grain.  In 1820 the usual crop in middle Georgia for each full hand was reported at six acres of cotton and eight of corn;[3] but in the following decades during which mules were advantageously substituted for horses and oxen, and the implements of tillage were improved and the harvesters grew more expert, the annual stint was increased to ten acres in cotton and ten in corn.

[Footnote 3:  The American Farmer (Baltimore), II, 359.]

At the Christmas holiday when the old year’s harvest was nearly or quite completed, well managed plantations had their preliminaries for the new crop already in progress.  The winter months were devoted to burning canebrakes, clearing underbrush and rolling logs in the new grounds, splitting rails and mending fences, cleaning ditches, spreading manure, knocking down the old cotton and corn stalks, and breaking the soil of the fields to be planted.  Some planters broke the fields completely each year and then laid off new rows.  Others merely “listed” the fields by first running a furrow with a shovel plow where each cotton or corn row was to be and filling it with a single furrow of a turn plow from either side; then when planting time approached they would break out the remaining balks with plows, turning the soil to the lists and broadening them into rounded plant beds.  This latter plan was advocated as giving a firm seed bed while making the field clean of all grass at the planting.  The spacing of the cotton rows varied from three to five feet according to the richness of the soil.  The policy was to put them at such distance that the plants when full grown would lightly interlace their branches across the middles.