Cotton seed, in fact, proved to be the only new fertilizer generally available in moderate abundance prior to the building of the railroads.  In early years the seed lay about the gins as refuse until it became a public nuisance.  To abate it the village authorities of Sparta, Georgia, for example, adopted in 1807 an ordinance “that the owner of each and every cotton machine within the limits of said town shall remove before the first day of May in each year all seed and damaged cotton that may be about such machines, or dispose of such seed or cotton so as to prevent its unhealthy putrefaction."[24] Soon after this a planter in St. Stephen’s Parish, South Carolina, wrote:  “We find from experience our cotton seed one of the strongest manures we make use of for our Indian corn; a pint of fresh seed put around or in the corn hole makes the corn produce wonderfully",[25] but it was not until the lapse of another decade or two that such practice became widespread.  In the thirties Harriet Martineau and J.S.  Buckingham noted that in Alabama the seed was being strewn as manure on a large scale.[26] As an improvement of method the seed was now being given in many cases a preliminary rotting in compost heaps, with a consequent speeding of its availability as plant food;[27] and cotton seed rose to such esteem as a fertilizer for general purposes that many planters rated it to be worth from sixteen to twenty-five cents a bushel of twenty-five pounds.[28] As early as 1830, furthermore a beginning was made in extracting cottonseed oil for use both in painting and illumination, and also in utilizing the by-product of cottonseed meal as a cattle feed.[29] By the ’fifties the oil was coming to be an unheralded substitute for olive oil in table use; but the improvements which later decades were to introduce in its extraction and refining were necessary for the raising of the manufacture to the scale of a substantial industry.

[Footnote 24:  Farmer’s Gazette (Sparta, Ga.), Jan. 31, 1807.]

[Footnote 25:  Letter of John Palmer.  Dec. 3, 1808, to David Ramsay.  MS. in the Charleston Library.]

[Footnote 26:  Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, (London, 1838), I, 218; I.S.  Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London, 1842), I, 257.]

[Footnote 27:  D.R.  Williams of South Carolina described his own practice to this effect in an essay of 1825 contributed to the American Farmer and reprinted in H.T.  Cook, The Life and Legacy of David R. Williams (New York, 1916), pp. 226, 227.]

[Footnote 28:  J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, p. 99; Robert Russell, North America, p. 269.]

[Footnote 29:  Southern Agriculturist, II, 563; American Farmer, II, 98; H.T.  Cook, Life and Legacy of David R. Williams, pp. 197-209.]