Agriculture and Industry
Georgia, like other southern states, was predominantly rural and agricultural in the early decades of the twentieth century, and cotton was preeminently the crop of the region. The state’s economy was to a large extent dependent upon the success of the year’s crop, and fortunes could, and frequently did, rest on such variables as rain or lack of it, and after 1913 on the boll weevil. The post card views of cotton fields, gins, and compresses, and of town squares and city streets jammed with wagon loaded with bales, leave no doubt as to the importance of cotton. Small towns sometimes measured themselves against other small towns by how many gins they had. Farmers competed with one another for the distinction of bringing in the year’s first bale. One of the cards included here records for us the date on which W.A. Brannon delivered two hundred bales of cotton to Newnan.

There were other crops that were a part of the Georgia economy - peaches, for instance, especially the Elberta peach, famous long before anyone had heard of the Vidalia onion. Corn was one of the major crops in the early 1900s. Many of the state’s farmers grew sugarcane. Steamboats carried cotton, naval stores and other agricultural products down the Chattahoochee, Flint, Savannah, Coosa, Ocmulgee, Oconee, Altamaha and other Georgia rivers to ports at New Orleans, Apalachicola, Darien, Brunswick and Savannah. (more…)