Cotton 
United States Bureau of Public Roads 
Fic. 8. Cotton bales on the way to the railroad for shipment. Motor transport and good roads 
have been a great help to cotton growers. When the old-time grower moved his crop, three bales 
were a fair load for a pair of horses to draw over the country roads. In 1927 North Carolina 
growers had 857,000 bales of cotton to deliver to railroads or mills. Without motor trucks and 
hard-surfaced roads, this enormous crop could not well have been moved. 
Some of the cotton of the South is used by the mills of North and 
South Carolina and Georgia, but the greater part goes to the mills of 
the northeastern states of the United States, western Europe (espe- 
cially England), and even Japan. 
Transportation to the shipping point. The transportation of the 
fiber from the fields to the factories begins at the ginnery. There 
the five-hundred-pound bales of ginned fiber are loaded on mule wagons 
by burly negroes, to be delivered at the nearest railway station or a 
river port a few miles away. This part of the journey, although 
short, is expensive, —it averages about eighty cents a bale, — be- 
cause of the generally poor roads of the South. A pair of mules has 
difficulty in pulling even a few bales over a poor road. 
From seaport to mill town. From the local shipping point the 
bales go direct to their destination. If they are to be used in South- 
ern mills, they go all the way by railroad. If they are to be used in 
New England, the bales are usually carried to the nearest seaport by 
railroad or by the picturesque flat-bottomed river steamboats. The 
cotton of Texas goes to Galveston. The cotton of the region drained 
by the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries goes to New Orleans. 
That of the Atlantic states goes to such ports as Savannah and 
Charleston. For this part of the journey the average cost for each 
bale is one twentieth to one tenth of a cent a mile by water, and a 
quarter to a half cent a mile by railroad, not including the cost of 
loading and unloading. This shows how much cheaper it is, in gen-