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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ladybranch, post: 58711, member: 44&quot;]Agree; however, the woman/girls would never actually picked cotton in those hats and dresses. The woman look dressed in their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. Note they don&#039;t have the necessary cotton picking bag slung over their shoulders. The men look dressed in what would have been worn for picking cotton, and they do have the bag slung over their shoulder. It all looks a bit staged to me.</p><p><br /></p><p>The early mechanical pickers were not practical on the small family farms in the south. Like &quot;yourturn&quot; found, the mechanical pickers were not fully used until the 1940s. They were only practical on the huge flat cotton fields of the Mississippi delta. This pic certainly doesn&#039;t look like one of the large delta cotton plantations. In the early 1960s when I first stepped foot in the state of Mississippi, there were still some fields being picked by hand. In the 1940s, 50s, early 60s and no doubt before, some of the small out-in-the country schools were let out for a couple of weeks in the fall for cotton picking. Many of the teenagers, **both** black and white, were eager to get in a few weeks of cotton picking for spending money to use at the big, huge, Mid-South Fair in Memphis, TN. Also everyone wanted to see the Cotton Carnival or the Cotton Maker&#039;s Jubilee in Memphis with their grand Kewes floats in the Fall. At one time these events rivaled the New Orleans Mardi Gras parades. Sad to say they were just another example of the &quot;separate but equal&quot; mentally of that time.</p><p><a href="http://historic-memphis.com/memphis-historic/cottoncarnival/cottoncarnival.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://historic-memphis.com/memphis-historic/cottoncarnival/cottoncarnival.html" rel="nofollow">http://historic-memphis.com/memphis-historic/cottoncarnival/cottoncarnival.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>--- Susan[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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