Title: That cotton pickin' exhibit
Date: September 15, 2006
It could have been me, or Doug Kubicek.One of the first things that I noticed in an exhibit on cotton at the Lavaca Historical Museum in Hallettsville was a barefooted mannequin dressed up as a young cotton picker. It reminded me just how much I hated to wear overalls or the funky straw hats that farm boys wore when I was growing up.
What I wanted was a pair of blue jeans, boots and a western hat to look more like a cowboy.
The cotton-picking mannequin also has on a pair of cloth kneepads donated by Elvira Workman, and that certainly brought back some memories of sore knees and rocks that had been plowed up between the rows of cotton.
I do have something in common with Kubicek, the Lavaca County historian, in that we can both claim some experience as cotton pickers, though not enough to brag about. It would appear, however, that he had some success at it, one of the exhibits featuring a sack that he used to make enough money to buy himself a bicycle.
I understand that he never picked cotton again, though his parents, Steve and Irma Kubicek, did keep the cotton sack just in case.
The exhibit - "Cotton is King" - is the first for the new museum administrator, Carroll Scrogin-Brincefield, who with docent Dolores Tousignant have put together the story of when cotton was a major crop in Lavaca County. It provides a nostalgic look at the importance of cotton from the 1850s until the 1970s when production ended in the county due to the economics of producing the crop.
Peak production had reached nearly 50,000 bales a year in the early 1900s and for some years the county had from 50 to 64 gins, the last operating to 1971. Cotton was produced on numerous small farms that have been returned to pastureland or the production of hay and other crops.
In addition to cotton having been a major cash crop for farmers, Lavaca County also had the headquarters in Hallettsville for Otto Goedecke, Inc., an international cotton brokerage and textile manufacturer.
The exhibit includes a collection of cotton products donated to the museum from the Goedecke Estate.
The old Goedecke home and "Cotton Row" complex of offices in Hallettsville are now in the process of being restored by Mr. and Mrs. Merle Richardson.
A native of Germany, Otto Goedecke began the business in 1932 and was a leader in modern merchandising of cotton by scientific methods that included the blending of cotton fibers for uniformity and fabric stability.
Some of the subsidiary companies in Texas included the Neches Compress and Warehouse Co. in Beaumont and Brenham, Mexia Textile Mills, Guadalupe Valley Cotton Mills in Cuero and the Rosenberg Cotton Warehouse.
In a room at the museum devoted to times of war, an interesting anecdote about Goedecke's worldwide reputation is presented. After Leon J. Berkovsky of Hallettsville was captured when his B-17 bomber was shot down during World War II, a German officer was interrogating him when he learned that Berkovsky was from Hallettsville. He immediately asked if Berkovsky knew the Goedecke family. The officer had lived for a time in Galveston when he was working for a German cotton buyer who had dealings before the war with Otto Goedecke.
The museum has been collecting stories about cotton in Lavaca County.
"The summer days working for pay for local farmers started early," Phil Hemmi recalls, "and seemed to last as long as the rows of cotton themselves, merging into the grind of the next day of toil."
He mentions something that I had almost forgotten, how as little kids we were sometimes allowed to ride behind our fathers on their cotton sacks - we always called them pick sacks at home - an entertaining but subtle way of teaching us what cotton picking was all about.
Cotton picking was stoop labor, but when my father was a young man it was a way to make more money than he could have made at most any other job, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Hard work was no stranger to his generation and he always prided himself on how much cotton he could pick.
For those who want to know what it was like when cotton was king in Lavaca County, the exhibit will continue through Nov. 15 with the museum being open on Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and Wednesday through Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., or for tours on special days.
Those are sure better hours than what one could expect to spend picking cotton.
Copyright, (c) 2006, The Victoria Advocate
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