There’s something about a cotton field in October that makes you stop and look twice. Ride down a two-lane road in eastern North Carolina this time of year, particularly through Sampson County, and you’ll see what I mean. Row after row of white cotton stretches toward the tree line, looking like somebody laid a blanket of snow across the fields before winter has arrived.
Cotton wasn’t part of my childhood the way it was for some folks. In my neck of the woods, tobacco was king. I grew up with curing barns, tobacco fields, and cattle or pigs standing in the shade on family farms. Cotton wasn’t the crop that defined my corners of North Carolina.
Still, every time I see a cotton field, I can’t help but smile. Cotton is woven into the fabric of Southern life, quite literally. It’s in our quilts, our dish towels, our Sunday dresses, and the old photographs tucked away in our grandmamas’ albums. It belongs to the story of this place, even if it wasn’t a crop I grew up around.
North Carolina has always been a state of farmers. During the colonial period and well into the years that followed, most North Carolinians made their living working the land. Small family farms dominated much of the landscape, with folks growing what they needed and raising a little extra to sell when they could.
Cotton grew here, but for a long time, it wasn’t particularly profitable. The problem was the seed. Separating the seeds from the cotton fibers by hand was tedious, time-consuming work. Then, in 1793, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed the equation and made cotton a much more attractive cash crop. Picking those fluffy white bolls still had to be done by hand, though, and that was hard, labor-intensive work. On the larger places, much of that picking was done by slaves before the Civil War, though most North Carolina farms stayed small family operations where folks worked their own land.
Even so, cotton never quite took over North Carolina the way it did in some of our neighboring Southern states. Tobacco, corn, and other agricultural pursuits remained important parts of our farming traditions.
But here’s where North Carolina really began to make its mark. We didn’t just grow cotton. We figured out how to turn it into something.
In 1814, a Pennsylvania-born businessman named Michael Schenck established a cotton-spinning operation near Lincolnton. It became the first successful textile mill south of the Potomac River, and it helped pave the way for an industry that would eventually transform North Carolina.
A few decades later, the Holt family began making a name for itself in Alamance County. In 1853, their mills started producing a distinctive dyed fabric known as Alamance Plaids. The colorful cloth became one of the best-known products coming out of North Carolina’s early textile industry, and it helped establish a reputation that would only grow with time.
The mills didn’t spring up overnight. In 1884, North Carolina had just 75 cotton mills in operation. Then the industry began to take off. By 1929, the South had surpassed New England in the number of cotton spindles and the amount of cotton consumed. North Carolina was right in the thick of that transformation, with companies such as Cannon Mills and Cone Mills emerging in the late nineteenth century.
And where there were mills, there were mill villages.
Entire communities grew up around these factories. Families moved to town for work, and the mills became a central part of everyday life. Men, women, and young workers alike found jobs in the textile industry, often working long hours to keep production moving. For generations of North Carolinians, particularly in the Piedmont, the mill whistle marked the rhythm of the day.
If your family roots run through places like Alamance, Gaston, Cabarrus, or Mecklenburg counties, there’s a good chance you’ll find somebody in your family tree who worked in a textile mill. Those jobs helped shape communities, supported families, and gave entire towns an identity that many still carry today.
Cotton farming grew alongside that industry. In 1900, North Carolina farmers produced nearly 460,000 bales. The cotton made its way from farms to railroads and then to mills across the state, where it became the cloth used for clothing, household goods, and countless other necessities.
World War I brought another surge in demand for American-made textiles, including uniforms and blankets. North Carolina’s mills expanded to meet the need, further cementing the state’s place as a textile powerhouse.
But cotton’s success story had a rough chapter ahead.
By 1930, North Carolina farmers had planted roughly 1.5 million acres in cotton. That was an impressive amount of land, but our state still couldn’t compete with cotton giants such as Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. And then came the Great Depression, falling crop prices, and a tiny pest that caused farmers across the South no end of trouble.
The boll weevil.
That little beetle with the long snout made its way across the cotton-growing South and reached North Carolina in the early twentieth century. By 1922, it had taken a serious toll on our state’s crop, destroying roughly 13 percent of the harvest that year. The damage continued for decades, forcing farmers to reconsider what they planted and making cotton a riskier proposition. For those of us who grew up in parts of the state where cotton wasn’t common, that helps explain why those white fields can feel almost unfamiliar today.
But there’s a part of this story that deserves a little North Carolina pride.
We helped figure out how to beat the boll weevil.
By the late 1970s, cotton production in North Carolina had fallen dramatically. In 1978, with only about 42,000 acres planted, farmers in the northeastern part of the state took part in an experimental boll weevil eradication program covering 15,000 acres. The results were promising enough that the effort expanded statewide in 1983.
By 1985, North Carolina had been declared free of the boll weevil. The program proved so successful that similar efforts spread to other Southeastern cotton-growing states.
And cotton came back.
By 1997, North Carolina ranked seventh in the nation for cotton production. Today, the eastern half of the state remains the heart of our cotton-growing country, and Sampson County is still one of the places where you’ll find those beautiful fields stretching toward the horizon. North Carolina farmers planted approximately 410,000 acres of cotton in 2024.
Now, cotton was never king in North Carolina the way tobacco was. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t left its mark. It helped build towns, fueled an industry that put North Carolina on the map, and supported generations of farmers and mill workers. Its history is part of the larger story of how our people adapted, worked, built, and kept going when the odds weren’t always in their favor.
That’s what I love about digging into North Carolina history. Sometimes the stories are right there in front of us, hiding in plain sight. We pass them on the highway without giving them a second thought, never realizing how much history is growing in the fields beside us.
So the next time you’re riding down a country road on an October afternoon and see a field of cotton glowing white in the sunshine, slow down long enough to appreciate it. Think about the farmers who planted it, the generations who worked the land, and the mills that turned those little bolls into something we use every single day.
We may come from different corners of this state, with different crops, different traditions, and different memories of home. But somewhere in that story, there’s a thread that ties us together.
And sometimes, that thread is cotton.
