Waxahachie cotton pickers 1913

http://www.shorpy.com/node/20830?size=_original#caption

I never picked cotton, but my mother did. Her father was a sharecropper until finally able to buy his own land. He had a small place northwest of Maud, Texas, down a dirt road. He raised cotton and had a pig or two, a smoke house and chickens. Except for the experience, my mother would have preferred not to pick cotton.

A friend in Clarksville, Texas, said she could remember going to town with her father and the back of the truck filled with cotton. She did not say she had picked any of it.

Making a bale meant a family would have cash money for a year. Most farmers worked off and on at other jobs when they could, but part time work did not often come along.