Trees, Louisiana

My mother always gave her birthplace as Tree, Louisiana. The internet has no such place, but does have a Trees, in Caddo Parrish. A Louisiana genealogy site says the town was first named Trees City, after J.C. Trees Oil Co.

“The company’s headquarters was moved to Oil City in 1983 – and I mean that literally. The building that once housed the company’s headquarters now sits in Oil City.”

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That would make sense in my mother’s birth and early years. Her father worked in oil fields in Louisiana before moving to Texas and taking up sharecropping. He and my mother’s mother later bought their own land a couple of miles northwest of Maud, Texas. My mother said she chopped (hoed) cotton and picked cotton. It was not a pleasant pastime. Chopping was an all-day affair or more, depending on the size of the cotton field. Chopping cotton was a summertime job, going up and down rows and rows of cotton plants, chopping out grass between rows. Northeast Texas grows good grass and lots of it in spring and summer.

Picking cotton was done in the fall, my mother said. She had a cotton sack, longer than she was, and she was a tall woman. Pickers would drag the sack down the rows, bent over at the waist, pulling bolls from the plant and putting the bolls in the sack. It sounds like one of those jobs you stand at the beginning of a row and look down the row and just say, “Lord, how much do you expect of me?”

Pickers emptied their sacks into a wagon with slatted sides or chicken wire sides. A wagon held enough cotton to make a bale. A bale weighed 500 pounds when the cotton was cleaned and compressed at the local gin. I would guess my mother started picking cotton in 1931, when she was 10 years old. Cotton that year priced at 5.66 cents a pound. 1932 price was 6.52 cents, and 10.17 cents in 1933. Highest-ever price before then was 35.34 cents a pound in 1919. Cotton would not hit that price again until 1973, at 44.6 cents a pound. Even during World War II, the highest cotton price was 22.52 cents a pound in 1945.

Trees is now listed as a populated place. The settlement is across Caddo Lake from Oil City.