Cotton Is King: From Slave Labor to Computer Gins

Northeast Louisiana's delta parishes were cotton country from the 1820s through the mid-twentieth century. Enslaved people cleared the bottomland forests, built the levees, and picked the cotton that made plantation owners rich. After emancipation, sharecropping kept many Black families tied to the same land under different terms. Mechanization finally broke the cycle in the 1950s and 1960s, depopulating the parishes. At Frogmore Cotton Plantation in Concordia Parish, an 1800s steam gin and a modern computer-controlled gin operate side by side — the entire arc of cotton's labor story in one place.