Pflugerville: When cotton was king

Pflugerville: When cotton was king

Written by Pamela Stephenson Tuesday, 07 November 2006

For more than a century, cotton was the most important crop grown in the Pflugerville area. Businesses that developed - from the gins to banks to mercantile stores - supported the cotton farming community. The planting and harvesting of the crop influenced the school calendar. Entire families spent their days in the fields, picking cotton.

Farmers hired workers to manually plant and harvest the crop. Herbert Bohls remembers workers coming from the St. John’s area in Austin. They joined area families in the fields during the fall. Until the 1930s, when the first tractors appeared in the area, mule teams pulled the plows for planting.

“A cotton bale of hand-picked cotton was 1,200 pounds,” Clarence Bohls said. “My brother and I could pick a bale every two days, each picking 300 pounds a day.”

Workers were paid by the pound. They began at daybreak, picking the cotton with their bare hands, despite the burrs. Even the children worked in the fields, missing school, or at the least, beginning their school year after the crop was harvested.

The contents of the bags were weighed and emptied into large trailers and hauled to the cotton gins. Pflugerville had two gins, the “large gin” and the “little gin.”

Linda Ramos Tanguma remembers getting her commercial driver’s license at the age of 15 so that she could help her father haul the bales to the gin, pulling the big trailers behind the truck. She would leave one trailer at the gin and return to the farm to get another.

“During the late 1940s there was a really big crop and the gins worked all night long. It was such a good market that they didn’t even have to grade the cotton,” said Hub Kuempel, a buyer for the gin. “A flat rate was offered to the farmers waiting in the cotton yard.”

The yard was located at the corner of Railroad and Pecan Streets.

Cotton is still grown in the area, but it is no longer “king” as many of the farms have made way for subdivisions, highways and businesses.

Pflugerville: A Heritage to Remember, an oral history, includes stories of farming cotton. The book, sponsored by the Friends of the Pflugerville Community Library, is scheduled for release by December 2006.

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