Word: delta
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Year after year Otis Town added to his acreage with every cent he made or could borrow. By the time he had 12,000 acres the rest of the Delta had been bought up at $10 an acre. The latecomers called him Old Man Town, and Old Man Town set to work draining his sloughs and developing every clod...
Otis Town's lust for land, and the wartime price of cotton, carried him from poverty to fantastic wealth and ruin, made assorted monsters of his wife and children, and left him in the end with a certain indestructible magnificence. It is the vivid history of Delta cotton and the people who raised it, from the day when they cleared the first land to the early '20s, when cotton let them down and the great Northern combines took over...
...When Otis Town left the Tennessee hills for the Delta, "the richest farming land since the discovery of the Nile Valley" was selling at 90? an acre. Town put every cent he had into 600 acres. Then he cleared the tremendous cane that towered 20 feet above him and walked the cotton seed into the reeking-rich earth. The next spring two Negroes, a man and a woman, shared his cabin, his labor, his prospects. They cleared and planted twice the past year's acreage. Settling up in the fall, Otis skinned the Negro so unmercifully that he drew...
Cotton Queens. World War I began: Delta cotton went to 25? a pound and Delta land went to $35 an acre. The second year of the war, Old Man Town sold 750 bales and bought 4,000 acres from a neighbor. He also mortgaged his 16,000 acres and his next year's crop to a Memphis cotton factor for $50,000. He gypped his hands out of "everything he thought they would stand . . . sold them cheap whiskey at bonded prices for what little money they did draw." In 1917 cotton went to 50?. Old Man Town...
...ended. Mrs. Town came back to the Delta and Old Man Town built her a $100,000 house with $50 doorknobs. She added an "e" to her name. Next year Old Man Towne raised dollar cotton. Mrs. Towne, pallid Loraine and nympholeptic little Elaine went to Europe. Van, demoniacally drunk, scorched around the State in an Apperson Jackrabbit with a siren on it, leaving terror, curses and shaken fists in his wake. Old Man Towne borrowed $500,000 against the open draft notes signed in his name in Van's handwriting, and against the importunate cables from abroad...