Picking Cotton by Hand
Gone but not forgotten is true enough. In the late 1950's and early 1960's folks got paid only two cents a pound for picking cotton in Bolivar. As a kid, I picked cotton for a week one year and made all of $11.00 ... my best day was picking 100 lbs of cotton. The best pickers in the field could pick 300 or 400 lbs a day pulling two cotton bags and picking two rows of cotton at a time! So pardon me if I don't view this mural quite as fondly as the painter from Washington, DC who painted it in 1941.
Fortunately, we have cotton picker machines that do this work now.
The United States government got into the art business when it instituted a series of programs to keep artists working during the Depression years. Tennessee still has most of the original thirty murals which are located on the walls of many small post offices in many small town where they were placed so long ago. Unfortunately, many people are not aware of these murals—even in the areas where they are located. You can still see this one at 118 East Market Street in Bolivar. It has been there since 1941.
The post office contains a mural by Carl Nyquist, installed in 1941, “Picking Cotton.” The mural is 13 feet 6 inches wide and 5 feet high. “The mural, a reflection of the long, flat cotton fields of the area, is an outstanding example of representational art, from the light brown earth color to the clothes the people are wearing…Perhaps the mural’s relationship to history can best be found in the clothing of the individuals. The long cotton dresses were still worn by women in the fields during the early 1930s. This appears to be the time depicted in the mural. Those were Depression years, and sometimes people involved in agriculture were better off than others. On many occasions, entire families of small landowners congregated in the fields to harvest the white cotton. The men wore loose-fitting shirts and trousers and wide-brimmed hats as protection from the hot sun. The bonnets worn by the women served the same purpose” (Hull, 1996, p. 11-12). The artist, Carl Nyquist, was not well known and there is little information on him other than he lived in Washington, DC at the time he executed the painting.
Click Here to watch this 2 1/2 minute video on Picking a Bale of Cotton!
"Picking Cotton" Mural by Carl Nyguist - 1941