The fields in parts of Missouri’s Bootheel look like they are decorated for the holidays. (Click on the images to make them larger.)
Strange looking hay bales
On our way down to Hayti to meet with Bishop Benjamin Armour to talk about the New Madrid baptism project, we saw round bales in the fields. Mother thought it was odd that hay bales would have different colors down there.
When we got closer, we could see the bales were cotton, not hay.
“Loaves” of cotton
Other fields contained what hooked like “loaves” of cotton.
I read recently that cotton farming became big in the Bootheel because boll weevils ruined the crops in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1920s. It gets cold enough in Southeast Missouri to kill them off in the wintertime.
Travel update
Pulled into the driveway Saturday night after 6,393.8 miles on the road through Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and several side trips through the State of Confusion.
Please keep that DONATE button at the top right of the page in mind. The gas bills will be coming in for a long time.
The Benton hill to which you refer is Crowley’s Ridge. In its shadow my great-grandfather Seth Rapp tended his family farm, shared his horse-drawn thrashing machine with his neighbors, operated the Watermelon Telephone Company, and raised my maternal grandmother and her siblings. I’ve always had the notion that heading south it’s the last hill between Cape and New Orleans. I lived in Cape for weeks, maybe months, before I knew that the two towns variously pronounced “Sikeston” and “Saxton” were in fact the same town, the difference in pronunciation dependent upon whether the speaker was raised north or south of Crowley’s Ridge. It really is our local northern boundary of the Old South.
Bought mine Sat from shop on Broadway.Thats me on the train pic wearing the baseball hat with the “B” on it from playing on the Bisons way back then.
Thank you, Sir Keith. You can see you self in a couple of others photos from when I ran the original post on trains in Cape parks.
Want to see information on my Spann family, and Loos family. I know both were in Junior high and Central High, in the 1920’s.