The Rust cotton picker
Ben Pearson, who was born at Paron in Saline County in 1898, became known as the Father of Modern Archery. In the 1920s, Pearson made his first bow. He finished next-tolast at the 1926 state archery championships, but worked each day to become better. Pearson won the state championship the next year. In 1938, he placed seventh in the national tournament. Pearson began manufacturing bows and arrows in his garage at Pine Bluff in 1931. From that humble beginning, he would build the largest archery equipment company in the world. By 1963, Pearson was selling almost 3,000 bows and 4,000 arrows per day. More than 800 employees worked at a 15-acre site in Pine Bluff.
Many Arkansans know of Pearson’s success as it relates to archery. What’s not as well known is the role Pearson played in helping John Rust, who invented the first practical spindle cotton picker in the late 1930s, finally achieve financial success. Few inventions had the effect on Arkansas that the mechanical cotton picker had. In a story on the cover of today’s Perspective section, the role of cotton cultivation in Arkansas history is outlined. This is an interesting sidebar to that story.
The late C. Fred Williams of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was among the nation’s top agricultural historians. In 2009, Williams hosted the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society in Little Rock and invited me to accompany those historians on a field trip from Little Rock to Stuttgart. It was fascinating to hear Williams talk about the history of agriculture in this state and the role cotton played.
“World War II brought dramatic changes in the area of farm equipment,” Williams once wrote. “Not only did technologies developed in the war greatly improve the machines and reduce their costs, the mass migration of rural Arkansans to defense plants in regional towns reduced the number of farms and increased the size of farming units. Using money saved from wartime prosperity, farmers were poised in the postwar period to buy machinery and land to expand their operations. When many of the small farmers did not return to the land after the war ended, as they had following World War I, landowners were forced to rely on machinery even more.
“Rice and soybeans were incorporated into this new order since the same harvester could be used for both crops with only limited modifications. A new age in Arkansas agriculture had begun and was reflected in changing land and cropping practices.
“In 1940, Delta counties cultivated only 153,000 acres of rice and 176,000 acres of soybeans, compared with 1.2 million acres of cotton. Those figures changed in the next 20 years. Reasons are complex, but the Delta’s geography is among them. The new agriculture could not have developed without significantly altering the area’s two most notable features—trees and wetlands.”
That brings us back to Rust, who was born in Texas in 1892. His parents died when he was 16, and Rust then drifted through Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.
“Rust was intrigued with the challenge of building a mechanical cotton picker,” the late historian Donald Holley of the University of Arkansas at Monticello wrote for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “Other investors had used a spindle with barbs, which twisted the fibers onto the spindle and pulled the cotton lock from the boll. But the spindle became clogged with cotton. Rust concerned himself with how to strip the cotton from the barbs, the answer to which, he decided, was to use a smooth, moist spindle.
“He later went back to Texas to live with a sister in Weatherford. He assembled the first working model in her garage and tested it on 10 artificial stalks set up on a board. The machine picked 97 out of 100 locks of cotton. He continued testing with funds invested by family and friends. In 1928, his brother Mack, who held a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas, joined him. Rust received his first patent in 1933. Eventually he and his brother owned 47 patents.”
John Rush once wrote: “The thought came to me one night after I had gone to bed. I remembered how cotton used to stick to my fingers when I was a boy picking in the early morning dew. I jumped out of bed, found some absorbent cotton and a nail for testing. I licked the nail and twirled it in the cotton and found that it would work.”
The Rust brothers moved to a cooperative farming community in Louisiana in 1930. Two years later, they chartered the Southern Harvester Co. in New Orleans. They later headed north to Lake Providence, La., after finding planters there who would finance their experiments. In 1935, the brothers founded the Rust Cotton Picker Co. in Memphis. They received national media coverage in August 1936 when they demonstrated their picker at the Delta Experiment Station in Stoneville, Miss.
“The Rust machine sent a shock wave through the country,” Holley wrote. “The reality of a machine that would actually pick cotton loomed over the South, potentially eliminating jobs and raising the specter of social convulsions in the midst of the Depression. The sharecropper system, which had been in place since the end of slavery, faced collapse. The prospect loomed of millions of black sharecroppers migrating to Northern cities in search of employment that did not exist. The Rust Cotton Picker Co., however, lacked financing for commercial production.”
International Harvester Corp., meanwhile, had spent $5.25 million during a two-decade period to develop a mechanical cotton picker. The scarcity of steel during World War II delayed production. In 1947, International Harvester opened a manufacturing plant at Memphis and became the first company to produce a cotton picker that would be sold at dealerships. John Rust had earlier declared bankruptcy. In 1949, he entered into an agreement with the Ben Pearson Co. and moved to Pine Bluff. The company then began marketing Rust cotton pickers around the world.
“The Rust cotton picker achieved commercial success,” Holley wrote. “Rust, after years of hardship, became a wealthy man. He repaid his sponsors, established scholarships at colleges in Arkansas and Mississippi, and toyed with a universal language.”
He died in January 1954 and is buried at Graceland Cemetery in Pine Bluff.