I Always Loved That Smell...

Way back in the last century. Back in a time when there was no such thing as compact discs and I would wager the thought of an iPod had not occurred to anyone yet. When I had an 8-track player in my old Impala and gas costs 75 cents a gallon I used to work at a radio station. WAHR-FM in Hunstville. We were an album oriented rock station and played vinyl records on turntables. The station was located on the 11th floor of the Times Building on Holmes Avenue and at 3.2 kilowatts our signal barely made it to the city limits. I spent many a Saturday and Sunday night there back in the late 1970s. Probably the most fun job I ever had.

Now you may ask...what does this have to do with the title and the pictures? Actually a lot. You see I always knew it was fall when I worked downtown. Not because of the weather although that was a factor. No. It was the end of cotton harvesting season and now it was time to gin it. There was a cotton gin down Church Street just north of where I worked. And the smell of the ginning process. For those of you that don't know, cotton ginning is the process of separating the seed from the fiber which made it easier to process into clothing or whatever. And of course everyone who knows even rudimentary history would know who Eli Whitney is.

Anyway, it always smelled like barbeque to me. For the life of me I never understood why that was. There was no hickory fire and no pork. But the smell was very similar. So when I came across this old cotton gin in Vincent, Alabama I thought two things. Cool beans! Something worth shooting and the memory of the smell of cotton being ginned. I've often noticed that smells remind us of memories. And of course things remind us of smells. But this was an unusual one for me. I asked at the town hall if they knew when it closed. Best anyone could remember was the early 1990s. But here it sat 20 years later. The machinery was rusting in place and even the scale read wrong. But it was still mostly intact. As if it lay dormant for the time being. Waiting till fall rolled around again and the long line of cotton farmers would process the fruits of their labor.

I'm sure most of y'all know this but Alabama is called the Cotton State. It produced more cotton per square mile than
any other place on earth in 1890 and half of all cotton exported in the world went through the port of Mobile in 1860.* But with the appearance of the Boll Weevil to Alabama in 1915 which nearly wiped out Alabama's cotton crop it forced farmers to diversify into other crops such as peanuts and soybeans. There is a statue honoring the boll weevil in Enterprise, Alabama. The only known statue to honor an agricultural pest in the world.#

 

I really did not mean this to be a history lesson. But history is what defines us. We get from here to there by our history. Which is why I do what I do. Pictures remind us of things. Of memories...both good and bad. I go to a Facebook page called Huntsville Revisited. The gentleman who runs it has an incredible wealth of pictures dating back years. I love to go there and see things as they were. Because I grew up there I see things from my youth and try and reconstruct where I was. Who I was with. Old friends. Things of that sort. It's neat to see the old pictures and remember my youth...

If you have time and of course a Huntsville connection helps check out Huntsville Revisited on Facebook. Take the time to check out his albums. It's a fun place to go.



* http://www.extension.org/pages/10578/history-of-alabama-cotton
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_Monument