MANUFACTURES. 



595 



jected to undue pressure, as must always be the case where the pressure 

 is applied at one time to the \^hole bulk of the bale. That the staple 

 tlius treated is not injured may be inferred from a statement made by 

 the Willimantic Company regarding high-priced sea island cotton, which 

 it has always been thought could not, without great loss, be packed in 

 any press yet devised. The treasurer writes of a bale compressed by this 

 method tested in this mill : " The cott'jn so compressed makes less waste 

 at the picker, in the cards, and in the combing machine." 



From these facts it appears that iio new inventions are essential to 

 overcome mechanical difficulties in the proper handling of cotton to 

 secure the best quality of staple, if the methods already devised are 

 employed with intelligence and skill. The old gin houses, with their 

 laborers skilled by a lifetime of careful training under intelligent direc- 

 tion, have passed away with the plantation system. Portable ginneries, 

 with skilled labor, have been tried and have been found unsuitable. 

 Numerous small toll gins, where the quantity, without consideration as 

 to the quality, of the work done, is the object, now occupy this field. 

 The improvement and development possible and demanded for this im- 

 portant industry can only be looked for in the consolidation and enlarge- 

 ment of gin houses. This raises the cpiestion whether the conditicn? 

 are favorable for the enlargement of these establishments. The most 

 important of these conditions is the production of a sufficient amount of 

 cotton to afford full work within such a distance as would admit of haul- 

 ing seed cotton by wagon to the gin. In the partial enumerations on 

 Avhich the estimates as to the statistics of gin houses is here based, the 

 average distance that cotton was hauled was 1.4 miles ; the maximum 

 distance seed cotton was hauled was eight miles, and for the largest 

 purely toll gin the distanced averaged four miles. It may be therefore 

 considered that, if sufficient inducements were offered, an improved gin 

 house might command the ginning within a radius of four miles. The 

 production of cotton for the whole State is about seventeen bales per 

 square mile, which for an area having a radius of four miles, would be 

 about eleven hundred and seven bales. But if the three principal cotton 

 regions, the Upper Pine Belt, the Red Hill, and the Piedmont Region, 

 which produce ninety per cent, of the cotton crop of the State, be taken, 

 the average is found to be about twenty-seven bales per square mile, 

 which gives seventeen hundred and ninety-five bales for the area indi- 

 cated. The average size of the enumeration districts for the census of 

 1880, for the regions above specified, was about sixty square miles. Of 

 these two hundred and seventy districts, seventy-two, or more than one- 

 fourth, produced between two tiiousand and three thousand bales of cot- 

 ton each, and twenty between three thousand and four thousand. It 



