MANUFACTURES. 597 



specified by the producer, at a great saving of expense in labor to him, as 

 otherwise lie must haul his crop home, store it, and again haul it to mar- 

 ket. The seed, too, could be shipped without delay to the nearest oil mill, 

 and the producer might return home with a railroad receipt for his cot- 

 ton and cotton seed meal prepared to feed his stock, or fertilize his land, 

 accomplishing by one step what it now requires several tedious ones to 

 compass. 



The value of cotton seed and of its manufacture into oil and cake is 

 just receiving a development which is likely to make great changes. In 

 1880 the price of upland cotton seed in South Carolina was ten to twelve 

 cents per bushel, and it was used almost entirely as a manure. There 

 was no oil mill in the State, and only one in Georgia. Before the Avork- 

 ing season of 1882, at least five new oil mills were established in Georgia, 

 and three in South Carolina. Those in Carolina w^ere the Charleston Oil 

 Mill, capital $60,000, having three twenty box presses, with a capacity of 

 w^orking fifty tons of seed a day ; two other mills, one in Greenville and 

 one in Chester, having together about the capacity of the former, so that 

 now of the 250,000 tons of cotton seed annually produced in the State, 

 about 20,000 tons, or less than ten per cent., can be worked up into oil 

 and cake. As a consequence of these enterprises, cotton seed is selling at 

 eighteen cents per bushel, or at an advance of eighty per cent, in two 

 years. So that this crop, worth $1,721,000 in 1880, may, in 1882, be sold 

 for $3,097,000. Nor is there anything of a merely speculative character 

 in these advances. Cotton seed oil is to-day the cheapest edible oil in 

 the world. Up to January 1st, 1881, none of this oil, as such, ^vas sold 

 for consumption in South Carolina. In the summer of 1882 it was to be 

 found in nearly all of the country grocery stores along the lines of rail- 

 road, and in all the principal towns; about one hundred barrels a month 

 are sold from Charleston, and the consumption in the State w^as not less 

 than 2,000 barrels. Such is the favor with which it has been received 

 that the dealers estimate that more than 5,000 barrels will be required to 

 supply the demand during the present year. Considering the excellent 

 qualities of this oil as a salad oil, or for cooking, and the present wide 

 margin between its price and that of lard and olive oils, together with 

 the growing population, and the increasing demand for food stuffs all 

 over the world, nothing seems more certain than that it must advance 

 in value rapidly as soon as its use becomes generally tested and known. 

 The cotton seed cake, or meal, now sells for $21 per ton at the oil mill ; two- 

 thirds of it is exported, and about ten per cent, is used as a fertilizer, being 

 considered by tlie manufacturers of commercial manures as the cheapest 

 supply of nitrogenous material; the balance is used for stock feed, chiefly 

 by Northern farmers and dairymen, a single broker, in Boston, dispos- 



