BLACK OAK AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, 21 



When the Captain found that half the purchase 

 could pay him the bona-fide debt, and leave thirty 

 negroes, he generously made it over to Theodore's 

 children. When he married his second wife, he 

 became entitled to her property, but he never used 

 one cent of it, but gave it all to her children, re- 

 turning even what she had used as his wife. In 

 the twenty-three or twenty-four years after Capt. 

 Gaillard had paid his last debt, he paid for real 

 property $118,000 ; retaining for his own use up- 

 wards of $13,000 in stock, and dividing among 

 his children upwards of five hundred negroes. 



The gin first used for cleaning cotton of the 

 seed was a clumsily constructed foot gin without 

 the wheels, as now used, but instead, two cross- 

 pieces with clubs at their ends, to give the neces^ 

 sary power. The greater part of the crops was 

 either ginned early in the morning, or after task- 

 work at night, a hand doing four or five pounds at 

 each time. Cotton at that period, down to the in- 

 troduction of the fine selected seed from the sea 

 islands, invariably yielded one pound of clean to 

 every three of seed cotton, and when seed was 

 selected it was with the view of its so yielding. 

 At that time, quantity and not quality was the aim 

 in view ; consequently, heavier yields were obtained 

 from our lands. Capt. Gaillard told me that his 

 average of cotton on the Rocks, for twenty years, 

 was one hundred and fifteen pounds per acre. My 



