EWGSI

  One last wonderful stop was Frogmore Plantation in Louisiana, a huge cotton processing facility. There I learned that the U.S. is #3 in cotton producing countries (China is #1 and India #2).  I learned that cotton is delivered wrapped in pink from various area growers. Each "roll" is tagged with the grower's name, moisture content, date, etc. And each "roll" is processed separately.       The basket on the left shows one pound of picked cotton. Just this one basket would take an enslaved person ALL DAY to pick out the seeds. Believe me, I tried it and it is HARD to do. Frogmore Plantation is fully mechanized and nice clean ready to use and wrapped bales finalize the process.  The pictures below show how cotton was baled and shipped in the old days.  There are hundreds of resources to access if you wish to know more about cotton, A-Z. With this small blurb, I hoped to just give you a pinch of information. And no, I shall not never become a cotton picker........

The New Madrid Earthquake of 1811   --   The area known as New Madrid was, in 1811, a ways upriver and was sparsely populated. After the Revolution, people were flocking west, crossing the Appalachian Mountains, but blessedly there were few settlers in the New Madrid area in 1811.   So what happened? On 16 December 1811, at 2:15 am, not one but THREE magnitude 8.0 or higher shook the area in that one day. In January 1812, there was another big shake, followed in February by a last 8.8 shock. Church bells rang as far away as Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston. These four big quakes in a three month period happened because “a seam between two plates pulled apart,” explained our presenter. “And the quakes continue to today…. There have been 4000 quakes recorded since 1974! And if and when another big one comes, the entire Midwest will be in big trouble,” he mused. The Sultana disaster of 1865   --   In the early morning hours of 27 April 1865, mere days after the end of the Civil Wa