I just saw the 2010 remake of “True Grit.” I loved the movie! Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Haille Steinfeld were all incredible! And yes, watching one of this years hit movies, a western no less, made me get to blogging! Why? Well, if you’ve seen the movie you may be able to guess, but I’ll fess up. The movie made me wonder about a couple of things: cotton production in Yell County, Arkansas and historic prices for cotton lint. Yes, this lead (and the blog post to follow) is in large part my admission of being a total agnerd!
Cotton Production in Yell County, Arkansas
So…. let’s start with the Yell County references. The character Mattie talked about selling the cotton from her family’s Yell County farm in Little Rock, however she considered changing to a marketer in Fort Smith — both trading centers in Arkansas. In today’s world, it is hard to think of western Arkansas as part of the wild west, but of course, knowing our nation’s history, many areas were wild 200 years ago!
While I’m not intimately familiar with that area, I’ve traveled it some and can’t say that I remember cotton fields there!
I pulled up a few sets of statistics from the National Agricultural Statistics Service’s Arkansas Field Office. Based on the last few years data, I’d say that cotton is no longer grown in Yell County. There are lots of areas of the Southern US where crops have changed rather radically so it’s not surprising. Cotton areas of Arkansas tend to be closer to the Mississippi River which have flatter land and deeper topsoils.
In fact, once I was able to find county specific cropland maps like this one from 2009 (I really think this is cool), it seems clear that most of Yell County isn’t cropland at all. And I went back to a few historical records from the 1800s (including the 1840 census) and didn’t even see Yell County on the list! By 1870 it was listed in the Census but I couldn’t locate crop data. And since the movie’s website suggests it was set in the 1870s, that sounds about right!
One of the benefits of being a real agnerd is knowing some of the places and people to get in touch with when your sleuthing turns up empty! Enter the National Cotton Council’s economist Shawn Boyd. He found the full 1870 Census which said Arkansas produced 247,968 bales of cotton that year with 3,671 of the bales coming from Yell County!
Cotton Prices in the 1870s
Trying to track down the price of cotton in the 1870s was exactly the sort of thing Shawn has helped me with previously (did I mention that the experts at the National Cotton Council rock?). I’m still not sure why I bothered cause a lunch time phone call (and likely a rather humorous voice mail to my economist friend Shawn Boyd was answered within an hour or so with the info I hadn’t been able to find!
The conversation in the movie touches briefly on the price of cotton with Mattie saying she had gotten 11 cents per pound where they sold their early crop. And the Fort Smith marketer was offering 9 cents. According to the information Shawn pulled, the average prices for cotton lint in the 1870s moved around some (see the graph of numbers below thanks to Shawn 🙂 ) but 9-11 cents per pound is in the range for the late 1870s! Close enough to get Shawn to say “It seems like the book/movie was pretty accurate (especially if the movie took place in 1877, 78, or 79). It looks like somebody did their homework when it came to the cotton prices.”
And with that, I’m going to stop my agnerd moments inspired by watching a few short minutes of “True Grit.” Sure am glad that it added up after I checked a few things out. For some reason I think I would have been totally bummed if the book or movie wasn’t well fact-checked! LOL!
Love this post! Not only did I also see the movie (I need to see the original now!), but I’m also a graph/fact nerd, so the info is awesome. Thanks for sharing!
I have seen the original before but want to see it again after seeing the new one! Thanks for the fact nerd bonding too!
I live in Yell County, Arkansas. I did not however, grow up here. I do know cotton was grown here years ago and there is still a standing cottin gin building (Yell County Gin) in Dardanelle, Arkansas; the town Mattie mentions where her fine lawyer J. Daggett was from. The building is currently being used for tractor sales. It’s back in a residential area of town, not on the main road. They grew a lot of the cotton in Yell County around the river; obviously for shipping ease. Carden Bottoms was an area where they grew a lot of cotton. Now soybeans and corn fill the fields where cotton was once grown. Very little rice is grown in this area of the state. We have Magazine Mtn. in northwest Yell, and mostly in Logan County, and Danville Mtn. is in central Yell County. There is plenty of flat farm land in between for raising cattle and crops.
Thanks for adding a local’s viewpoint! I really have enjoyed learning some of the behind the scenes story to one of the year’s top movies. Guess next time I head west on I-40 I’ll have to stop in Yell County!
I just saw the movie Friday night and also picked up on the Yell county reference. It’s near to my heart because that’s where my grandparents farm house (still standing today) is. We still own that property and I can recall that my grandad used to tell stories of cotton picking there. For a couple of summers, the former baseball great, ‘Dizzy Dean’ worked for my grandpa picking cotton, before he became pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. Guess lots of history came from the area. Sorry to say that not many are still around to fill us in with the little tidbits anymore.
Wow! That’s a cool connection to make! Thanks for sharing the story as I have to admit that while I’ve gone through Yell County a number of times, I’ve not spent any time there. If you’d like to get any of your granddad’s cotton stories down to share, you can email them to [email protected] — I’d love to share more information here in another blog post if possible.
Hi there Jeff my Great grandfather was John Gentry Keener of Prarie, Yell Co Ar born in 1900. He was the blacksmith who had a shop out by Wayne Farms poultry until his death in 1991. He was a neighbor and friend of Dizzy and I have heard stories of the two of them hunting squirrel with rocks as boys and picking cotton. I verified their proximity from census reports because I knew he always said he could have went to play ball with Dean had he not been married which he was in late 1921.
I was fortunate to have been old enough to remember his stories and young enough to enjoy listening to them. I also have one of his and my grandmothers cotton pickers log books.