Cotton Industry
The Savannah Cotton Exchange was established in 1876 and made its permanent home on Bay Street in 1883. The exchange was established to provide cotton factors, brokers serving planters’ interest in the market, a place to congregate and set the market value of cotton exported to larger markets such as New York or London. By the end of the 19th century factorage was on the decline as more planters were selling their products at interior markets, thus merely shipping them from Savannah via the extensive rail connections between the city and the interior.
By 1870 three principal railroads—the Central of Georgia, the Savannah and Charleston and the Savannah and Gulf—connected the city to markets along the coast and the interior. The Central of Georgia, whose principal shareholder was the city of Savannah, established its own docks and canals to the west of the existing Savannah riverfront. This marks the first shift of industrial-commercial activity outside of the central plan of the city. An additional railroad was built extending from the Drayton Street Depot out to Tybee Island in 1887. The rate, 1 cent per mile or 17.7 cents each way, enabled city dwellers to escape to the ocean and spend their newfound leisure hours at the beach on Tybee Island. This became the first commuter line from Savannah to an outlying area.
19th-century development in Savannah was dominated by the emergence of cotton as a widespread cash crop and a subsequent shift in the economy of the city. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Eli Whitney changed the face of agriculture in the American South. Whitney’s gin was produced in response to the state of Georgia’s appointed commission for the promotion of a gin suitable to remove seed from fibers on the short-staple, green-seed cotton. Whitney developed the gin at Mulberry Grove Plantation outside Savannah while he was a tutor to the children of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene.
Sea Island or long-staple cotton had been very profitable in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War, but the production of this variety was relegated to the narrow coastal zone and would not grow in the upland interior of the South. Green-seed cotton could be grown in the uplands but was difficult to process with the pre-1793 roller gin; consequently, Whitney’s invention opened the interior of the South to widespread cotton production.
The development of Georgia’s interior had a tremendous impact on Savannah, as cotton production was focused on lands newly appropriated from the Creeks along the upper Savannah River. Planters on both the Georgia and South Carolina sides of the river shipped their cotton downriver to market and export at Savannah. This increase in trade corresponds to the increase in population, as Savannah was the eighteenth-largest urban area in the United States by 1820. In 1818 shipping and business stopped temporarily when the city fell under quarantine due to a yellow fever epidemic.
| Economic competition This monopoly on the interior markets did not last long; in 1833, the South Carolina Railroad, extending from Charleston to Hamburg, South Carolina, was completed. The longest rail line of its day, the South Carolina Railroad was primarily built to redirect the export of cotton grown along the Savannah River through Charleston. The siphoning-off of cotton markets along the upper Savannah prompted the increased interest in the development of north Georgia. The Central of Georgia Railroad was organized in 1833 to open a commercial line between Savannah and the vast interior of central and north Georgia. The forcible expulsion of nearly 18,000 Cherokees, following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, ensured that north Georgia would be open to settlement and cotton production. The Central of Georgia Railroad extended to Macon by 1843 and to Terminus (later known as Atlanta) by 1846. |
In 1828, construction began on the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal, a 16.5-mile (26.6 km) canal connecting the Ogeechee River to the southwest (near present-day Richmond Hill) and the Savannah River, slightly to the west of Savannah’s newly established riverfront. The canal was completed in 1831, directing the resources of Georgia’s south-central interior to Savannah. The expansions of Savannah during the 1830s and 1840s led to the need for a new city map, which was published by Edward A. Vincent in 1853.
Despite its small population, Savannah amassed an enormous amount of wealth. By 1820, Savannah was exporting $18 million worth of goods. It is important to recognize, however, that this wealth came about as the result of both the removal of indigenous peoples from the interior as well as the slave trade. Although originally banned from the British colony of Georgia, the slave population exceeded the free population in Savannah by the end of the 18th century (5,146 free and 8,201 slave in 1800). Little is known about the slave population of Savannah beyond what can be read in census information: between 1810 and 1830, there was a decrease in the number of slaves in the city, followed by an increase in the slave population from 9,478 in 1830 to 14,018 in 1850. As the population of free people of color grew by 68 percent between 1850 and 1860, the slave population remained relatively stable. Additionally, Savannah retained a consistent number of free African Americans throughout the antebellum years (725 in 1860), and they were engaged in a variety of entrepreneurial activities.
Read more about this topic: History Of Savannah, Georgia, Economic Development
Famous quotes containing the words cotton and/or industry:
“We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, will often peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)