05/27/2001

By Curtis Howell / The Dallas Morning News

A massive, steam-spewing, three-story steel monument to Collin County's agricultural heritage lies hidden deep in McKinney's industrial district.

The steam cotton compress – the last operating in Texas, and perhaps the nation, is late-1800s technology that looks meant for a battleship's engine room. It was built to compact large cotton bales into much smaller ones for loading onto rail cars.

The giant machine is little used. Cotton is no longer the area's main bounty.

"I thought I'd shut it down after 1999," said Ben Scholz, who operates the compress. There is barely enough business, he said, to keep the equipment running.

But it would be a mistake to think that farming no longer matters here, that it has taken a back seat to development. More than two-thirds of the county's 535,040 acres are still agricultural, according to County Extension Agent Eddie Baggs. Cotton has simply been supplanted by other crops.

Granted, things are changing, and there will be a time when more Collin County land will be urban than rural. But for now, the agricultural heritage that has defined Collin County for a century and a half is still the dominant land use.

Although little manmade evidence survives of the county's earliest days, all you have to do to see what made Collin County the magnet that it has become is to arrange to see the vast cotton warehouses and the steam compress at Producers Compress Inc. cooperative.

That, or, take a drive to the country and look across the rich blackland fields of wheat, corn and milo.

"I do it at least once a month, just to see where I grew up and what's changing," said Plano's Eddie "Sarge" Stimpson, author of a memoir titled My Remembers, which recounts his days growing up in a sharecropper's family.

"I do a lot of presentations and I tell them, 'Every little thread on your body, everything you eat – the people had to work hard and die poor for you to have it,'" he said. "There was nothing Collin County couldn't grow."

Since its beginnings in the first half of the 19th century, Collin County farming has changed many times. Prior to 1880, most of the cultivation was done by subsistence farmers who were "independently poor," according to Dr. Kyle Wilkison of Collin County Community College.

"They were still at the mercy of the weather, but there was a relationship between hard work and success," Dr. Wilkison said. "Independence was prized above all else. Land ownership meant independence. It meant you were a man."

Remnants of that pride of ownership still exist. The Texas Department of Agriculture lists 40 Collin County farms as Family Land Heritage farms that have been in the same families for at least 100 years, most of them much longer.

Railroads arrive

Collin County's rich soil became a terrific investment nearly overnight. Those with ready cash, town dwellers mostly, bought up most of the land. By 1910, the vast majority of farmers were tenants, he said.

"Railroads brought great wealth, made a lot of people rich, but not the producers for the most part," Dr. Wilkison said.

The shift in ownership caused sweeping changes.

Motivated by profit, owners forced tenants to use every available acre for cotton or wheat.

"They had no interest in letting someone use valuable land for a cow pasture, hog pen or sweet potato patch," Dr. Wilkison said. "Farmers went from independent landowners to a culture where they were plowing cotton rows to the front porch."

It was an economic trap.

Tenancy had several levels. At the lowest end were the half-croppers who brought only their labor. The owner provided tools, teams, credit, seed and housing. If a man had his own tools, team and credit, he could retain two-thirds to three-fourths of the crop to sell, Dr. Wilkison explained.

At the top of the stack were cash renters who had complete say over what to do with the land. Sharecroppers, though, could seldom amass enough money to buy their own farms. That left them dependent, and for the white tenants, it was the first time they could not do better in life than their fathers.

"To have to work someone else's land, there was some shame in that," Dr. Wilkison said.

"They were caught," he said. "You could work your tail off and for reasons they couldn't comprehend, they couldn't get out. The goal was to break even."

The fallout from the widespread frustration gave rise to the Populist parties of the 1890s and the Socialist parties in Texas in the early 1900s.

With mainly rural support, Socialist candidate Reddin Andrews, a preacher, came in second in the gubernatorial election in 1912 saying, "A vote against the Socialists is a vote for the devil."

"People were angry and here was someone saying, 'It's not your fault,'" Dr. Wilkison said.

World War II

Mr. Stimpson said he used teams of mules mostly to farm land owned by the Haggards and Carpenters until he joined the Army in 1948.

The next major waves of change came in the 1950s with the onset of mechanized farming, and in the last 10 to 15 years with the decline of cotton as the major crop.

Besides the traditional row crops – grains and cotton – Collin County also claimed to be the onion capital of Texas, and it produced bumper harvests of cantaloupe and watermelon, Mr. Baggs said. But all three were labor-intensive and did not lend themselves to mechanization as did cotton and grain.

So when World War II and the Cold War spurred manufacturing, laborers and small farmers fled the fields for higher-paying jobs in Dallas that were also less rigorous, leaving cotton, corn and wheat as the dominant crops.

Today, farmers in Collin County are sophisticated and, weather notwithstanding, still among the most productive in the state.

Last year, Mr. Baggs said, crop and livestock brought $62.3 million into the economy. The impact is many times that amount if fuel, fertilizer, seed, equipment and all of the other spending that supports agriculture is included.

Grains and cotton production take up 100,000 acres, and county farmers and ranchers graze 33,000 head of livestock.

Mr. Scholz of Wylie has one of the larger farms in Collin County and also is the general manager of the Producers Compress, which can store as many as 35,000 cotton bales and houses the steam compress.

Decline of cotton

Cotton accounted for 3,000 acres last year compared with 76,000 for corn and wheat, and the gap widens every year. Where once nearly every town in the county had at least one gin, now the only one left is in Farmersville.

The future of farming in Collin County will once again change with land ownership, Mr. Baggs and others say.

Population grows. Developers reach out to buy more and more land, and often, large tracts are cut up into 5- to 50-acre hobby farms.

Until they are developed, though, farmers rent them, raise crops and protect the agricultural status for the owner.

In cases where large tracts are inside city limits, Mr. Scholz said, developers often pay farmers to keep the land in production just to get the tax break.

In perhaps 25 years, Mr. Baggs predicted, small acreage crops such as grapes and sunflowers will be viable – what he calls niche production.

But Mr. Stimpson said he has already seen the future of farming in Collin County firsthand.

It happened in the early '70s, he said, when he was harvesting cotton near the corner of Custer and 15th Street.

"While I was out there one day, I seen all this equipment coming down [15th]. They came across the fence and the field and started bulldozing," he said. "A man came over and said it had sold and we wasn't going to farm it no more. They bulldozed the crop, the old house – everything."

Staff writer Curtis Howell can be reached at 214-977-7472 and by e-mail at .