A couple recently stopped by MidCountry Media’s offices to ask if anyone could identify what was going on in a photo they had found while going through a relative’s estate.

The photo showed an odd-looking machine with what appeared to be hoses coming off the top. Men held the hoses as they walked through a field. The back of the photo read: “April 8, 23, Odin, Ill.” The photo postcard definitely has the word “picker” on the front and a word in front of it appears to be “cotton,” but it is difficult to make out for sure.

It looks as if the crop the machine was going through was cotton. If the photo had said it was taken in a southern state associated with cotton production, we all would have immediately agreed it was a machine used for that, but since it was from Illinois, no one who had previously looked at the photo could decide what was happening in the picture.

I said I would post the photo on Farm World’s Facebook page and then link it over to AntiqueWeek’s Facebook page (MidCountry Media owns both publications). I felt confident someone from one of those two groups would be able to easily identify the machine and what was happening.

Before I could even publish the photo, Editorial Assistant Mandy Steele had already found two videos showing the machine (or at least something similar to it). But I wanted to see what our Facebook viewers thought, so I didn’t post that information with the photo.

Several people commented that it looked like a machine invented by Dr. Seuss. Others thought it was doing something in terms of bug removal. But, in less than an hour, a viewer correctly identified it s a pneumatic cotton picker.

While we might not think of Illinois as a cotton-producing state, records indicate cotton was indeed grown there through the 1920s. Last year an Illinois farmer was said to have the first cotton crop in the state since the late 1920s.

A 1930 video found on YouTube was titled “Cotton Pickers Lament” and it showed the pneumatic cotton picker. Another video is the “Story of Cotton from Harvest to Mill,” a 1940 Cotton Industry Educational Film. It was produced by Paul Hoefler and is 11 minutes long.

“There is no other farm crop on which so many Americans depend for a living,” according to the voiceover narrative. According to the film, one-third of all farmers were growing cotton and 10 percent of people in the United States were earning their living via cotton farming.

The film begins by saying cotton picked by hand was cleaner and brought higher prices. It then goes onto show the “marvels” of a machine picking cotton in California. The machine used was said to be “50 times faster than a man” in harvesting cotton.

“These machines allow farmers to earn a living in areas where there is a labor shortage,” the film stated. “It has released thousands of pickers to better manufacturing jobs.”

Mechanical devices designed to pick cotton were developed in the mid- to late 1800s, but were never commercially produced. In the 1930s John Daniel Rust invented a machine that was put into production and tested in the South.

“In 1936, the Rust machine received a public trial at the Delta Experiment Station near Leland, Mississippi,” wrote Donald Holley, in an article titled “Mechanical Cotton Picker” on the Economic History Assoc. website. “Though the Rust picker was not perfected, it did pick cotton and it picked it well. The machine produced a sensation.

“The Rust brothers’ machine provoked the fear that a mechanical picker would destroy the South’s sharecropping system and, during the Great Depression, throw millions of people out of work. An enormous human tragedy would then release a flood of rural migrants, mostly black, on northern cities.

“The Jackson (Miss.) Daily News editorialized that the Rust machine ‘should be driven right out of the cotton fields and sunk into the Mississippi River.’”

World War II helped bring the mechanical cotton picker into production. In 1942 International Harvester announced it had a commercial picker ready for production. It was one of the firms that had experimented in the 1930s with the pneumatic picker and determined the machine could not pick faster than a person.

“In late 1944, as World War II entered its final months, attention turned to a dramatic announcement,” Holley wrote. “The Hopson Planting Co. near Clarksdale, Miss., produced the first cotton crop totally without the use of hand labor. Machines planted the cotton, chopped it, and harvested the crop.

“It was a stunning achievement that foretold the future.”

If you have a photo of a vintage farm machine and you don’t know what it is, consider positing it on Farm World’s Facebook page – chances are good a page visitor will know what it is.