I've just spent 30 minutes listening to a Tea Party neighbor rant about electric cars and high-speed rail. The gist of his rant is . . . well, you know . . . waste of money, never work, plenty of oil . . .
Got me to thinking about mules, electric cars, trains, and jackasses.
I was born in Wilkinson County in the far SW corner of Mississippi, 1944. In 1951 my father’s business moved us to East Tennessee. Every summer, my mother, younger brother, and I returned home to Mississippi for most of three months (this was back in the day when we had REAL summer vacations from school).
My grandfather owned a small grocery store in Mississippi and a large general merchandise store and cotton gin across the state line in Louisiana. He also bought peppers and beans from local farmers and sold them to processors near Baton Rouge.
When cotton picking started in August, farmers from two counties brought their cotton to Granddad’s gin. Friday and Saturday were the big ginning days. When we arrived at the gin at 0500, trucks and wagons would be lined up for most of a mile, waiting their turn at the gin and more came in all day until long after dark.
1961 was my last summer to gin cotton. I graduated from high school in 1962, spent that summer working in East Tennessee, then started college in the fall. After that summer was more work to pay tuition then into the Army for almost 30 years.
When I was growing up during the summers in Mississippi, most farmers plowed with a team of mules and the primary farm vehicle was a wooden farm wagon pulled by that same team of mules.
During the summer of 1961, I had on old Kodak Signet 35 camera that I used to take photographs of all my favorite spots – the gin, the store, and the like. A few weeks ago, I was scanning my old Ektachrome slides into the computer and I stopped to look at the photos of the cotton ginning operation.
I counted the vehicles lined up at the gin. In the late summer of 1961, in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, one-third of the vehicles bringing cotton to my grandfather’s gin were mule-drawn wagons.
The first automobiles were introduced into the US in the 1890’s. The Duryea brothers started making cars in 1893. Think about that – 70 years after the introduction of the automobile, one-third of the farmers in a rural parish in Louisiana were still using mule-drawn plows and wagons. Cotton was still being picked by hand.
So – when someone tells me that the electric car is a useless toy because it’ll go only 40 to 100 miles before recharging, and the batteries cost thousands to replace, I recall those mules in Mississippi and Louisiana that were still in use 70 years after the internal combustion engine was supposed to replace them. Change is slow. But it changes.
And don’t get me started on the railroads. We could catch the train twice a day in Centreville, MS, and ride to Baton Rouge, LA. Today there are not even railroad tracks through Centreville.
Seventy years from now, when electric cars are the norm, historians will read the complaints about the early electric cars and file them under “Planning for the past.”