It’s hard to read, but “Wilson N C” is written in the cotton plants just below the four women and five children. The reverse of the postcard is labeled “Foust’s Ground Floor Studio, Wilson, N.C.” and carries a Wilson postmark with a partially illegible date — MAR 10 190_.”
Copy courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
This remarkable postcard image is undated, but likely was taken in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.
Typed along its right edge: “Elm City, N.C. ‘Cotton Picking’.”
The handwritten message: “I don’t know that you ever saw a cotton field at ‘picking time’ This is taken 1/2 mile from town just as they are getting ready to begin work ‘after dinner’.”
I honor the lives and memory of our cotton-picking ancestors.
Image courtesy of Keith Boykin. Thank you!
Wilson Times, 18 September 1896.
I’m speechless.
[William W. Graves, by the way, was a wealthy young farmer whose landholdings were in the Evansdale area between Wilson and Stantonsburg.]