The Cotton Exchange: Four Hundred Thousand Bales a Year
Near Augusta, Georgia
Before the Civil War, tobacco was Augusta's first cash crop. Farmers rolled their hogshead barrels of cured leaf down to the Savannah River and floated them to market here. Then came the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in seventeen ninety-three while he was living on a plantation near Savannah, and tobacco's commercial dominance ended within a generation. Upland cotton, which grew across the piedmont counties surrounding Augusta, could now be processed fast enough to be profitable, and it was.
By the eighteen eighties, Augusta was operating as the second largest inland cotton market in the world, behind only Memphis, Tennessee. The Cotton Exchange building on Reynolds Street, completed in eighteen eighty-six, formalized what had become an enormous commercial infrastructure. Brokers traded bales. Telegraph lines connected the trading floor to New York and Liverpool. In a typical year, between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand bales of cotton passed through the exchange.
The building was designed by architect Enoch William Brown in a High Victorian style, with decorative brickwork and a distinctive clock tower intended to signal Augusta's status in a global market. Cotton from the surrounding counties went out through this city to textile mills in New England and Britain that kept the looms running on what the Deep South's enslaved and then exploited labor produced.
The exchange building still stands on Reynolds Street, now home to a bank branch, the clock tower intact.
