Cotton Companies on Front Street

Memphis, TN--Yours truly, normally in exile in Durham, North Carolina, is writing from the city that is the subject of this blog, Memphis, Tennessee. I'm here on an extended visit. As most of my friends know, for the last two years I have been intently interested in cotton and especially the old cotton culture that used to exist on Memphis's Cotton Row, that four- or five-block stretch of Front Street between Jefferson and Beale. Today will be an exciting day: I'm scheduled to meet with three of the very few cotton merchants who still operate on Front Street: Calvin Turley, of Turley Cotton; Danny Lyons, of Lyons Cotton; and Kenny Jabbour, of Jabbour Cotton. Their offices are in the Cotton Exchange Building, which technically is not on Front Street but at 65 Union Avenue, at the corner of Union and Front.

On Monday, I spent a couple of hours in the Memphis and Shelby County room of the public library poring over the 1962 Polk's Memphis City Directory. I wanted to create a list, by address, of all the cotton companies that were located on Front Street in that year. Here is the list, which is rather long. The terms in parentheses are the description of the business as recorded in the directory. A linter is the fiber that stays on a cottonseed after the cotton is ginned. As far as I've been able to tell in my reading, a buyer is a company that purchases and takes ownership of cotton from a farmer; in contrast, a broker is a company that simply sells cotton on a farmer's behalf. A factor, at least in the nineteenth century, was a company that loaned money to a farmer so he could buy seed and equipment to grow the crop; in return, the farmer not only repaid the loan (with interest) but gave the factor exclusive rights to sell his cotton on his behalf. I don't know precisely what the term dealer meant and how a dealer differed from a buyer or broker. Sometimes the term listed in the directory was simply cotton; I omitted it in those cases.

At the time, the biggest cotton companies in Memphis were probably Anderson Clayton (at 2 S. Front Street), Weil Brothers (93-95 S. Front Street), Allenberg (104 S. Front Street), and Hohenberg (266 S. Front Street). Of those four, Allenberg and Hohenberg were headquartered in Memphis; the two are still in business, their headquarters now on Goodlett Farms Parkway in Cordova. Allenberg still does business under that name, although they are owned by Louis Dreyfus. Hohenberg was sold to Cargill in 1975 and today operates as Cargill Cotton. Another company that would over the next thirty years become one of the largest in the world was W. B. Dunavant and Co. In 1971, Dunavant became Dunavant Enterprises and moved to a new, modern office at 3797 New Getwell Road. In 2010 Dunavant, which now is located at 959 Ridgeway Loop Road in Memphis, sold its cotton business to longtime rival Allenberg.

22-26 N. Front Street (Falls Building)

• Max D. Lucas and Co. (cotton linters)
• Trammell and Co. (cotton linters)
• William C. Manley Jr. (cotton linters)
• Bill C. White (cotton linters)
• Stapleton Linters
• Harold Holt Co. (cotton linters)
• Railway Supply and Manufacturing Co. (cotton linters)
• Cotton Warehouse Inspection Service
• W. M. Rootes and Co. (cotton linters)
• Brode Corp. (cottonseed products)
• William S. Roberts Jr. (cotton ginner)

2 S. Front Street

• Anderson Clayton and Co. (cotton buyers)

44 S. Front Street

• Mid South Cotton Growers Association

48 S. Front Street

• Frank Oakes and Co.
• Fulton and Sons
• Covington and Smith Co. of Mfs. [Manufacturers?] Cotton

50 S. Front Street (building no longer extant)

• Alex L. Bernstein (cotton brokers)
• John A. Lyons Jr. (cotton brokers)

52 S. Front Street (building no longer extant)

• Cotton Boll Liquor Store
• Cotton Row Café

56 S. Front Street

• Staple Cotton Cooperative Association
• William R. Copeland and Co. (cotton buyers)
• Ramsey-Austin Cotton Co. (brokers)
• Clarence Hossley and Co.
• John R. Williamson and Co. 
• Malcolm L. Wilson (cotton broker)
• Bradshaw Cotton Co. (buyers)

60 S. Front Street

• F. M. Crump and Co. (cotton brokers)
• Austin Brothers Co. 
• Williams Cotton Co.
• Dudley S. Weaver and Co. (cotton buyers)
• W. B. Bridgforth and Co. (cotton dealers)

64 S. Front Street

• Riverside Cotton Sales Inc.
• John C. Weaver Co.

66 S. Front Street (Magnolia Building; I believe this is the building just north of Union Avenue, on the other side of which is the Cotton Exchange Building)

• Richards Cotton Co. (cotton brokers)
• E. F. Creekmore and Co. (cotton buyers)
• W. L. Ford and Co. (cotton brokers)
• Wesson and Co.
• Mfs. [Manufacturers?] Cotton Sales (office)

70 S. Front Street (building no longer extant--unless this was an address in the Cotton Exchange Building)

• Goodbody and Co. (cotton brokers)

81 S. Front Street (at this point we are now just south of Union Avenue)

• A. W. Grimming Cotton Co.

84 S. Front Street (building no longer extant--unless this was an address in the Cotton Exchange Building)

• May Sternberger and Co. (cotton brokers)

86 S. Front Street (building no longer extant--unless this was an address in the Cotton Exchange Building)

• Cotton Exchange Café

88 S. Front Street (building no longer extant--unless this was an address in the Cotton Exchange Building)

• De Soto Cotton Co.
• Herbert Esch and Co.
• John Hopkins and Co.
• Newbern and Co.
• George M. Darms
• John V. Welch
• O'Neal Cotton Co. (buyers)

89 S. Front Street

• John A. DuPre and Co. (cotton dealer)
• Lytle-McKee Cotton Co. (brokers)
• Taylor Cotton Co.

90 S. Front Street

• A. R. Wetenkamp and Co.
• George S. Peyton and Co.

91 S. Front Street

• Barnwell and Hayes (cotton buyers)

92 S. Front Street

• Patton Brothers Inc (cotton brokers)

93-95 S. Front Street

• Weil Brothers Cotton Inc. (buyers)

94 S. Front Street

• Carl-Lee Cotton Co. (buyers)
• Lloyd N. Judson
• R. W. Luke Holland (buyer)
• Herman J. Inderbitzen
• Kyle Patton and Co.

96 S. Front Street

• Columbia Compress Co.
• Duncan and Sims Co.
• Charles M. Parker Cotton Co.

97 S. Front Street

• D. O. Andrews and Co. (cotton exporters)

104 S. Front Street

• Allenberg Cotton Co. (buyers)

105 S. Front Street

• Hugh E. Tucker and Co. (cotton brokers)
• A. S. Byrd Cotton Co. (dealers)
• D. D. Dumas and Co. (cotton brokers)
• Southern Cotton Co-op Association
• Horace E. Jester
• L. Gordon Yancey Cotton Co.
• James C. Hill and Co.
• Ben F. Hill Cotton Co.
• D. L. McDonald Cotton Co.
• Crawford and Co.

106 S. Front Street

• McAdams and Co.
• Sam Parker

107 S. Front Street

• J. L. Mercer and Co. (cotton factors)

109 S. Front Street

• Sledge and Norfleet Co. (cotton factors)
• R. A. Armistead and Co. (cotton buyers)
• Day Brothers Cotton Co. (dealers)
• Hubert N. Stovall (cotton brokers)
• Robert M. Day (cotton brokers)

110 S. Front Street

• C. W. Hussey and Co.
• Nebhut Cotton Co. (exporters)

111 S. Front Street

• Bluff City Cotton Co. (brokers)
• J. J. Powers and Co. (cotton dealers)
• Jones-Beal Inc. (cotton dealers)
• Larkin-Hinkel Cotton Co. (buyers)
• Chickasaw Cotton Co. (dealers)
• James H. Cobb (cotton broker)
• Junius D. Hobson (cotton brokers)
• C. L. Andrews Cotton Co. (buyers)
• Arlie C. Brooks (cotton shipper)
• Boeving Brothers Cotton (cotton ginners)

112 S. Front Street

• W. B. Dunavant and Co.
• F. Eug Cau

114 S. Front Street

• C. M. Austin Co.
• Reese E. Austin (broker)
• T. H. Austin Cotton Co. (buyers)

115 S. Front Street

• F. G. Barton Cotton Co. (cotton factors)

116 S. Front Street

• Berry B. Brooks (cotton broker)
• Charles R. Cash
• E. Hope Brooks (cotton broker)

117 S. Front Street (building no longer extant)

• Graves-Beasley Inc.
• Beasley ACT and Co.

161 S. Front Street (building no longer extant)

• Crespi Cotton Co. (buyers)
• W. D. Lawson and Co. (cotton buyers)
• Thomas H. Todd and Co. (cotton buyers)
• Molloy H. Miller Co. (cotton dealers)
• Ted I. Lewis (cotton dealer)
• Cannon Mills Inc. (cotton-buying office)
• Murff and Co. Inc. (cotton buyers)
• L. T. Barringer and Co. (cotton buyers)
• S. Y. West and Co. (cotton buyers)

266 S. Front

• Hohenberg Brothers. Co. (brokers)

Cotton Man

It is the spring of 1995, and the editor of Barron's sends one of its writers to Memphis to do a story on William B. Dunavant Jr., the greatest cotton merchant in Memphis history--indeed, the greatest cotton merchant the world has ever seen. Cotton prices are on the rise, as China, India, and Pakistan have all seen their cotton crop destroyed by Mother Nature, and there's money to be made--lots of money--by the merchant who can play his cards right. And no merchant plays a better hand than Mr. Dunavant. How does he do it? In a market with so much volatility, how does he stay on top?

I can only imagine that the writer Barron's dispatched to Memphis was 27 and from the North. How else would a sentence like this appear in the final copy? "The unpredictable nature of the [cotton] trade is never far from people's minds at Memphis' Front Street cotton market, where Dixie chauvinism and nostalgia for antebellum glories have driven countless Sons of the South to dream of $1 cotton and mount suicidal Pickett's charges on the market." Predictably, Dunavant's voice is a "drawl" that is--you've got it--"smooth as molasses." And right on cue, an "air of Southern gentility" settles over his office.

To be fair, aside from the excess and cliches, the author, whose name is Jonathan R. Laing, provides an intriguing profile of Mr. Dunavant. We learn that Mr. Dunavant keeps a clean desk and writes nothing down, relying solely on his memory. His messages are delivered in shifts by one of two secretaries, who hand him notes written on sheets from scratch pads.

Mr. Dunavant, who was the principal owner of the Memphis Showboats of the old USFL, is known by many in Memphis as the guy who tried to get the city an NFL team. When that effort failed, he consoled himself by purchasing a 14,000-acre ranch in Montana. With crates of Mississippi tomatoes in tow, he spends several months a year in the Big Sky State.

At the time the article appeared in the May 8 edition, Dunavant Enterprises was buying and selling around 4 million bales of cotton a year, to the tune of approximately $2 billion, making it among the largest cotton firms in the world. In 2010, Mr. Dunavant, who is now 79 years old, sold his cotton interests to another longtime Memphis firm, Allenberg Cotton. Today, Dunavant Enterprises focuses on "logistics," that is, the transportation of goods and commodities from one point to another.

Lift That Bale

In Memphis, cotton is king. Or so I heard growing up in the city in the 1970s and 1980s. But by the time I reached the age of maturity, cotton culture in Memphis was scarcely visible. Or I should say the buying and selling of cotton—the great commercial enterprise upon which Memphis was built in the decades after the Yellow Fever scourge of 1878 had nearly wiped out the town—were scarcely visible. To be sure, cotton—or at least the idea of cotton—was present in other ways. Downtown there was the old King Cotton hotel; in the grocery stores one could find King Cotton brand lunch meats; and, above all, there was the annual Cotton Carnival, Memphis’s much less grand, and much less debauched, version of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras. But long gone were the days when farmers from the Mississippi Delta and western Tennessee would bring their crop of white gold into town to sell it on the spot to merchants on Front Street. And the lint-covered merchants who had once conducted their business so publicly, stationed elbow to elbow on the four or five blocks of Front Street that became known as Cotton Row, milling about in the Cotton Exchange Building and the downtown diners, were now hidden away in air-conditioned office buildings in the suburbs.

Cotton merchants in Memphis, 1939. Photo by Marion Post Walcott.

Still, I felt proud of Memphis’ connection to cotton, and still do, so I was gratified to see in D. Clayton Brown’s King Cotton in Modern America: A Cultural, Political, and Economic History since 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) an entire chapter devoted to cotton culture in Memphis. The chapter, which is titled “Memphis: The Epicenter of the Cotton Belt,” surveys the history of cotton in Memphis as it looks at cotton culture in the city from several illuminating angles, including the media (the offices of Cotton Farming magazine are in Memphis), Beale Street, and the Peabody Hotel, where the founding meeting of the National Cotton Council took place in 1938. (The National Cotton Council has been headquartered in Memphis since the beginning. For decades it was in a colonial-style building at 1918 North Parkway but in 2008 it moved to suburban Cordova.). There is an extended discussion of the Cotton Carnival, which was first held in 1931, and its black equivalent, the Cotton Makers Jubilee, of which, I must confess, I had been unaware before reading Brown’s book. The original Cotton Carnival was, aside from the blacks whose job it was to pull the floats, an all-white affair. In 1936, several of Memphis’ black citizens organized their own version of the carnival, the Cotton Makers Jubilee. (The name was later changed to the Memphis Kemet Jubilee in honor of black Egyptian culture.) Today, the Cotton Carnival exists as Carnival Memphis; that the name no longer retains the word cotton attests to the displacement of cotton from the center of the city’s economy; it also attests, I would imagine, to the powerful and often painful associations the word carries.

In his chapter, Brown gives us a glimpse of the colorful mule markets that used to be numerous in the city, a part of the city’s history that had been unknown to me. Before tractors became the norm on the cotton farms surrounding Memphis—and they did not until well after World War II—mules were used to pull the plows that would break the land and prepare the soil for planting. As recently as 1946 twenty-two mule yards were in the city; in that year alone Owens Brothers, which was the largest of the mule-trading operations, auctioned forty-five thousand of the plow-pulling animals. 

Brown ends his chapter with a look at cotton in today’s Memphis. Memphis has always been a center of cotton marketing, and there are still merchants in the city today. There are a lot fewer, and most of them are located far away from the old Cotton Row (two notable exceptions are the Turley Cotton Company and Lyons Cotton, Inc., which have their offices in the Cotton Exchange Building itself; they were recently joined by Jabbour Cotton, so now there are three), but no doubt a respectable number of cotton bales are still sold through Memphis merchants: Allenberg Cotton and Cargill Cotton, both located in Memphis, are two of the largest cotton merchandisers in the world. Cotton trading has also gone high-tech. In 2000, the Seam, an online cotton-trading site, was launched; formed by an organization of cotton merchants, including three from Memphis, its headquarters is in the Bluff City.