Bluff City bicentennial: How the Cotton Exchange shaped Memphis
Without cotton, Memphis as we know it wouldn't exist.
The industry was fueled by the fertile soil in the Mississippi Delta, technological advancement that brought the cotton gin, slaves, later replaced by sharecroppers and others working for free or cheap, and a global demand for the crop.
Although cotton was bought and sold in Memphis for most of the half-century before the Civil War, it wasn't until after the decade after the war that a group of growers, buyers, financiers and others whose livelihoods were tied to the crop formed the Memphis Cotton Exchange in 1873.
The first location of the Cotton Exchange was in a modest building near Madison Avenue and Second Street. It then moved to a larger building near the same intersection. The final stop was the 12-story building at 65 Union Ave., where it moved in the mid-1920s and remained until it closed in 1978.
If the story of Memphis had to be told through a single building, that one at the corner of Union Avenue and Front Street — the center of what was then known as Cotton Row — is among the few that could tell it.
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In 2006, the first floor became home to the Cotton Museum, which looks back on how cotton influenced everything in Memphis from the economy to the music to large cultural events.
"This floor sat empty from 1978 to 2006," said Ann Bateman, Cotton Museum manager. "They basically walked out and locked the door. All the stuff was still here. I wouldn’t call it preserved. It was just left. ... They just literally walked out and shut the door and turned the lights out."
Bales of cotton and pints of bourbon
Much like the name Wall Street refers to the home of the New York Stock Exchange and the financial industry ecosystem surrounding it, Cotton Row, the strip of Front Street in Downtown Memphis between Monroe and Gayoso avenues, was known simply as "the street" to cotton traders.
The street, including 28 buildings and two vacant lots, is now on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the National Register nomination form submitted the year before the exchange closed, the cotton trade got its formal start within the first decade of Memphis' founding.
"From 1826, when 300 bales were brought to Memphis by wagon, to the present, cotton has been important to Memphis," the application said, adding that by the late 1880s and 1890s, that number skyrocketed to 400,000 to 700,000 bales of cotton every year.
Much of that cotton was bought and sold along Cotton Row.
In the heart of it all was the Memphis Cotton Exchange. And on the ground level where the museum now sits was "the floor," said Calvin Turley, who started his career inside the building when it was still functioning as the exchange and still runs his cotton company from the fourth floor.
On the floor, cotton merchants would gather to agree on the value of bales of compressed cotton that sat about 5 feet tall and 2 feet wide.
"For most of the history of cotton merchandising in this country, the value of a 500-pound bale of cotton was determined by a sample — approximately shoe box size, let's say — which you would look at and read like you would a book," Turley said.
The color of the cotton, the leaf content, and the length of the fibers when bunches were pulled apart all contributed to its value.
"You needed to be where the brokers and merchants were so you could go look at samples and determine the value of this commodity that your intention was to trade," he said. "There was every good reason to have a place where people would meet one another."
That need to be close created a cotton ecosystem.
Inside the Cotton Exchange building, cotton classers were on the top floor where the natural light was best. It was their job to examine cotton samples and sort them into different classes based on quality. The "squidge" worked alongside the classer as an apprentice learning the business. Until bright light bulbs were developed to mimic sunlight, this work could be done only on clear, sunny days and near windows.
Porters — usually black — maintained the street, moved cotton bales and performed other labor-intensive jobs.
Outside the building, cotton factors, who lent money to farmers to buy seed and merchants to buy cotton, set up alongside cotton insurers, warehouse representatives, steamship agents and others.
"It was to be a place where rules were made, people could gather, markets were shown on the board," Turley said. "It was all about the buying and selling of cotton."
Just as that proximity facilitated business, it also created a social order maintained by lively games of dominoes, practical jokes and often-raucous drinking.
"There was a lot of drinking on the street, which was maybe a combination of a certain level of anxiety produced by speculation during the season and then nothing to do in the summertime," Turley said. "One of my first jobs was going to the Cotton Bowl liquor store and buying half pints of Old Yellowstone bourbon, which was not a very respectable brand, but it kept fires going."
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The death and rebirth of Downtown
The buildings on Cotton Row didn't match the elaborate architecture of some of the others that were rising around it, but even that was a sign of the time.
"Although built during a period of exuberant architectural expression, the Cotton Row buildings are primarily a product of function rather than prevailing fashion," the National Register nomination form said.
These buildings were there to get business done, not to look pretty. But just as the technology of the cotton gin helped to make the cotton industry viable, technology eventually made Cotton Row and the exchange obsolete.
While some of the world's leading cotton companies — including Dunavant Enterprises and Hohenberg Cotton, which later sold to Cargill — came from the shops on Cotton Row, as technology developed, traders could make deals over the phone from miles away and had no reason to come to Cotton Row.
As businesses disappeared and consolidated on Cotton Row, others in Downtown were shutting down too, although for different reasons.
According to Charles Crawford, a historian with the University of Memphis, as cars became more common, more and more people were willing to commute for work. As they moved east to the Memphis suburbs, businesses followed and East Memphis became the new central business district.
Opposition to school integration and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel only accelerated the already declining Downtown.
By the time the Memphis Cotton Exchange closed in 1978, much of Downtown was already desolate.
"You could have fired a gun down Main Street and wouldn't hit anyone," Crawford said.
But just as the exchange building followed the trend of a waning Downtown, it helped lead the revival.
Henry Turley, who helped pioneer a wave of Downtown development and revitalization, bought the building in the mid-1980s with partner Clyde Patton. Henry Turley, Calvin Turley's brother, had already renovated two vacant buildings when he and Patton set their sights on this one.
"The building was nearly empty," Henry Turley said. "There was nothing on Main Street. This place was pitiful."
Henry Turley persuaded tenants to move in by offering part ownership of the building rather than just rental space.
After this building, Henry Turley went on to lead a new wave of residential development to encourage more density Downtown, an effort that is still underway decades later.
As for the exchange building, it is still being used for what it was always used for — offices. Now, it houses advertisers, lawyers, real estate developers and, yes, even cotton traders.
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