John Raymond Shute II
Wayne Durrill, interview, June 25, 1982
Southern Oral History Program
Documenting the American South
Excerpts:
“…The
primary crops were cotton and corn. You had to have the corn to feed
the mules to raise the cotton. That was about the cycle that was
operated.
“…The
merchants were in favor of roads and good roads—all-weather roads, they
were called—where the farmer could bring his cotton to town to the
market and carry his supplies back without getting hub-deep in mud in
the wintertime and covered with dust in the summertime. “....The
cotton platform was not a facility that bought and sold cotton. It was
the official weight station of the county. That was owned and operated
by the county. Now there was and is—it doesn't function anymore—a Union
County Cotton Warehouse, which was a separate corporation, and they
stored cotton. But we had cotton buyers—they were called brokers—all
over Monroe.
“You'd come up
here in the fall of the year, and you couldn't drive a buggy or later a
car up Hayne Street or Jefferson or Franklin Streets or this Windsor
Street because of the cotton wagons. I mean they just choked the
thoroughfares.
“Well, those
buyers would give a man a bid on his cotton. If it was accepted, he gave
him a ticket. He took that ticket and his bales of cotton to the cotton
platform. There it was officially weighed, and the cotton weigher was
an official of the county. He got the correct weight and left the cotton
there in the name of this buyer who had bought it and got a certified
ticket for the weight. Then that cotton was picked up by the Cotton
Warehouse Company and stored as the property of the buyer that bought it
and would be moved about and shipped and this, that, and the other on
orders from the buyers. Then the farmer would go back to the man that
bought it with his ticket and get a check.
“That was the
function of the cotton platform. In the fall of the year, it was filled
with cotton. They couldn't move it into the warehouse fast enough to
keep the platform pretty well open, so that whole area out there was
always choked up with wagons. That was on Planter Street.
"... they'd take
those cotton checks as a rule and go to the wholesaler that had been
supplying them through the year and pay up his bills. That'd be his
first thing. The second thing they'd do, his family nearly always came
to town with him when he brought his cotton, and they would do their
shopping. The women folks would buy piece goods and buttons and thread
and needles and things that were needed around the home. Later they'd go
to the store and buy what was called fancy groceries. This would be a
small amount of jarred and canned pickles in jars and jellies, not many,
because most of that stuff was done at home, the canning and things
like that. But then this farmer would put in, usually, in those first
checks—the first loads that he'd bring in—supplies that he needed like
flour and coffee and salt and sugar and staples. He would buy those
there, and Monroe became quite a trading center. We had some large
stores here.
"…forwarding
agents in Cheraw and Camden would arrange and make contact with
merchants and others to ship goods, mostly cotton, down the river and to
bring supplies back up the river. You can imagine what-all was brought
up the river, not only supplies for stores, but this was open country
and pioneer country, and they brought in all manner of things: spinning
wheels, furniture, almost everything. It was a thriving industry. Then
there were companies, primarily in Charleston, that handled the trade
from there on up, coast-wise shipping. The greatest shipping merchant in
Charleston was Henry Laurens. He had a fleet of ships. By the way,
Laurens County, South Carolina, is named for him. So these were the
contacts that John Shute made, and it worked both ways.
“Then he had
his contacts with merchants in Charlotte and here in Monroe, and he
brought their supplies to them, too. It was necessary in those days to
have companies like his own, wholesale and retail groceries, to in turn
supply these little rural stores, say, twenty by sixty feet, out in the
rural areas that furnished the fundamental and basic supplies for
farmers. When they got ready to buy things like fertilizer or flour or
heavy groceries or farm supplies, they'd come into the store with their
wagons and load up and carry them back to their little stores. They'd
usually buy on credit during the year, and then in the fall when they
sold their cotton, which was sold in Monroe, they would pay up their
bills and start all over again. That built up Monroe as a trading center
at a relatively early period. That's one reason, I'm convinced, that
Monroe later became a railroad center, because of the fact that Monroe
was the highest cotton market in the country. Not only that, but we had
four or five large wholesale grocery stores here. We had a large
wholesale hardware. As a matter of fact, we had two that merged just
shortly after the turn of the century and formed what is now the Monroe
Hardware, which at that time and today is the largest wholesale hardware
in the two Carolinas. They had branch warehouses in both states. So
this type of thing built Monroe into an early and very successful
trading center, and that is responsible for the growth that we had."
