Cotton plantation, 1914. Cotton bolls being harvested and weighed (right) and transported in wagons (right) for processing. This plantation is in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. The southern US states produced millions of bales of cotton annually in the early 20th century. By this time, the workers were free as slavery had been abolished in the USA in 1865. Photographed in 1914 by US photographer John Calvin Coovert (1862-1937) using a Cirkut camera. Coovert took hundreds of thousands of photos, creating a body of work that presented an iconography of the Cotton South. This image is a composite created from different scenes.