Chester IL.

Chester Illinois. Home to Popeye The Sailer Man. There is a six-foot, 900 lb. bronze statue of popeye, that stands in the Elzie C. Memorial Park, which also honors Popeye's creator, Elzie Segar.

The population of Chester Illinois is 8,400 at the 2000 census. It is county seat of Randolph county and is located 63 miles south of st. Louis, Missouri. Chester is a city located on the bluffs of the Mississippi River Valley in Randolph County, Illinois. The Longetude is 89.822, and the latitube is 37.914.

Chester's big event is it's annual Popeye picnic and parade held the weekend after Labor Day. Popeye fans travel from all over the U.S. to parade in the weekend activities.

Cotton Plantation

"It was work hard, get beatins, and half fed..... The times i hated most, was pickin' cotton when the frost was on the bolls. My hands get sore and crack and bleed." A quot from Mary Reynolds.

First thing that comes to mind when you here of cotton plantations, is slaves stooped over, picking cotton, and hauling huge cotton stuffed bags behind them. For the most part this was true. Cotton become the dominate cash crop of the south in the height of the system (1850). 1.8 million out of 2.5 million slaves in the U.S. (nearly 75 percent) were involved in cotton plantations.

Between the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown in august 1619, and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment prohibiting slavery (December 6, 1865), cotton only became a significant factor after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Nonetheless, during that 72-year period, an estimated of one million individuals were enslaved in the service of "King cotton," either by transfer, or by domestic slave traders.

The industry of Cotton was given a boost invention of Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin in 1793. With the aid of a horse to turn the gin, a man could clean fifty times as much cotton as before. This increased the demand for slaves. For example, in 1803 alone, over 20,000 slaves were being brought into Georgia and south Carolina to work in the cotton fields. By 1850, America was producing 3,000,000 bales of cotton and the industry had become a vital element of the south's economy. The need for slaves, and the price of slaves, was much higher in states in the lower south, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, than in states of the upper south, including Virginia and Maryland. The result was a thriving domestic slave trade that devastated many slaves households.

Teenage boys and young adult men were especially desirable laborers for the new areas, and slave families in the upper south lost sons, brothers, and young fathers to the cotton plantations of the lower south. at the time of revolution, most slaves were held along the southeastern seaboard, but by 1860, the greatest concentrations of slaves were in the lower south.