Lindsey Bonded Warehouses

The Lindsey Bonded Warehouses are significant because they represent a very important marketing development in cotton agriculture -- the intervention of the federal government to buy surplus and store it until market conditions were at their most favorable. The warehouses are being nominated for local significance because they are the only known survivors within the northern part of the state, which once had various such facilities. (Such warehouses may have existed in other parts of the state as well, but sufficient documentation is available at the present time to evaluate them only within northern Louisiana.) The beginning date for the period of significance is c. 1915, which is believed to be the date for the earliest warehouses (see below). The ending date follows the present 50-year cutoff (1949). The buildings continued in their significant role well past this date, and the marketing tool they represent continued to be significant.

King Cotton is notorious for its boom-bust cycles -- the equivalent of an economic roller coaster depending upon world conditions and a host of other factors. In one particularly dramatic price collapse cotton fell from almost 42 cents a pound in April 1920 to 13.5 cents in December of that year. A critical issue is what one historian termed "the ruinous system of selling the entire crop at harvest time for what it would bring on a glutted market. Beginning with the Populist Party in the 1890s, agrarian advocates pressed for government intervention. With each market crisis (the "cotton cycle" as it is sometimes termed), the standard solutions were championed: adequate credit, storage facilities, crop limitations, and diversification. And all were tried at one time or another.

Warehousing (storing surplus to wait for a favorable market) seems to have had various levels of government involvement. In 1916 Congress passed the U.S. Warehouse Act, wherein receipts given to producers could be converted at any time into liquid assets. By 1919 various states had state-sponsored warehouse systems. As noted in Part 7 of this nomination, the Lindsey warehouses, although privately owned, did their business in government contracts. Here the US government bought the cotton from farmers, warehoused it, and then released it on the market at propitious times.

Large and small cotton warehouses that relied on government contracts existed throughout the South. Some, like Lindsey, simply stored cotton, while others were compress companies that pressed the cotton into even smaller bales and then stored it. The giants in the field were owned by large corporations such as the Federal Compress Company, with headquarters in Memphis.

Specific information on the Lindsey warehouses was gleaned through an interview with J. D. Lindsey, the 83-year-old son of G. E. Lindsey, the founder. (Other than this important first-hand knowledge, there is little documentation on the warehouses.) J. D. Lindsey recalls working in warehouse #3 as a youth in the 1920s. After World War II he returned to Bernice to take over the business. Mr. Lindsey cannot be certain about the exact dates for the seven warehouses. He recalled that his father got in the business in his teens and that he knows the seven were there when he left for college in 1932. The business expanded considerably beginning in the 1950s, and now there are an additional fifty warehouses to the east of the old facilities. Also, in the mid-1950s, the commodity being stored changed to surplus grain.

The cotton stored at the Lindsey warehouses arrived by rail (coming from wherever cotton was produced) and was shipped, as certain lots were sold, either overseas or to cotton mills in the Southeast. For world export, it was shipped by rail down to the port of New Orleans. To be competitive (and Mr. Lindsey remembers many competitors), one had to secure favorable freight rates.

It is uncertain how many people were employed at the facility during the historic period. Mr. Lindsey explained that it fluctuated wildly depending upon whether the cotton market was good or bad. When prices were high, his firm moved into "high gear," employing manual laborers wherever they could find them. He also emphasized that the business was more complex than one might assume. For example, an inventory had to be maintained, with each bale of cotton having a number. When an order came, it was for specified bales (assorted by grades apparently), and his employees had to be able to locate them readily. Mr. Lindsey estimates that the largest of his old warehouses had a 7,500 bale capacity. A 1941 economic survey indicated that the warehouses were storing 15,000 bales at that time.

Mr. Lindsey's recollections and other sources indicate that there were once other cotton warehouse complexes in northern Louisiana. (For example, Sanborn maps show a large Federal Compress facility in the city of Monroe.) However, today the Bernice buildings are believed to be the only survivors from the historic period. They survive to represent an earlier generation, for example, of the large modern metal cotton warehouses one sees today along the highways of northeastern Louisiana. By their very presence, they tell a story of the marketing of cotton in the twentieth century.