The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 68, July 1964 - April, 1965 Page: 409
574 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Development of Manufacturing in Texas
in 1919 by the ratio of $62,000,000 to $49,000,000 of value added
by manufacture. As late as 1929, food production still led petro-
leum refining by roughly $95,000,000 of value to $91,000,000. But,
by 1931, the positions had reversed. Even so, those figures are
indicative of the danger of reading the early history of the devel-
opment of 'Texas manufacturing altogether in terms of petroleum
refining. It is undoubtedly true, however, that the development
of petroleum refining had vastly more secondary developmental
influence on the growth of the economy than did the growth of
food processing.
In addition to the significant development of food processing
and petroleum refining industries, the period from 1900 to 1930
brought forth an intensification of previous efforts to establish
the cotton textile industry in the state. That was rather logical, in
view of Texas' pre-eminence in the production of cotton since
the establishment of the railroads in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century. At the height of the era of cotton production, in
the mid-192o's, Texas was growing from thirty-five to forty-two
per cent of the cotton produced in the United States and twenty
to thirty per cent of the world's crop. The first attempt on record
to establish a cotton mill in Texas was made by the state's re-
doubtable knife-fighter and revolutionary war hero, James Bowie,
who took out a charter in 183o. But he never got into successful
operation. There were other sporadic and unsuccessful attempts
made prior to the Civil War, and during the Civil War a gov-
ernmental institution, the state prison at Huntsville, turned out
notable quantities of cotton cloth for the Confederate cause. After
the Civil War, efforts languished until an industrial exposition
in Atlanta created again widespread interest in introducing cotton
textile manufacturing into the South. About the same time, the
new Northrop loom was introduced as a superior machine which
the new southern mills could originally install, while the northern
mills were hesitant to re-tool with it. Those developments helped
to initiate the march of the textile mills into the Southeast, and
to some extent, into Texas. In the period from 1890o to 1926,
twenty-five mills were established in Texas, and the Census of
Manufactures for 1929 showed a total of twenty-seven mills in
operation turning out 1.13 per cent of the nation's total of cotton
textiles. By 1947, census data showed that the number of mills409
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 68, July 1964 - April, 1965, periodical, 1965; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101198/m1/494/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.