Cotton plants can be found growing wild on the roadside here in Providenciales. They are remnants from a past cotton industry that once dominated North and Middle Caicos and Providenciales.
The Year Four students used jeweller’s loupes to examine a cotton boll and wrote poetry while thinking about two focus questions: “What else does it look like?” and “What does it remind me of?”
Here are a few of their poems:
My Wonderful Cotton
My wonderful cotton, like a big puffy cloud floating in the sky,
Delicious cotton candy waiting for me to eat it,
Snow as white as can be falling from the sky,
The leaves of my cotton like autumn just falling,
The boll as golden as a coin with patterns like a sponge,
I love my cotton and I hope you do too!
My Spectacular Cotton
As fluffy as a cloud,
A soft white pillow lying on my bed,
Boll as brown as firewood,
As yellow as autumn leaves bright and beautiful,
Your stem as long as a tree trunk reaching high,
A chocolate cookie crispy and warm,
Waves crashing furiously,
My spectacular cotton, I find you fascinating!
A bit more history…
In the late 1780s Loyalists arrived after the end of the American Revolution, primarily from Georgia and South Carolina. They were granted large areas of land by the British government to make up for what they lost in the American colonies. The Loyalists imported well over a thousand slaves and planted vast fields of cotton. Cheshire Hall Plantation was built by Thomas Stubbs here on Provo. You can visit the plantation ruins, just like our Year Four students did last year.
The cotton plantations were doomed as the competition was fierce and the soil was thin and not very fertile. They were also prone to pest infestations. After a hurricane in 1813, the cotton plantations were to perish. All the slaves were freed and are the ancestors of much of the populations of North and Middle Caicos and Providenciales today.