John C. Bain Papers, PC.297

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These include a few letters written to Bain between 1914 and 1930; except for five World War I letters (dated in 1918 and 1919) these are almost altogether of purely family and personal interest. The same is true of the insurance papers, the papers on family genealogy, newspaper subscriptions, and rural electricity and telephones. Of the two deeds in the collection, however, there is a 1901 deed (the only paper predating 1914 in the personal papers) of more than passing interest. It is a deed of contract between Sudie McK. Wade and James Smith that provides an interesting example of a three-year lease of land in which the consideration is the ditching and fencing of the land to be done by the contractor, the penalty for nonperformance of which being forfeiture of the crops he raises on the land. Bain's correspondence and bills of lading for his berry crops shipped to markets in Virginia, Maryland, and New York from 1916 to 1929 have been separated into a separate file, as have been a set of collection statistics he kept in 1917 for an unknown product. The post office papers in this part of the collection include Bain's postal route book (indicating the names of the various family members who might receive mail in their rural box), the December, 1917, issue of R.F.D. News, and correspondence relating to payment of Bain's pension to his widow in 1930.

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These files relate primarily to the Cumberland County Farmers' Alliance and to the various sub-alliances in the county, though the small file of correspondence includes letters concerning activities of the Farmers' State Alliance between the years 1907 and 1929. At county level, the papers include minutes, treasurer's accounts, and records of the mutual aid society of the Cumberland County Farmers' Alliance. Records of the seven sub-alliances still active in the early twentieth century in the county that are to be found in this part of the collection are limited to quarterly reports of membership and range in date from 1905 to 1916. The last folder in the box contains the 1902 rules for the cooperative store operated for the benefit of the Wade and Geddie sub-alliances. These files will not include information on Bain's activity as business agent for the purchase of commodities, fertilizer, potash, and nitrate of soda for local farmers. Since Bain acted as business agent for farmers in the alliance as well as for those in the cotton growers' association, and since his agency for supply of fertilizer continued longer with the association than with the alliance, those papers are filed in the third and last part of this collection of papers.

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These include a few papers relating to the Cumberland County cooperative warehouse owned by members of the Cotton Association, and subscription for a cooperative store in Fayetteville. Correspondence, 1919-1929, includes circular correspondence from the Raleigh office of the North Carolina Cotton Growers' Cooperative Association, weekly reports of deliveries of cotton (by contract number) by members of the association, final settlement prices, reports of seasonal pool payments, and payments of reserve certificates. Two account books include fertilizer accounts for the years from 1907 through 1915 and from 1917 through 1926, while a third account book includes a general store's accounts from 1913 to 1921. All three books seem to include accounts against farmers belonging to the alliance as well as against those belonging to the association. The remainder of this file of papers is made up of fertilizer contracts, orders for shipment, guarantees by lien and mortgage, records of payment, and so forth, ranging in date from 1922 through 1929. While far from complete, it is a valuable set of papers from which one can reconstruct the method of operation of a local farmers' cooperative effort in cotton production.