Peering out below the brim of a green cap emblazoned with a gold “D,” Wesley Johnson holds up a single cotton boll and twirls it between his fingers. This morning, he picked some cotton in the fields next to his father’s house. “I used to laugh because I’d see people stop and get out of their cars and walk to the fields,” Johnson says. “I’d say, ‘Daddy, what are they doing?’ and he’d say, ‘They’ve never seen cotton before.’” He turns around, revealing the words embroidered on the back of his hat: Dunn, NC. They help explain his own fascination with cotton.

It’s the first Saturday in November, and the small Harnett County city is about to double in size for the North Carolina Cotton Festival. Eleven downtown blocks will be closed off to accommodate 10,000 visitors, music stages, food vendors, a classic car show, and more activities geared to bring together the community that’s long made a living off of cotton.

Johnson, a board member of the Dunn Area History Museum, is here to answer questions about Dunn’s history and its local cotton production. As he sees it, they’re one and the same.

Harnett County was formed in 1855. At that time, the area was known for small farms that were tended by families and, in some cases, by the enslaved people, who composed 32 percent of the county’s population. Dunn was incorporated later, in 1887. The town’s namesake, Bennett Dunn, was leading the rail project that would take the Atlantic Coast Line from Fayetteville to Wilson, cutting straight through town, when word reached some Sampson County farming families who were looking for cheap land and opportunity.

Dunn’s soil and proximity to three waterways — the Cape Fear River, Black River, and Stony Run watershed — made it a perfect place to settle and grow cotton. Soon, gins popped up around town, all run by families whose names can still be found in Dunn today. Wesley’s own textile venture, East Coast Hemp Supply, occupies the Johnson Cotton Co. building on West Broad Street, where his grandmother once worked.

Cotton production fueled the town’s economy for decades — but it wasn’t easy work. The jagged burrs along the plant’s petals would bury into a picker’s cuticles and eventually cut their hands. This was long before the invention of mechanical cotton pickers, but some farmers in the area still pick by hand.

“You ride around with anyone here in their 70s, 80s, or 90s, and they see the way a field is left now — they’ll nearly cry,” Johnson says. “Whenever they picked, they picked every bit up. If there was a piece on the ground, you picked it up, dusted it off, and threw it in the bag.”

Although many of the families that once ran gins later turned to other ventures, cotton continues to define the landscape of Dunn. It’s scattered across fields, and on a cool November afternoon like this one, it’s wrapped around just about everyone.

NC Cotton Festival
November 1-2
Historic Downtown
Dunn, NC 28335
(910) 892-5735
thecottonfestival.com

More to Explore: Discover more November events across the state at ourstate.com/calendar.