Ninety year old Don Baker barely remembers the fanfare of a 1936 demonstration of mechanical cotton pickers, when engineers boasted to the national press and Delta farmers that their lumbering metallic monsters would transform the industry.

Baker recalls more sharply struggling to recuperate from the lean years of the Depression-buying a new-fangled contraption to replace his more than 500 tenant families was the last thing on his mind at that time.

But 50 years later, Baker stands as a witness to the fulfillment of the engineers' prophecy.

Today, pickers standing hunched over cotton plants with sacks in hand can only be seen in old photographs or perhaps in small patches used by researchers to develop new strains.

Baker still runs, from "semi-retirement," one of the largest cotton operations in the state. Leland-based McGee Dean & Co. is a legacy inherited from his father-in-law, Burrell Otho McGee.

"When I came here in 1919, my fathr-in-law bought this Panther Burn Plantation with 6000 acres in cultivation and 6000 acres in timber," Baker recalls. "It was farmed absolutely with mules and tenants, you see....We had 250 mules at one time on Panther Burn. I could tell you the name and age of every one of those mules when I saw them out in the field....

"And the only implements they had was a turning-plow and what was called a Georgia stock with one furrow. By the time we bought the place, we bought a bunch of double shovels with two furrows, and later on we went to cultivators. And the first tractor we bought on that place was in 1923. It wasn't a cultivating tractor. All it did was help pull the combine and thrashing machine."

While area farmers like Baker were acquiring their first tractors, the Delta Branch Experiment Station of Mississippi State University was experimenting with some of the first mechanical cotton pickers.

A hand picker might average only 100 pounds per day, but no one knew what a mechanical picker might do.

"Mechanical cotton harvesting was tried with little success at the Delta Branch Experiment Station in 1922. Further tests around 1930 with improved experimental machines produced more favorable results," said E. Buford Williamson, the former head of the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Field Crops Mechanization Research Laboratory at Stoneville, a town adjacent to Leland.

"However, the labor-saving potentialities of the spindle picker were not widely recognized until several experimental machines were demonstrated in a nationally publicized field trial at the Delta Branch Experiment Station, Aug. 31, 1936," he said.

Williamson, who retired 10 years ago, wasn't on hand for the 1936 demonstration of the International Harvester, Rust and Berry Gamble mechanical cotton pickers.

And when Williamson came to the Experiment Station in 1946, the mechanical pickers were still an anomaly. Raised in northern Mississippi, Williamson's family had often picked cotton and the new machine fascinated him.

"One day I was in charge of doing some harvesting tests and the man who ran the picker went to lunch from noon to 1 p. m. I picked a bale of cotton while he was gone. I thought, "Isn't this something! It would have taken my family a week to do what I've done in an hour."

Only 6 percent of the nation's cotton was harvested mechanically in 1949, the first year the USDA kept figures. The machines were first available commercially in 1943, after tests primarily in the Mississippi Delta, Williamson said.

But the mechanization of cotton harvesting really didn't take hold until the 1960's. A slim majority, 51 percent, of the nation's cotton fields were harvested mechanically in 1960. By 1965, 85 percent was mechanized; and in 1972, 100 percent of the U. S. cotton crop was harvested by machine, according to the USDA.

Modern cotton pickers that can harvest four rows at a time have become common just in the last five years and cost more than $100,000 each, Williamson said. One four-row picker does the work of about 200 hand pickers. The traditional two-row picker costs about $70,000.

A long prong sticks out for each row of cotton to be picked to lift up the plants' lower limbs. Inside the prong rotates several hundred tapered spindles on a drum. The cotton wraps around the spindles and a "doffer" plate strips the cotton off the spindles.