An inventor from Texas moved to Pine Bluff and created a machine that revolutionized American agriculture.
John Rust was born in 1892 near Necessity, Texas, and became apt at mechanical tinkering while doing farm work. He set a goal of creating a mechanical cotton picker and in 1928 went into business with his brother Mack; they ultimately owned forty-seven patents. The brothers worked in Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee as they sought financial backing for their cotton picker, but their company went bankrupt in the early 1940s and Mack moved to Arizona.
In 1949 John Rust entered into an agreement with Pine Bluff’s Ben Pearson Company to produce the machines and after decades of hardship he became a wealthy man, paying off his debts and endowing college scholarships in Arkansas and Mississippi.
The Rust Cotton picker signaled the death knell of the sharecropper system. Rust died in 1954 and is buried in Pine Bluff’s Graceland Cemetery.
To learn more, visit encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
