John Daniel Rust was born on Sept. 6, 1892, near Necessity, Texas. His father, Benjamin Daniel Rust, was a Civil War veteran, a farmer and a school teacher, while his mother, Susan Minerva Burnett, ...

“If the cotton picker ever comes, it will behoove us to do some serious thinking about the human consequences of these machines. I heard a man familiar with the South say recently that the first ...

When the Rust brothers produced their first picking machine, in 1935, a revolution in cotton farming was forecast. But mechanical cotton culture ran into many snags, has proved much more evolutionary ...

The National Museum of American History has a staggering 1.8 million objects in the collections. It isn’t possible for one person to know all the artifacts, but, as a curator of agricultural history, ...