Harris Hill (Schley Co researcher) shared this and I think you'll find it very helpful: In the late 1880's and early 1890's, the country was in a depression. Cotton prices had sunk to an all-time low. There were sentiments amongst the farmers to withhold cotton from the market to force the price up but there was no real unity and the effort was ineffective as many had to sell to feed their families. There are numerous stories in the old Schley County News issues about cotton and cotton warehouses mysteriously burning. As a result the Farmer's Alliance was formed as sort of economic union to provide the unity that was missing. They also acted as cooperatives to market their crops collectively. Some formed banks, built grain elevators, cotton gins, etc. The effort was unsuccessful and the Farmer's Alliance eventually became part of the Populist Party movement. The following was taken from "A History of Greene County" by Dave Buckhout. http://www.inheritage.org/almanack/c_greene_04.html Agrarian Uprising . It all began as the Farmer's Alliance, a grassroots, rural-commerce movement rising out of Texas in the 1880s. Initiated as an alternative to the virtual slavery many small farmers felt in relation to their creditors, by 1890 the Alliance had drawn up a political platform and had spread across the rural agrarian South like wildfire. Two suspicions lay at the movement's root: a bitter distaste for the draconian power wielded by the reigning Democrats - C. Vann Woodward in his Origins of the New South quoted a Georgia Alliance-backed paper accusing "the silk-hat bosses of deserting the wool-hat rank and file" - and a hostility towards lenders and their source: Wall Street, the very symbol of northern banking interests. By 1889, there were 104,000 Alliance members in Georgia alone. Greene County, the majority of its population of the small-landowning and tenant farming class, became a hotbed of the uprising. When Alliance-backed Democrats were soundly defeated in the elections of 1890, mainstream party loyalty having swamped this upstart challenge to the "redeemers," the result was the splinter Populist Party. There was an Alliance in Schley county and from what I could determine from old newspaper accounts, it resembled a union and seemed to have formed in part for political clout.