An agricultural-related knife built on a curved jack frame, the cotton knife was used by cotton buyers to cut a sample from a bail of cotton. The blade is distinctive, having a short section near the tang which is unsharpened and a swelled forward part the size of a teaspoon. Alternately, some cotton knives have a very wide and heavy blade like a rope knife, but often wider at the point or with a slightly more acute point, sometimes etched “Cotton Sampler” or “Cotton Knife.”