I’m not sure if he was a Puritan, but let’s not forget whale oil salesman and banker Preserved Fish.
Any relation to G.I. Joe?
One of the detectives in Ed McBain’s 87 Precient mysteries is Cotton Hawes. Named after his father’s greatest hero, Cotton Mather.
It’s a nice sounding name, isn’t it. All it would take, I think, is for a sexy character on tv to be named Cotton for it to gain in popularity. Maybe a TD&H lawyer with a dark history on a soap opera? Cotton Stone esq?
Preserved Killick is the Captain’s manservant in the Aubrey/Maturin Napoleonic sea adventure books.
Love those strange old names. I was surprised when I discovered that Learned Hand wasn’t just a fictional wise judge used in hypotheticals, but an actual historial figure.
Another one I first heard in America: The Book was George Washington’s nephew, Bushrod Washington. Whenever I hear a name like “Learned” or “Bushrod”, I wonder: what did their friends call them when they were growing up?
Barefoot Sanders and Kenesaw Mountain Landis were two other colorfully-named Federal judges.
“Buzzy” and “Dink”.
Lancashire would like a word with the ignorant fools at that website, having had a cotton industry since the mid sixteenth century.
Actually, until this summer I taught a boy called Rayon.
I think they meant an industry growing cotton, not processing it.
Whatever they meant, it was a pretty foolish remark. If you’ve got 250,000 people employed in the cotton industry and (an infinitesimally smaller number of) people getting incredibly rich from it, where the plants grew isn’t that relevant to whether people are going to name their kids after it.
Processing cotton is a textile industry. I think those folks would name their kids “Tex”.
Unless they used a spinning Jenny. Then they could name their kids “Jenny.”
I’d be surprised if there was a “cotton industry” in Lancashire as early as the mid sixteenth century. Textile industry, OK. But “cotton”–no way.
Living in the southeast US, I know a couple of guys called Cotton.
Both are nicknames. Both have very blonde hair. Both have told me that when they were little, their hair was white-blonde, like cotton. Voila! Nickname.
For the given name, it’s likely a family surname on the maternal side somewhere.
How about their eyes? It could be relavant to this related thread.
Either of them named “Joe”? That would be too cool. 
Both blue eyed. One is named Robert and one James. Didn’t get to call either Cotton-eyed Joe. 
Dang!
Any Dopers hear of the famous Jerry Cotton? In English, his name sounds … cool, gangsterish/ G-man action type. Until some spoil-sports point out that it translates as … Jeremias Baumwolle. Which sounds dumb.
To add to the FBI-agent Jerry Cotton:
OK, the earliest internet cite I can find is mid seventeenth - 1641, to be precise (for Bolton, if anyone’s interested). If I can be bothered I’ll dig out my old books and find the bit about fustian and the clamouring wool traders a century earlier - as if a hundred years makes any difference. It’s still a ridiculous example of ignorance for them to claim that cotton was “never a big source of industry in Britain”.