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Cotton Gin

The cotton industry was important to the Texas economy. Because ginned and baled cotton kept its value, it was the major cash crop for most of Texas.

During the ginning season, from August to January, the gin was alive with activity. The machinery ran all day as fires for the steam boilers glowed and smoke billowed from the stacks. Chugging and hissing roared from the steam engine as the endless leather belt slapped out a rhythm while it transferred power to the ginning machinery.

Wagon loads of cotton, fresh from the fields, were brought here to be ginned. Often, many wagons were lined up outside waiting for their turn. For the youngsters, it was always a special treat to ride to the gin on top of a wagon load of cotton.

Before the Civil War, many planters owned cotton gins and processed their own cotton. As the population grew and more cotton was planted there was a need for more gins. After the Civil War, the break up of the large plantations into smaller family farms and tenant farms brought about the need for community cotton gins. Throughout the cotton belt almost every town had at least one gin. Some towns had as many as six; cities often had more.

The word gin is short for engine, and originally cotton gin meant only the machine that cleaned the cotton fibers and removed the seeds. Cleaned cotton is known as lint. The building was called the gin house or ginnery. Gradually, cotton gin came to mean the building, and the machine was referred to as a gin stand. This gin stand is described as a forty-saw machine because of the forty steel discs with saw-like teeth on the edges that clean the cotton. This machinery made the gin a dangerous place to work, and many ginners were injured or maimed during the ginning process.

Often the cotton crop was contracted for sale long before harvest. Brokers representing cotton merchants in Galveston bought quantities of cotton destined for the cotton mills of the Merrimac Valley in New England. Much Texas cotton was shipped across the Atlantic to the port of Liverpool. It was spun into thread and woven into cloth in the mills of Lancashire, the center of world textile trade in 1890.

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Please send comments to Historic_Village@baylor.edu. Updated Aug. 23, 2001.