“White Gold.”
“King Cotton.”
Anyone who has studied history knows that cotton was the backbone of the U.S. economy in the 19th century and that the rich Texas soil was ideal for growing it. As the demand for cotton grew, so did the need for a more efficient way of separating the seeds from the fibers so it could become a marketable commodity.
In the early days of cotton growing, cleaning the seeds from the fiber was tedious and time-consuming. A picker could only remove seeds by hand at a rate of only about a pound of cotton per day. But Eli Whitney’s cotton engine, or ‘gin’ as it became commonly known, revolutionized the process. The gin worked something like a strainer or sieve. Cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too delicate to let the seeds through, but the hooks could easily pull the cotton fibers through. Whitney’s hand-cranked machine could remove seeds from 50 pounds of cotton daily, and horse-powered gins could clean even more.
According to historians, the first cotton gin made its way to Texas from Georgia in 1825. By 1860, there were approximately 2,000 gins in Texas. In an article published in 1934, local writer Pauline Sherman stated, “The first cotton gin [in Lovelday, Texas] dates back to 1874. It was run by a horse, and after a hard day’s work, three bales of cotton were ready for market.”
The cotton gin became a status symbol. Every community had at least one.
The Texas Historical Commission in Crockett published a book in 1979 listing some of the cotton gins in and around Houston County – the Dailey Gin, Lively Gin, J.J. Brooks, Mose Spence, the Worthington Brothers, Woodard Standley, and the list goes on.
Houston County resident Michael Brown knows firsthand about some of the local cotton gins. He comes from a long line of cotton farmers. Brown’s family migrated to the area from Mississippi in the 1800s. “As soon as they settled in, they began to grow cotton, as did most of the people in the area,” Brown said. “It was the cash crop of the day.”
Brown could write a book about his experiences growing up in a cotton-farming family in Houston County. And he remembers quite well what it was like during the ginning season, which can last from late August through late December. At the height of cotton harvesting, gins would operate between 18 to 24 hours a day. Brown recalls that in its heyday, the Buck Berry Gin, located on Second Street in Crockett, did a booming business.
“Wagonloads of cotton would be lined up, waiting to be ginned. Sometimes, a farmer might only have a bale or two’s worth, but they’d go ahead and have it baled. The farmers would take a sample from their bales and place it into a paper sleeve listing the bale number and weight. Then, on Saturday, the farmers would park their trucks around the courthouse square downtown, and the cotton buyers would grade the samples and then make their offers to purchase the cotton.”
Brown says that in 1948, Pete Caprielian purchased the Buck Berry Gin, and he and his son, Jake, managed the day-to-day operations. Jake operated the Berry Gin Company until 1980, when he sold it to the Melder family out of Natchitoches, La. The Melder family, which owned several gins in Louisiana, disassembled one and transported it to Houston County. “It was rebuilt about nine miles west of Crockett at Mustang Prairie. We always called it the Crockett Gin. And that’s the gin we run now.”
When Brown and his wife, Rhonda, married in 1974, “There were still about 30 cotton farmers in the area.” But the cotton-growing economy diminished as cattle ranching increased and the oil boom moved in, forcing gins to begin closing. When asked how Brown came to run the Crockett Gin, he said, “In 1996, Caprielian, who had been running the Crockett Gin for the Melders, announced he was going to retire. So Mr. Melder came to Crockett to convince me to run it. I’ve always liked a challenge,” Brown said, grinning, “so I accepted the offer.
“Even though I grew up around cotton, I knew nothing about ginning operations. I had to learn the hard way. If I didn’t know something, I had a couple of good friends in Texas that ran gins, and I could call and ask them, ‘Where do you buy this, or where do you get that?’ They’d tell me. It was definitely a challenge to learn to gin.”
While the basics of Whitney’s gin are still used today, the process has been refined. Cotton arrives at the Crockett Gin in compressed modules, where a manually operated pipe swung over the cotton vacuums it up into the facility. The cotton goes through several processes to remove the seeds, leaves, and debris. After the fibers are separated, they are compacted into bales using a press, then strapped and bagged for shipping.
The method of sampling and grading the bales is still used today, but this, too, has been updated. Before wrapping the bales for storage and transport, a sample is cut from each bale and sent to the USDA office in Corpus Christi for classing. Samples are given a grade based on criteria such as fiber length, uniformity, the fineness of the fiber, and leaf and trash content. After the sample is taken, the bale is weighed and given a “PBI,” or permanent bale identification tag, and shipped off to sale or storage.
Brown ran the gin by himself off and on for many years but recently hired a ginner to help with the process. And Brown says he uses parolees to work with the ginning. “I believe in giving people a second chance. Probably 99% of my hires have been incarcerated. I don’t care what they’ve done as long as they do a good job for me. Many of these men can’t get employment elsewhere because of their records. Plus, a lot of people don’t want to do this kind of work. It’s hot, it’s dusty, it’s hard labor. So it’s difficult to find help willing to work in those conditions.”
And Brown’s son Charles is helping to carry on the family business. “After high school, I let Charles have about 150 acres of land next to mine,” Brown said, “and he farmed on that. It’s how he paid his way through college. He graduated with a couple of degrees, but he came back to farming.”
Over the past few years, the price of cotton farming has skyrocketed. “When I first started farming,” Brown said, “a bag of certified seed was about $22 a bag. I just paid $482 for certified seed. Back in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, I could produce a whole crop on $20,000. Today, $20,000 doesn’t even pay my diesel bill. Nowadays, once you invest, there’s not much return on your money.”
Brown laments that cotton farming in the Houston County area will never return to its former profitability. “These days, people divide up the land and sell it to developers. Those of us who still have cotton farms are hanging on by a string.
Brown is determined to continue his cotton-growing business, but the future of the Crockett Gin is unsure. The cost of operations is high, and other cotton farmers in the area no longer use the local gin. “It’s sad that as many gins as there were here in the 1800s, this is the only one left operating.”
And now it seems even that is questionable. n
