LA GRANGE — The Fay- ette Heritage Museum and Ar chives invites you to an evening focused on the early cotton gins of Fayette and Washington counties. Steph Jarvis, director of the Texas Cotton Gin Museum at Burton, is returning to share more about how early cotton gins were powered.
Additionally, Ronnie Stanley, a volunteer at that museum, will talk about what it takes to keep their 100-year-old “Lady B” running. In 1925, the Burton Farmers Gin Association made a historic purchase—a Cooper Bessemer Type IV Oil Engine— to replace the steam engine inside the Burton Farmers Gin. The restored 16-ton “Lady B” is the largest internal combustion engine of its vintage still operating in America. The three-storytall machine is still used to clean and bale cotton when it is fired up every April during Burton’s annual Cotton Gin Festival.
The 1890 United States Agricultural Census recorded Fayette County as the fourth largest cotton producer in Texas with 88,208 acres of cotton. Along with all that cotton being grown, cotton gins were built every five to eight miles apart, keeping farmers from having to travel too far to gin their cotton.
Right across the border in Washington County, the Burton Farmers Gin served farmers from 1914 to 1974 and now lives on as part of the Texas Cotton Gin Museum. The biggest mis sion of the museum is to preserve these cotton stories and share them with present and future generations.
In line with that work, the museum maintains a database of Texas cotton gins from 1825 to the present day and has begun to map the locations of those gins.
Jarvis, in connection with our local museum and archives staff, is hoping local citizens with knowledge of Fayette County gins will attend and help map more of those sites.
The program will be held tonight, Thursday, June 26, at 7 p.m. in the meeting room at the rear of the Fayette Public Library at 855 S. Jefferson Street in La Grange. The after-hours entrance is along Franklin Street.
