Buena Vista Cotton Gin

The Buena Vista Cotton Gin, a plantation steam gin recorded in woods about 1,700 feet south of the centerline of the Natchez Trace Parkway near milepost 45, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a ruin. When it was nominated in 1974, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History called it the only known steam cotton gin site with above-ground remains in the state. What remained was a brick smokestack fifty feet tall, an eight-foot cube at the base tapering to a corbelled top four feet square, with an arched opening low on its west face where smoke from the wood-fired boilers once entered. The wooden gin house, two and a half stories over a steam engine and a vertical press, was already gone.

The gin was probably built about 1848 to run on horse power and converted to steam between 1857 and 1861 by James W. Watson, owner of Buena Vista Plantation. Steam was rare: the machinery was so costly that only the wealthiest planters converted, usually ginning their neighbors' cotton for a toll to pay for it, and as late as 1860 most Mississippi gins were still driven by mules, horses or oxen.

Watson, born in Port Gibson in 1824 and orphaned before he was two weeks old, graduated from Princeton in 1844 and grew his land from 1,000 acres in 1849 to 1,700 in 1859. The work was done by enslaved people, whose number rose from thirty-five taxable slaves in 1849 to 110 in 1862; in 1859 they picked 420 bales, a crop exceeded by only two other planters in Claiborne County. Watson was a delegate to the Mississippi secession convention. The site was privately owned when it was listed.