Texas Cotton Gin Museum

Thirteen farmers raised ten thousand dollars by selling two hundred shares at fifty dollars apiece, formed the Burton Farmers Gin Association in 1913, and built this gin the following year for eleven thousand eight hundred and thirty five dollars and ten cents, more than they had raised. The machinery was designed and built in 1914 by the Lummus Cotton Gin Company: five gin stands on a fifty seven foot line shaft, a stick machine, a burr machine, separators, cleaners, a press pump and pneumatic conveying fans. It took about fifteen hundred pounds of seed cotton to make a five hundred pound bale, and the gin could turn out sixty bales in a working day, one every twelve minutes. The timing was cruel. Washington County ginned more than fifty two thousand bales in 1900 and just over eleven thousand in 1920, on barely less planted ground, because the boll weevil arrived in the early 1900s and took the crop apart. The county lost more than seven thousand people in the decade to 1910. Texas had around four thousand three hundred gins in 1912; Burton had four over its history, and this one was the town's third when it opened. About a hundred and fifty were still running statewide in the 2025 crop year. In 1925 a Bessemer Type IV oil engine, a hundred and twenty five horsepower and fifteen and a half tons of it, came down from Grove City, Pennsylvania to replace the original steam plant. It drove the gin until it broke down in the early 1960s and an electric motor took over. The gin ran commercially until 1974 and then stood empty with all its machinery in place, which is why it survived. Volunteers restarted the Bessemer on the twenty ninth of February 1992.