The Continental Gin

Robert S. Munger changed how America ginned cotton, and he built the factory for it in Dallas. Before him a gin was a row of separate machines that men fed by hand, hauling seed cotton in baskets from one to the next. Munger's system, worked out in the mid 1880s and patented in 1892, sucked the cotton out of the wagon through a pipe into an air stream and carried it through the whole plant on air and conveyors in one continuous process, from separator to distributor to feeders to a single flue and a finished bale. It ended plantation ginning and became the standard across the cotton South. He came up from Mexia to Dallas in the mid 1880s, and in 1888 began putting up a works of brick warehouses along Elm Street and Trunk Avenue, on the far side of the tracks from the town, where land was cheap. In 1899 his firm merged with five others, from Alabama, Georgia and Massachusetts, to become the Continental Gin Company, the largest maker of cotton gin machinery in the United States. Munger sold his interest in 1902. A foundry went up in 1912 and the plant made gin machinery on Elm Street until the company closed in 1962. It is a Dallas landmark district and on the National Register. Artists took the buildings over in the early 1980s, before anyone else in Dallas was doing that, and the complex became loft apartments in 1997 and offices since. The money made in this plant paid for Munger Place, the subdivision Munger laid out east of downtown in 1905 behind the first deed restrictions in Texas.