Stovall Gin

There has been a cotton gin on this site since the late nineteenth century. There is an old photo of that gin, and we are trying to find it somewhere!

We encountered the old gin during development for the festival. Digging a post hole, we encountered the old two-foot think brick foundation, which we had to dig through! The photo here shows that old brick.

The site was such an early industrial site for this area that the power for our festival comes from Entergy, while in every direction around us, Coahoma Electric Power provide the juice. We are an island of Entergy service, since we got started so long ago.

The Stovall Gin Company, Inc. was founded in 1949 as a cooperative gin, and it ran until 1982. Most gins in that era were cooperatives, whereby several farmers would join forces and build a gin to process their crops when harvested. When mechanical picking came to the forefront of cotton production, gins had to be able to process a faster stream of picked cotton.

Cotton needs to be picked immediately when ready. Rain onto an unharvested crop can not only degrade the fiber itself but can strip the cotton of the plant and onto the ground, where it is lost.

Once picked, cotton was put into open top trailers, and needed to be ginned immediately. And rain was still a big problem after picking; in fact, rain on top of a trailer of picked cotton could be disastrous. Oddly enough, the greatest risk was fire. When rain hit a trailer, the top layers of cotton would absorb the water and become much heavier. That added weight pressing down on the dry lower levels of cotton could often cause spontaneous combustion, and a wet trailer of cotton would ignite in the center and burn from the inside out. And cotton burns FAST. A burning trailer could jeopardize everything around it, including the gin itself.

Once in the cotton gin, the seed cotton moved through dryers and through cleaning machines that removed the gin waste such as burs, dirt, stems and leaf material from the cotton. Then to the gin stand where circular saws with small, sharp teeth pluck the fiber from the seed.

From the gin, fiber and seed went different ways. The ginned fiber, now called lint, would be pressed together and made into dense bales weighting about 500 pounds. Producers would usually sell their cotton to a local buyer or merchant who, in turn, would sell it to a textile mill either in the United States or a foreign country.

The cottonseed was the key to cooperative gins. The gin would sell the oil-rich cotton seed for feed or to an oil mill where the seed would be processed into cottonseed oil, meal and hulls. Typically the revenue from seed sales would be more than the operating costs of the gin, so the cooperative typically would send a check to each farmer member at settlement.

Cotton gins were loud, dusty, and dangerous. After running full out for 60-75 days, they basically shut down and the farmers spent the next 10 months getting everything repaired and ready to ramp up again.

Around the Delta there were scores of small cooperative gins that would run 24/7 vacuuming cotton our of trailers as quickly as possible, baling it up, and shipping it out. The photo here shows bales of Stovall Gin cotton ready for shipment circa 1972. In fact, our Mighty VIP viewing area is the old loading dock, and the Stovall Gin logo on the floor of the VIP section covers the old bale press.

In the 1980s that all changed. New technology emerged in the form of modules, which look like giant loaves of bread. Modules allowed the cotton to be compacted in the field and stored in place for long periods without losing yield or quality prior to ginning. Instead of having to be towed in trailers behind tractors, the cotton could be transported on specially designed trucks. This meant that not only was there no longer a critical time crunch to get the cotton to the gin, but also that gin could be farther away since trucks, not tractors, would haul the cotton from field to gin.

That meant that gins could not run for longer periods, as cotton could now be stored in situ. So small gins quickly became uneconomical, replaced by larger more efficient operations that ran for several months a year. Like many gins in the area, the Stovall Gin ceased operations in 1982, and all the gin equipment was sold and shipped to a third world producer.

The power was turned off, and that’s where things were left. Until 38 years later, we decided to turn on the power and have a music festival . . .