Bonham Cotton Mill

Women ran the part of the Bonham Cotton Mill that people remembered. About half the workforce was female at any time, and at the 1950 anniversary celebration nearly 60 percent of employees with over forty years' service were women. Three had worked there since the first day. The mill supported a free kindergarten for fifty years, begun in 1907 by members of the First Methodist Church. One teacher served over forty years, the lessons covered manners, health, cleanliness and the Bible, and a board of two women from each Bonham church governed the school.

What the plaque says

Bonham Cotton Mill In 1900, nine Bonham businessmen formed a corporation to construct and operate a cotton mill near this site. The town's presence on the northern edge of the blackland prairie made it an idea location for textile manufacturing, since cotton was one of the area's principal crops. The Bonham Cotton Mill, which opened in 1901, was the town's first significant industrial plant. The corporation constructed a series of company homes and provided free day care for children of employees. In 1920, the company merged with Consolidated Textile Corporation, which was based on the east coast. Management of the mill remained in the hands of John C. Saunders until his death in 1934. The Bonham Cotton Mill closed in 1930 with the onset of the Great Depression. In 1931, Bonham businessmen rechartered it as a Texas corporation. After reaching its peak of production during the 1940s, the cotton mill declined in the pst-World War II years. The plant merged with the Brenham Cotton Mill in 1958 but closed eventually in the 1970s. As Bonham's principal employer for many years of the 20th century, the cotton mill had a major impact on the city's social and economic history. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 2.0 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 24 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 29 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.

More markers nearby

• Bonham Daily Favorite — 0.2 mi
• Fannin County — 0.3 mi
• Constantine Lodge No. 13, A. F. & A. M. — 0.4 mi
• Confederate Commissary — 0.4 mi