Ghost Town of Cotton Gin

The Handbook of Texas counts 508 residents in Cotton Gin in 1860. Dr. James S. Wills built its first store and served as postmaster, and by the 1870s the town had a dozen stores, four churches and a weekly newspaper, the Herald. When the Houston and Texas Central bypassed it in 1872, many people moved to Mexia. The population stood at 206 in 1904, the post office was discontinued four years later, and the Handbook reports twenty-eight people from 1968 through 2000. Cotton Gin is a small, exact case of what a missed railroad did.

What the plaque says

Ghost Town of Cotton Gin Settled prior to 1848, when Dr. J. S. Wills established a mule-drawn gin here. Post office was founded in 1851, the year county was organized. Dr. Wills gave a block of land for courthouse, but voters declined to make Cotton Gin the county seat. Town had 3 churches, a good school, a newspaper, a Masonic Lodge, stores and saloons. In the 1870's when Houston & Texas Central Railroad built a few miles to the west, business interests left here. Cotton Gin illustrates fate of hundreds of early Texas towns by-passed by railroads, highways and industry. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 10 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 12 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 14 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

More markers nearby

• Furney Richardson High School — 3.8 mi
• William Rufus Boyd, Jr. — 5.6 mi
• Town of Teague — 5.8 mi
• Old Division Point Office for the "Boll Weevil" Railway — 5.8 mi