Goldman Ginnery

Cotton was still a Victoria business when the Goldman gin worked. In September 1923 the Victoria Advocate reported 7,000 bales ginned in the county, with farmers hoping to reach 10,000, and about half the county's cotton was ginned in the city. The Goldman gin turned out 1,403 bales that season and the Feik gin south of town 1,190. A 1986 survey puts the Goldman gin on a triangle of the Owens Addition of 1882, operating by 1891 beside the Southern Pacific tracks, and lists its warehouse among the city's German-heritage buildings.

What the plaque says

Goldman Ginnery Adolph Goldman was born in Bremen, Germany in July 1836. At age seventeen, in 1853, he immigrated to New York City, where he worked as a clerk. He moved to New Orleans four years later and then to Goliad, Texas in 1859. There, he found work in a mercantile store. Following military service in the Civil War, Goldman moved to Victoria in 1865 and established his own mercantile firm. He became a successful businessman, with other endeavors including dairying, farming, grist milling and cotton ginning. Records indicate Goldman operated a cotton gin at this site beginning in the late 1880s. He purchased the land, as well as existing gin structures, from Ernst Moeller (Miller) in 1890 and may have leased the facilities prior to the date of purchase. Over the next several years, Goldman bought surrounding property and developed a successful ginning operation, which he continually updated with new equipment and structures. With immediate access to the rail line that ran along East Street, Goldman was able to manage other cotton-related operations at this site, including warehouses for area cotton growers. After the turn of the 20th century, Goldman's two sons, Edwin C. and G. Clarence, joined their father in the management of the family business. By 1907, they had constructed a red brick warehouse, and the business continued to grow, averaging 3,000 bales a season. Upon Goldman's death in 1921, he left the property to his sons. Edwin C. maintained the business until 1937, when he sold all but the brick warehouse to F.S. Tarkington. The ginning operations continued until the early 1940s, when the facilities burned. In the 1960s, Tarkington's heirs sold the property, which became the site of an agricultural supply center. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.7 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 2.0 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Palestine Missionary Baptist Church — 0.2 mi
• F.W. Gross High School — 0.3 mi
• Webster Chapel United Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• Site of Southern Pacific Railroad Depot — 0.3 mi