Gruene Cotton Gin

Gruene's gin sat at the center of a sharecropping economy. In 1872 the Gruene family bought 6,000 acres north of the Guadalupe, and several dozen families worked it on shares. They lived in a county where the first gin went up in the mid-1850s and twenty stood by 1885, and where the crop rose from 1,220 bales in 1860 to more than 16,000 in 1900. When the boll weevil came, the family's 8,000 acres reportedly failed to make a single bale in one late-1920s year. Cotton farming in Comal County ended altogether in the 1950s.

What the plaque says

Gruene Cotton Gin Built on the site of an earlier grist mill, the Gruene Cotton Gin was constructed in 1878 by H. D. Gruene. Powered by the Guadalupe River, the gin was steam-operated and served to process the vast amounts of cotton grown in the area, the gin played an important part in the economic development of Gruene, a community dependent upon the cotton crop. The gin was destroyed in a 1922 fire, and only part of the boiler room remains. A new electric gin was built at another location and served the community until the cotton crop was lost to a boll weevil infestation in 1925. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gruene Historic District — steps away
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 3.0 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 15 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 15 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• Original Gruene Mercantile — steps away
• Gruene — steps away
• Ferdinand J. Lindheimer — 1.7 mi
• New Braunfels — 2.3 mi