Lubbock's First Cotton Gin

The gin arrived just as cotton was proving itself. The county's first crop, thirty bales, was grown in 1901, and in 1904 farmers hauled about 110 bales a hundred miles to the gin at Colorado City. Back in 1891 sorghum cane had taken 328 of the county's 400 cultivated acres. By the 1930s cotton was rising to dominance, and in 1981 the county's thirty-three gins, the most of any county in Texas, handled 274,669 bales. With three cottonseed oil mills, Lubbock came to be called the world's leading producer of cottonseed oil.

What the plaque says

Lubbock's First Cotton Gin The Lubbock Cotton Gin Company operated at a site 1/10 mile northeast in the 1900s and 1910s. Until 1903, the nearest gins were over 100 miles away, thus limiting any local experiments with growing cotton. However, after the first small efforts to raise cotton proved successful in 1902 and 1903, local municipal leaders recognized that cotton farming could become an established industry and decided to purchase a cotton gin. After a public subscription drive, a group led by town co-founder Frank E. Wheelock funded and opened Lubbock's first cotton gin in late 1904. The Lubbock Cotton Gin Company was jointly owned by Wheelock, William Carlisle, Brothers K. and G.W. Carter, H.V. Edsall, and W.G. Nairn. Wheelock traveled to the railroad siding in Canyon with two wagons and eight horses and returned eight days later with a 16,000-pound engine and gin equipment in tow. The gin was installed over a three-month period, opening in time for the 1904 harvest. Each season once the harvest began, the gin operated almost continuously. Soon, other gins opened in the county to keep up with increasing cotton production, increases which by the 1920s resulted in the opening of numerous compress warehouses and cotton seed oil-producing plants. After this gin closed in the late 1910s, the site became parts of the Lubbock Cotton Oil Company and the Lubbock Compress Company (northeast 0.2 miles). Starting with the first cotton gin in 1904, Lubbock has grown to be the center of the South Plains cotton industry, recognized as one of the leading production regions of the United States and the world. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buddy Holly Center — 0.4 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 0.8 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 2.9 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 4.3 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Buddy Holly — 0.4 mi
• Mackenzie Scout Trail — 0.6 mi
• Mount Gilead Baptist Church — 0.6 mi
• Lubbock County — 0.7 mi