Site of Ezell-McLeroy Cotton Gin

Ezell built his gin in a county whose cotton crop had just exploded. The Handbook of Texas gives 1,212 bales in 1870 and 18,826 in 1890. It also shows who worked the land. Of 2,829 farms counted in 1890, 1,232 were sharecropped, or 43.55 percent, and by 1900 the share had reached 48.8 percent. Land ownership, the Handbook says, was concentrated in the hands of relatively few people, which left many families farming land they did not own.

What the plaque says

Site of Ezell-McLeroy Cotton Gin John Ezell (1857-1933) and his family moved from Alabama to Texas in 1867 and settled on a farm near here. The growth of cotton crops increased in Johnson County by the 1890s, and the need for more cotton gins became acute. In 1896 Ezell built a cotton gin on his land located halfway between the communities of Alvarado and Cahill; it became a major business in rural Johnson County. Although the cotton gin with its wooden siding was destroyed in an 1899 fire, Ezell rebuilt before the 1900 season began and installed new equipment. Cotton production continued to expand in the area and Ezell became a successful gin owner and farmer. J. Otto McLeroy, Sr. (1883-1966) took over operations at the gin in 1917, and it became known as the McLeroy Gin. Cotton buyers were attracted to Alvarado by two rail lines that intersected there, bound for major cotton markets in Dallas, Fort Worth and Waco. The McLeroy Gin continued to operate through the 1920s and 1930s, and finally closed in 1948. The building housing the cotton gin burned in 1953, destroying the remnants of a once-thriving business. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 20 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 22 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 23 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Cleburne State Park — 23 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.

More markers nearby

• Site of Norman Springs & Norman Grove — 1.5 mi
• Alvarado — 2.2 mi
• Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson — 2.2 mi
• Balch-Senterwood Cemetery — 2.4 mi