1793-1860

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THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON GINS, A SOUTHERN INDUSTRY, 1793-1860

By Dr. M.C. McMillan (deceased) Auburn University Auburn, Alabama

This paper is organized around the important cotton gin manufacturers including Samuel Griswold, Daniel Pratt, Eleazer Carver, I. F. Brown, Benjamin D. Gullet, F. McCarty, Etc. It emphasizes the fact that at least eighty percent of the gins were made in the South--the only ante-bellum industry in which the South has a monopoly. Major improvements in the cotton gin from Whitney to 1860 are discussed. The constant aim of every gin manufacturer (never completely realized) was to make a saw gin that would not damage the cotton fiber. Roller gins were impractical for short staple cotton. The paper is concerned with how the leading gin manufacturers sought to meet the needs of the cotton planter. For instance, after the introduction of Mastadon cotton (a cotton with larger bolls) from the Patit Gulph area of Mississippi, Eleazer Carver made a gin stand suited to the new cotton.

The description of gins (30 to 60 saws, etc.). location of gin factories and their sources of power, raw materials used in their manufacture and where they were secured, advertising and sales methods, number of gins in operation in various decades, and transportation facilities available for shipping gins are all discussed.

Sources are the manuscript industrial census of 1850 and 1860, which list by name all the cotton gin manufacturers, where factory located, source of power, raw materials used, value of the factory and number of gins made annually. Patent office reports and cotton gin patents issued are an even more important part of the bibliography. In addition, I have used most of the Southern agricultural magazines before 1860, DeBow's Review, Nile’s Register, many Southern newspapers, and the correspondence of some of the manufacturers. Advertisements in the agricultural press and newspapers are an invaluable source. Both also have numerous articles on the subject. Records of county and state fairs have material on cotton gins as prizes were always offered for the best gins exhibited. In the case of Daniel Pratt, I have his record books, which includes specifications for each gin made, raw materials used, name of the mechanic who made the gin, name of the purchaser, and how the gin was shipped to the purchaser.

The following essay from Dr. M.C. McMillian (deceased) was published in the Cotton Gin and Oil Mill Press May 1993. This information and many important facts about Daniel Pratt and the manufacture of cotton gins are located at the Auburn University Archives and is the property of Auburn University Auburn, Alabama. Special Thanks to Nancy Hefner, Lenora Kirkpatrick and friends for finding this important essay.

For More Information about the McMillian Papers contact at Auburn: Dr. Dwayne Cox University Archivist (334) 844-4500

This information has been assembled as close as possible to the original manuscript and should in no way be changed.

The Manufacture of Cotton Gins

1793-1860

By Dr. M. C. McMillan Auburn University Auburn, Alabama

Much has been written about Eli Whitney and the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Many writers have stressed its importance to the whole economic, social, and even political development of the South as a section and the country as a whole. They have emphasized the fact that this invention, together with the inventions in spinning and weaving which occurred in England between 1764 and 1785, made possible the great textile revolution in England and the United States. Other writers have found that the invention of the gin brought into existence a chain of factors and events which inevitably led to the Civil War. Yet almost nothing has been written on the history of the gin after Whitney’s invention. It is the purpose of this paper to examine in the time allowed the history of the manufacture of gins from Whitney’s invention to the Civil War. Who were the leading gin manufacturers in this period, where were their factories located, what raw materials were used in the manufacture of gins and where were they secured, what major improvements had been made on the cotton gin by 1860, and what part did the gin manufacturer play in building the cotton kingdom?

In considering the Whitney gin for short staple of green seed cotton it should be remembered that the roller gin for long staple or black seed cotton had been in use in the West Indies and India for centuries before 1793.1 Its exact origin is unknown.2 The roller gin was a very simple machine and worked well on long staple cotton. It was based on the principle that when long staple cotton was forced through two parallel rollers placed closely together the lint would go through and the seed remain behind.

The most popular roller gin for long staple cotton in Georgia and South Carolina in 1793 was that of Joseph Eve.3 Eve was a member of a Philadelphia Loyalist family who had fled to the Bahamas during the American Revolution. In the Bahamas in the seventeen-eighties he invented and began manufacture of a much improved roller gin. His improvements on the crude roller gin consisted in building a machine with two sets of double rollers, lengthening the rollers, coordinating the parts of the whole machine so that it ran with greater ease and ginned with more rapidity than ever before, and adapting various motive powers, including horse, wind, and water power to the machine.4

When cotton was introduced into the United States for the first time as a commercial crop by Loyalist who were returning from the Bahamas in the first decades after the American Revolution, Eve’s gin was introduced along with the Sea Island cotton.5 At first Eve manufactured and shipped his gins from the Bahamas, but in the seventeen-nineties he returned to the United States and began the manufacture of his gins in Augusta, Georgia. His gins continued for decades to be the most practical and popular gin for Sea Island cotton in those areas of Georgia and South Carolina (and later certain limited areas of Florida and the Gulf Coast) where climate and soil allowed the growth of the long staple. 6

However, only the short staple or green seed cotton would grow in the great upland area that was most of the South, and the roller gin would not separate short staple or green seed cotton lint from the seed, to which it clung

tenaciously. If the South were to become the cotton kingdom, a gin suitable to this type of cotton was necessary. These were the circumstances when Whitney invented his gin for short staple cotton on Nathaniel Greene’s Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, in 1793.7 Whitney solved the essential problem of a gin for short staple cotton by setting wires in a wooden cylinder and revolving this against the slatted side of a box of cotton. The wire points upon entering the slats of the box caught bits of the fiber, and as they made it they tore the lint from the seed which were to large to follow between the slats. As the cylinder continued its revolutions through the box it cleaned virtually all the lint from the seed, which then fell through a crevice on the further side. In order to keep the wired cylinder from becoming clogged with lint, Whitney equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite direction and at a greater speed. This is a description of the gin on which Whitney made oath on October 28, 1793 and secured a patent from the United States government on March 14, 1794.8 Whitney and his partner Phineas Miller, the second husband of Mrs. Nathaniel Greene and the man who had financed the invention, began the manufacture of the new gin in New Haven, Conn., where Whitney had made friends and business connections during his college days at Yale University.

The company of Whitney and Miller planned to maintain a monopoly in cotton ginning by following a policy of not selling the machine, but rather establishing gins in the South which would by all cotton, gin it, and sell the lint. This policy proved to be a major business error, however, as they could not manufacture enough cotton gins to gin the rapidly increasing crops, nor could they raise sufficient capital to finance the purchase of the entire cotton crop.9 In 1793, news of Whitney’s invention spread throughout the upland cotton growing area where much cotton had been planted even before his invention, in anticipation of someone inventing a successful gin.10 Infringing machines were constructed in many mechanic’s shops, some of which at least were an improvement on Whitney’s original model. Edwards Lyons a mechanic of Wrightsboro, Georgia and Hodgen Holmes, a mechanic of Augusta, Georgia, made gins in which circular saws (which all gins for short staple cotton were soon to use) were substituted for the wire spikes of Whitney’s original model. 11 Holmes has the best claim to the invention of saws as he secured a patent on his gin with saws on May 2, 1796.12 Beginning in 1795, Whitney brought suit against one rival gin manufacturer after another.13 Long litigation in the courts followed which did not end favorable to Whitney until 1807. In that year in the case of Whitney vs Arthur Fort involving Holmes gin, Whitney secured an injunction from a Federal court in Georgia protecting his patent rights.14 In answer to the claim of the defendants lawyers that the Holmes gin was materially different from Whitney’s model, Judge William Johnson of the Federal Court of Georgia declared:

"A Mr. Holmes has cut teeth in plates of iron, and passed them over the cylinder. This is certainly a meritorious improvement in the mechanical process of constructing this machine. But at least, what does it amount to, except more convenient mode of making the same thing? Every characteristic of Mr. Whitney’s machine is preserved...Mr. Whitney may not be at liberty to use Mr. Holmes’ iron plate, but certainly Mr. Holmes’ improvement does not destroy Mr. Whitney’s patent right. Let the decree for a perpetual injunction be entered." 15

However, this decree could not be enforced for two reasons. First, public opinion had turned against Whitney because of his over-reaching policy of monopolizing the operation of the gin. Juries, especially in Georgia, were inclined to decide against Whitney.16 Second, the production of cotton was increasing at such an astounding rate that Whitney could not under the most favorable circumstances have met even half the demand for the gin. Production soared from 10,400 bales in 1793 to 73,000 in 1800 and 177,000 in 1810. 17 By 1810 the volume of upland cotton exports was ten times that of Sea Island.18 Miller wrote Whitney in 1794 that "the people of the country are running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market. 19 " Meanwhile, Whitney suffered one misfortune after another, including a fire which destroyed his factory. Although the South Carolina legislature appropriated $50,000 to extinguish Whitney’s patent rights in that state, and smaller grants were forthcoming from North Carolina and Tennessee, these did little more than pay for all the litigation in which Whitney became engaged. And in 1812 when Whitney’s patent expired the Congress of the United States refused to renew it. 20 This decision left the manufacture of gins open to the world and Whitney in disgust turned forward from the manufacture of gins to the manufacture of firearms where his contributions were as great in the construction of gins. He introduced the idea of "Standardization of P arts" and became the father of the Assembly line.

Even prior to 1812 Whitney’s factory at New Haven had made only a small percentage of the saw gins constructed. Most of them manufactured locally in hundreds of blacksmith and mechanic shops on the plantations or in the nearby towns. However, many of them were very poorly constructed and did not even come up to the standard of Whitney’s first model. The decision of the Congress not to renew Whitney’s patent in 1812 cleared the way for the rise of gin manufactories comparable to factories in textiles, iron and other industries, where capital, the entrepreneur, and experienced labor all combined to make a superior finished product.21

One of the earliest of the gin manufacturers was Eleazer Carver of Bridgewater, Massachusetts.22 While traveling in the South in 1806 he made the acquaintance of some very important planters in the Natchez area of the Mississippi River Valley, where upland cotton had been grown commercially about as early as in Georgia and South Carolina.23 Among these were William Dunbar, famous scientist and planter, who himself had made improvements on a gin, and Stephen Minor, one time owner of nearly all the land in the area.24 Since Carver had experience as a mechanic, they interested him in establishing a gin shop to make gins for their plantations. In 1795, the first gin in the region and had been constructed in typical fashion for Daniel Clarke, by his Negro Salve mechanic, chiefly from a rude drawing and an imperfect description obtained from a traveler who had seen Whitney’s gin in Georgia. Later, other gins had been made by David Greenleaf, who became a well known local gin wright. But all these gins were crude affairs. The saws of some of them had been "hammered out of hoe blades and had only two or three teeth to the inch." 25 The planters hoped that Carver with his New England connections and experience as a mechanic could bring in machinery and establish a first rate gin shop near Natchez. The first gin that Carver made was for Stephen Minor’s plantation and it proved to be superior to any other gin in the area. He erected one of the first saw mills in the Mississippi Territory in order to saw lumber for his gin stands and open a gin shop in Natchez.26 For six years Carver made gin stands for the Mississippi planters before the War of 1812 closed his shop. During the war he did defense work in New England, but returned to Natchez in 1814 and built a new gin shop, with money supplied by his nearby planter friend, Stephen Minor. Before leaving New England Carver contracted with Seth and Abram Washburn’s forge and iron works in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to do all his iron work and ship it to Natchez, including the castings and the cuttings of the saws. 27 However, this arrangement lasted less than two years, as Carver decided in 1816 to return to New England to establish there in conjunction with the Washburn’s the Bridgewater Cotton Gin Company, popularly known for more than fifty years as the Carver Cotton Gin Company. A desire to be near his raw materials and a Puritan mind which found "Natchez under the hill" and the rowdy frontier objectionable in part at least prompted by his return.28 In 1816 and subsequent years Carver built on South Brook, in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, an extensive establishment run by water power, where he continued to make gins throughout the ante-bellum period. He used the white pine from Maine for his gin stands, but the pulleys and cylinder blocks were made of hornbeam wood, which he secured locally. The iron mainly used was Swede, which came in bars three inches wide, and three quarters of an inch thick. The steel was known as "English blister" and came in the same size. The saws were made by welding a bar of steel between two of iron, and hammering into form, after which they were trimmed, ground, polished, and the teeth cut. The iron on the outside of the gin saw was suppose to wear more rapidly than the steel, making the saws self-sharpening. At first, the brushes where made from hair of horse-tails imported from South America in bales, but hog bristles which the southern gin manufacturers were using proved to be superior and Carver started using them after 1836.29 Carver and his partner Albert Washburn both made improvements in the gins, which they protected by securing patents.30 In 1820, cotton ginned in Natchez, Mississippi on Carver’s gins brought two to four cents more in the New Orleans market than other cotton.31 And in 1823, cotton from William Dunbar’s plantation, ginned on a Carver gin, sold for four cents more per pound in Liverpool, England, then that from inferior gins.32

In 1833, four mechanics (three of whom were the Keith Brothers who were soon to have important patents to their credit)33 left the Carver Gin Company, and with five associates financiers, among whom were George W. Bates and Joseph A. Hyde formed Bates, Hyde and Company, popularly known throughout the ante-bellum period as the Eagle Cotton Gin Company. 34 The Eagle Cotton Gin Company was organized with thirty shares of stock worth $1,000 each, divided among the nine partners. It was run by steam instead of waterpower as in the case of Carver Company was less than a mile from the Carver Plant. It apparently came into being because of dissention in the Carver Gin Company and the existence of a local supply of cotton gin mechanics trained in the Bridgewater plant. Also, the great demand for the gin in the South made competition attractive. 35 The Eagle Company was the second and last gin factory founded in the North during the ante-bellum period, 36 and it surpassed its predecessor in the production of gins by 1860.37 Both the Eagle and Carver gins were of a superior quality and were constantly improved in the period under discussion. 38 They had a majority of the foreign gin trade from the beginning, and were live competitors for the New Orleans gin trade, but sold few gins elsewhere. 39 However, their combined output in 1860 (990 gins) was not quite two thirds of the production of the south's leading gin manufacturer Daniel Pratt.

The production of the gins was from the beginning and remained mainly a southern industry. Whitney invented the gin in the South and before the rise of factories gins were made on or near the plantations in southern blacksmith and mechanic shops. With the coming of the factory or large gin shops their manufacture remained largely in the cotton belt, with new factories being opened in the west as the cotton kingdom moved westward. Several factors contributed to make the manufacture of gins a southern industry. Factories remained in the south because the first mechanics or gin wrights were southern men or men trained in southern shops, thus giving that section the only large supply of trained labor. But an even more important reason was the fact that the manufacturer needed close and constant contact with his gins in operation in order to keep them running and to gain enough experience to design new models. A gin was a very sensitive and intricate machine, subject to constant mechanical supervision if it were to turn out fine cotton. 40 Often it was returned to the factory for repair or repaired by the factory’s traveling agents. Transportation and communication difficulties made proximity to the planter very advantageous to the manufacturer. Labor was cheaper in the South and many of the southern factories worked trained slave mechanics.41 Moreover, except for the saws, grates, and brushed, gins were made largely of heart pine of which the South had almost a monopoly. It was less costly to ship the raw materials, which the south could not secure within its borders, to the South than to secure a substitute or ship the bulky pine lumber from which at least seventy-five percent of the gin was made to the industrial east. 42 For these and perhaps other reasons the manufacturer of gins was essentially a southern industry, a fact of some importance as in this industry alone the agrarian South excelled the industrial East in the period before the war.

One of the most important of the Southern gin manufacturers was Samuel Griswold of Clinton, Georgia. 43 Griswold was a Connecticut Yankee, even as Eli Whitney, who came to Clinton, Georgia , in 1818. He first opened a tin shop which made all kinds of tin products. 44 In 1825 he enlarged his tin shop into a combination tin, cabinet, and machine shop, where he manufactured cotton gins, gin gear, wheat fans, cast iron cog wheels, Freeborn’s improved cast iron ploughs, carding machines, high and low post bedsteads, and other furniture. 45 He manufactured fifty gins during his first year (1825) which indicates both the popularity of this gins and the fact that his shop was a large one for the period. 46 He advertised at this time that he made the saws and grates from either iron or steel. 47 With the increased demands for his gins and the accumulation of a larger capital, he abandoned his diverse manufactory and built in Clinton a large gin factory. He became an extensive owner of timber lands in Jones County with a large saw mill which sawed the long leaf pine into lumber for his gin stands.48 He imported machinery and adapted it to the manufacture of gins if it could be secured; if not he invented it and manufactured it in his own machine shop. He bought to his factory from New England some of the most highly trained mechanics of the day, the most famous of whom were the brothers, Dwight and Israel Brown. 49 Griswold advertised that he had built more than 10,000 gins by 1850. 50Eighty mechanics worked in the gin factory in that year. The factory has an annual production of 900 gins a year in 1850; a production rate which the factory maintained throughout the fifties. 51 The census of 1850 listed 700,000 pounds of iron castings, 50,000 pounds of wrought iron, 40,000 pounds of gin saw cast steel, an undetermined amount of hog bristles, and 200,000 feet of lumber as the raw materials for the making of the 900 gins. 52 Although Griswold was a manufacturer rather than a planter of a good indication of his growing wealth can still be found in his slave holdings. In 1830, he owned four slaves, in 1850 ninety-one slaves, and in 1860 one hundred and eight slaves. 53 He used slave labor extensively in his saw mill, foundry, machine shop, and some were trained mechanics in his gin factory.54

After a fire in 1850 Griswold decided to move his gin factory to a point on the Central Railroad some eighteen miles from Clinton in order to facilitate the shipping of gins, which heretofore has been hauled over much of the southeast in large Concord wagons drawn by six horses. The new location would also be advantageous in that it was near the center of his large holdings in timber lands in South Jones County. 55 In the new town which was named Griswoldville, he built in addition to the new gin factory, a foundry, a wagon manufactory, a church, a school, a large mansion for himself, and houses for his workmen. He accumulated a fortune from his gin factory, which he generously shared with local educational and charitable institutions or his day. For example, he was one of the early benefactors of Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. 56 Griswoldville was burned by Sherman in 1865, a blow from which he never recovered. Records in Jones County Court House show that at his death in 1867, his customers still owed him for gins more than 250,000 dollars.

In one respect Samuel Griswold is the key to the development of the whole gin industry. His factory became a training school for gin mechanics who moved on once they had learned the trade and could finance the undertaking to establish gin factories throughout the South. 57 Among those who acquired the "know how" at Griswold’s factory and then moved on to establish important gin manufactories were Daniel Pratt, of Temple, N. H., who founded the Pratt Gin Company in Alabama in the eighteen-thirties; 58 Joseph Winship of New Salem, Massachusetts, who established Winship Gin Company in Madison, Georgia in the eighteen-forties, which he moved to the railroad center of the South, Atlanta, Georgia in 1853; 59 Israel and Dwight Brown of Connecticut, who bought out the E. T. Taylor Cotton Gin Company, 60 and organized Clemons, Brown and Company in Columbus, Georgia in the eighteen-fifties;61 and Orren Webb Massey of Rockingham, North Carolina, who built the Massey Cotton Gin Company at Masseyville, near Macon, Georgia, in the eighteen-fifties. 62 So important is Samuel Griswold in the large production of a practical gin and in training mechanics who patented improvements in the gin or founded factories of their own, that he deserves as much space in any history of the cotton gin as Eli Whitney, and yet nothing has been written about the man.

From the standpoint of his contributions to the development of the gin industry, the most important person to train at Samuel Griswold’s "school for gin manufacturers" was Daniel Pratt, of Temple, New Hampshire. 63 He came south in 1819 and during the eighteen-twenties designed and built for wealthy planters in the vicinity of Macon and Milledgeville, Georgia, some of the most beautiful and well constructed homes in the South. 64 These homes establish Pratt’s reputation as one of the leading carpenter architects in the South in the eighteen-twenties. 65 In 1831, he became manager, and after one year a partner in Griswold’s gin factory. Here he applied the same skills in designing and building gins that had formally gained him a reputation as an architect. In 1833 Pratt decided to move westward with the cotton planter in order to establish a gin factory nearer the center of the cotton belt on one of the great river systems of the South which would furnish transportation for the sale of his gins. 66 The West was at the time virgin territory for the manufacture of gins as there was not a single factory of any size west of Georgia. Griswold agreed to become a partner in the new enterprise but within a year sold his interest to Pratt. In 1833, Pratt moved westward from Clinton in wagons loaded with his household belongings and fifty cotton gins. His first stop was at Elmore’s Mill site about twelve miles north of Montgomery, Alabama. Here he assembled and painted the fifty gins he brought from Georgia, which found a quick sale among the planters of the Alabama Black Belt. 67 As Pratt was an ardent advocate of waterpower as a cheaper source of power than steam, he leased in 1834 for five years a waterpower site on Autauga Creek, known as McNeil’s mill. Here he constructed a two story frame gin shop and averaged a production of two hundred gins annually until his lease expired in 1839.68 This required a great deal of mechanical ingenuity as he had not yet secured many of the machine tools which were later employed at his Prattville factory. At this time the gin saws were cut and the hole punched by hand out of sheet steel imported from England by way of Mobile. Each gin required 30, 45, 50 or 60 saws, as these were the most popular sizes in the eighteen-thirties. Other parts of the gin were constructed of cast iron and heart pine.69 Plantation records in the Alabama Black Belt in the eighteen-thirties indicate the great popularity of the Pratt gin. 70 Aware that he must greatly expand his facilities for the production of gins, Pratt purchased in the fall of 1835 for $21,000 (half of which price was to be paid in cotton gins) one thousand acres of heavily wooded land with an excellent waterpower site.71 The new location on which he built the town of Prattville was three miles up Autauga Creek from the McNeil mill site and twelve miles from Montgomery and some four miles from the Alabama River. Profits from the gin factory at McNeil’s mill enabled Pratt to pay for his new site before he moved his factory there in 1839. 72 On the new site Pratt built the town of Prattville, a manufacturing village of some eight hundred people by 1850. 73 Prattville was a planned town, largely on the New England model, with streets, a public square, and sites for a school, and other public buildings determined by land surveys in advance of settlement. This gin factory in turn financed the beginnings of other industries, including a cotton factory, foundry, flour mill, sash, door, and blind factory and wagon manufactory. 74

Before 1850 the demand for Pratt gin far exceeded the capacity of the 1839 factory. As a result, Pratt constructed in 1854 a new brick factory which had a capacity of 1500 gins annually. 75 He wrote a friend at this time: "I expect to put in the latest machinery and have the best cotton gin factory in the world." 76 The new factory was 250 ft. long by 50 ft. wide, and three stories high. 77 The first floor was filled with the various machine tools used in the manufacture of gins. There was a line of shafting 250 ft. long, on which at suitable distances apart, were seventy drums for driving the various machines. This floor contained the steel and saw department. Here gin saws were cut from sheet steel. Ingenious mechanical machines were used to secure precision in the gin saws, as on their accuracy depended in great part a perfect gin. The sheet steel was first cut into squares, then rounded and lastly teeth were cut. Every gin saw was made uniform, all being the same size, temper and thickness. Machines also cut into specified sizes and shapes the well seasoned yellow pine for the gin stands. The gin saws were mounted on one shaft about 3/4 of an inch apart, the gin brushes made of hog bristles on another. An elevator carried these gin parts, together with the grates, ribs, and other iron parts cast locally in Pratt’s foundry to the second floor, where assembly of the gin stands took place. This consisted of placing the mounted gin and brush shafts together with the cast iron ribs and other gin parts made in Pratt’s foundry. After being tested with seed cotton to see that it was in perfect running order, the assembled gin stand was then carried on the elevator to the third floor where it was painted or varnished and boxed for shipping.78 The popularity of the Pratt gin was due in large part to its simplicity and durability. In 1846 Pratt wrote:

My gins are made on the most simple plan I can adopt to have them answer the purpose. I have long since learned that a piece of machinery should be simple to go into general use. My object is to make them simple and durable.79

Although most of Pratt’s gins were made to some standard pattern, some were made to order. Wealthy planters of the Mississippi River Valley where Pratt sold seventy percent or more of his gins in the eighteen-fifties often ordered gins of special construction with extras. J. J. Hooper, editor of the Montgomery Mail who visited the Pratt factory in 1857 wrote that some gins are "got up in the most elegant and finished style, resembling more furniture for the parlor than machine for the plantation. He saw many with polished mahogany covers and engraved plates." 80 In some cases all visible parts of screws, bolts, and iron were nickel plated. 81

When the new factory was completed in 1854 the Pratt gin factory became the largest gin factory 82 in the world and his gins were renowned wherever cotton was grown. In the decade of the eighteen-fifties he not only sold more gins in the south than an other company, but he filled orders for gins from Russia, the British Empire, France, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America. 83

Pratt never tired of boasting that all materials used in the construction of his gins, except the sheet steel for saws, were southern. The Pratt Gin Company imported the sheet steel for more than forty years (as did Samuel Griswold and Company) from Naylor’s Steel Works in Sheffield, England. 84This was a better grade of steel than could be secured in the United States. The wood for the gin stands came from the surrounding country side. The iron for the gin castings made in the Pratt foundry came from Shelby Iron Works, some fifty miles to the north.85The Shelby Iron Works Papers in the University of Alabama Library indicate that for more than forty years, Pratt was Horace Ware’s best customer. All orders specify "No. I foundry pig iron." 86 According to Pratt this was the very best grade of pig iron to be secured anywhere in the United States. 87 It was a very soft iron made from brown ore with charcoal. The Prattville foundry found a soft or very malleable iron necessary in order to mould it into complex castings for the Pratt gin.

Thirty and forty-five saw gins increased in size. His most popular gin in the forties and fifties was a 50 or 60 saw gin and he sold an increasing number of 80 saw gins to large planters in the late fifties. 88 The "Eureka Gin" which Pratt started making about 1858 was a very popular gin in the lowland areas of the Mississippi river where Mastadon or other large boll types of cotton were grown. These gins contained eighty saws and since they were of special construction sold for six dollars per saw. 89

Pratt sold large numbers of his gins through his own factorage house in New Orleans and on a commission basis through the commission merchants of the south. 90In addition, in 1860 he had fourteen traveling agents in the Mississippi River Valley alone in order to sell and service his gins. 91 It is interesting to note that Pratt sold very few gins in Georgia and South Carolina, where Griswold and Company and Taylor and Company of Columbus, Georgia (later Clemson, Brown and Company) were the main competitors. Pratt sold his gins in Alabama (many delivered by wagon until railroads were built) or shipped them by way of Mobile and New Orleans to the central and western cotton areas. So large was Pratt’s New Orleans’s business that he wrote in 1849:

I have ten times the interest that I have in Mobile and I say that Louisiana has done as much toward building up Prattville as Alabama.92

Pratt accumulated a huge fortune from his gin factory and other industries before 1860. 93 He became a well known philanthropist, giving large sums to the Methodist Church, and to state and private institutions of higher learning in Alabama and Georgia.94 The town of Prattville, which he had built and dominated, was a monument to his enterprise and business ability. He lived in a large mansion, built on a thirty acre plot set aside for the purpose and landscaped by imported gardeners from England. He was the patron of George Cooke, famous ante-bellum artist of New Orleans. He built an art gallery in Prattville, (the largest in Alabama and perhaps in the South before 1860), purchased and placed therein the works of Cooke and other well known artists. 95

Surprisingly enough, Pratt secured no patents on his gins until June, 1857. Then his patent consisted as he described it of a gin so constructed that "a spiral movement is given the cotton within the box or hopper, and a fresh surface constantly presented to the saws, so that the cotton will be stripped from the seed without being cut or broken. 96 He secured other patents after the Civil War 97 but his genius as a gin manufacturer, lies not in the patents he secured but in the large scale production of a popular and superior gin which he constantly improved during the period when such a gin was necessary if the cotton kingdom were to expand from South Carolina and Georgia to Texas. By 1860 Pratt had placed more that fifteen thousand of his gins in the hands of cotton planters and had made many times that many gin parts to service his own and other gins. 98

A study of cotton gin patents before 1860 indicates that the large gin manufacturer with the exception of Eleazer Carver secured very few patents. 99 However, the absence of patents does not indicate lack of contributions to the mechanical improvement of the gin. For instance, the least durable part of the gin until the eighteen-thirties were the wrought iron ribs 100 through which the steel saws passed. They soon wore out where the hard steel saws came in contact with the ribs. Pratt was the first gin manufacturer to use cast iron instead of wrought iron for the gin ribs. He wrote: "I find cast iron ribs to answer a better purpose than any wrought ribs I have ever used. I have them chill hardened, nearly as hard as glass where the saws pass through them." 101 Yet Pratt never sought to secure patents on this and other like improvements. Pratt secured one patent prior to 1860; Griswold secured none although he and Pratt bought out some patents; Carver secured six. But, mechanics in factories of the Carver Cotton Gin Company, Eagle Cotton Gin Company, Griswold Cotton Gin Company, and Pratt Gin Company, and manufacturers and mechanics in scores of smaller and lesser important gin factories than those discussed in this paper had secured some 67 patents of the saw gin by 1847 and more than 125 by 1860.102 Some of these made significant and important improvements in the cotton gin.103 Despite claims to the contrary on the part of some pro-Whitney New England writers, 104 the evidence indicates that the cotton gin of 1860 was as much superior to the gin of Whitney’s invention as the automobile engine of the nineteen-twenties was superior to that of the eighteen-nineties. Many manufacturers and mechanics had made improvements in order to bring this about. The original principals of the saw gin as patented by Whitney and Holmes remained the same just as the original principals of the internal combustion engine remained the same, but by 1860 great advances had been made in modes and material of construction for cotton gins, the feeder and condenser had both been added, and various motive powers had been expertly applied. One indication of improvement in the gin is the fact that Whitney’s first model was capable of ginning only fifty pounds of cotton in a twelve hour day and no later Whitney gin model could gin a 500-pound bale. 105 By 1860 a sixty saw gin of either the Pratt, Griswold, Eagle, or Carver make, could gin four or five bales in a twelve hour day. 106 It is true that no such radical change had been introduced as that caused by Robert S. Munger’s application of the pneumatic principle to ginning in the eighteen-eighties. It was Munger’s invention that brought the large and expensive gin and caused the transition from the plantation gin of the ante-bellum period to the large public gin of the later period. 107 Although planters often ginned for their poorer neighbors in the ante-bellum period, the capacity of the ante-bellum gin was limited. Large planters often found it necessary to have a battery of five or six gins in a row in their gin houses in order to gin their own cotton in season. 108

The census of 1860 list 16 gin factories in Alabama, 12 in Georgia, 8 in South Carolina, 5 in Louisiana, 4 in Texas, 4 in Arkansas, 3 in Mississippi, 2 in Tennessee, 2 in Massachusetts, and 1 in New York. 109 Only three of these factories were beyond the borders of the South. Alabama, the center of the cotton kingdom in 1860, had the most factories but none in Alabama averaged more than 125 gins except Daniel Pratt’s factory which averaged 1500. 110 Eight or half of these gin manufactories in Alabama averaged less than 50 gins in 1860. The smaller manufactories might be better described as machine shops and they tended to make in addition other machinery such as wheat fans, corn mills, horse mills, grist mills, and thrashers. Three of these manufactories in Alabama, including Pratt’s used water power, six used steam power, and seven relied on hand and horse power alone. In Georgia there were only two large manufactories in 1860, Samuel Griswold’s factory in Griswoldville, and Clemson, Brown and Company of Columbus, both run by steam, each of which averaged about 1000 gins in a year. 111 All of the eight factories in South Carolina, the five factories in Louisiana, the four in Arkansas, the four in Texas, the two in Tennessee were small although some averaged about 200 gins a year. 112 T. G. Atwood’s factory at Bluff Springs, Attalla County, Mississippi averaged 350 gins a year in 1860 and Beckett and Tindell at Aberdeen, Mississippi averaged 250, but the other factory in Mississippi made only 52. 113 The two Bridgewater, Massachusetts, factories made together 990 gins in 1860, the Carver Gin Company 410, and the Eagle Cotton Gin Company 580. 114 The New York factory was mainly a factory for textile machinery and made only a few gins as a sideline. 115 Although the large gin manufacturer in the South in 1860 was likely to be a man of northern birth (for instance Griswold, Pratt and Brown), the production of gins in the North in 1860 was not more than 10 percent of the total production for that year. 116 However, from their advertising in agricultural periodicals and the southern press (especially the New Orleans newspapers) one would judge that the two Bridgewater factories controlled a large share of the cotton gin trade. 117 They did give the Pratt Gin Company which had the largest trade in the Mississippi Valley area live competition around New Orleans.

The importance of the gin manufacturer to the history of the ante-bellum South and his contributions to southern agriculture are obvious. He supplied the machinery (without which the cotton kingdom could not have existed) that made possible the ginning of nearly four million bales of cotton annually by 1860.118 He had striven constantly and not without success to produce a superior gin which would, because it prepared cotton in a superior manner for the market mean tens of thousands of dollars to the southern planter. He had built in the South an industry in which the predominantly agrarian South excelled and could take pride. Today, such southern place names such as Masseyville, Georgia, Griswoldville, Georgia, and Prattville, Alabama remind one of the fact that these men were pioneers, establishing towns and villages dedicated to industry at water power and other sites. And ironically enough (because of the possibilities of reduction in gin sales) some of the magnates of the gin industry became ardent propagandist for an industrialized South, depreciating the reliance of the South on cotton alone. 119 They preached that industry could diversify the economy of the South, and greatly strengthen the South economically and militarily in the sectional struggle. Among the gin manufacturers who became propagandists for southern industry, Daniel Pratt is a paramount because he was not only the largest gin manufacturer in 1860 but operated in Prattville a successful textile mill, foundry, flour mill, wagon manufactory, tin shop, and sash, door and blind factory. His gross income of more than half a million dollars in 1859 was living proof that industry could be made even more lucrative in the South than the cultivation of cotton. 120 By example and through the media of speeches, the Alabama Legislature, letters, southern newspapers and periodicals Pratt became before 1860 even more important as propagandist for southern industry than the largest gin manufacturer in the world. 121

1 B.L.C. Sailes, Report on the Agriculture and Geology of Mississippi, (Philadelphia;1854), 141; 155-156; D.A. Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, (Charlotte, N.C.), 10. American Farmer, (Baltimore) XV, (1834) 74-75.

2 Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 10, thinks it originated in India about 300 B.C.

3 E. Merton Coulter, Thomas Spalding of Sapelo, (Baton Rouge, 1940), 64; Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 2; Thomas Spalding, "Communication for the Southern Agriculturist on the Cotton Gin; and the Introduction of Cotton", Southern Agriculturist, (Charleston, S.C.) IV, new series, (1844),106-III.

4 Ibid.; American Farmer, XV, (1834) 74-75; Tompkins, Cottonand Cotton Oil, 2, says that Dr. Joseph Eve "is reported to have been the first to run a gin by power."

5 Coulter, Thomas Spalding of Sapelo, 64-68; Thomas Spalding, Communication for the Southern Agriculturist on the cotton gin, and the Introduction of cotton, Southern Agriculturist. IV, new series, (1844), 106; U.B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, (Boston, 1931), 91-94; J. A. Turner, ed., The Cotton Planter’s Manual (New York, 1857), 18.

6 John D. Legare, editor of the Southern Agriculturist found the Sea Island cotton planters using Eve’s gins when he made an excursion into that area in the winter of 1832. He wrote: "When the cotton of the estate of Butler was separately quoted as a superior article, it was ginned entirely by Eve’s gin, as were generally the cotton of St. Simons. This gin has been in use on St. Simon’s Island for nearly forty years, and is now in very common use in this and the adjoining counties." See John D. Legars, "Account of and Farmer, (Baltimore) IV, (1834), 74-75; Southern Agriculturist, (Charleston) VI, (1833), 169. Later popular roller gins for Sea Island cotton, which were improvements over Eve’s gin in some respects were those of William Whitmore of West Cambridge, Massachusetts and, who secured patents in 1833, 1834, 1835, and 1839 and Fones McCarty of Demopolis, Alabama, who secured a patent in 1840. Other improvements on the roller gin were patented in 1823 and subsequent years by Eleazer Carver, of Bridgewater, Massachusetts. See Edmund Burks, List of Patents for Inventions and Designs used by the United States from 1790 to 1847, (Washington, D.C., 1847), 75-76: "Whittmores Cotton Gin;" The Southern Agriculturist, VIII (1835), 333, 473, 480; "McCarthy Cotton Gin," Southern Agriculturist, III, new series (1844) 105, 183, 237: Farmer and Planter, (Pendleton, South Carolina), IV, (1853), 157; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, (New York, 1941), II, 736.

7 Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 10-11; William Scarborough, "Sketch of the late Eli Whitney, with some Remarks on the invention of the Saw Gin," Southern Agriculturist, V, (1832), 393.

8 For a copy of the original patent see the appendix of Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 444-462; Denison Olmsteed, Kemoir of Eli Whitney, Esq. (New Haven, 1846), reprinted in J. A. Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, 297-320 is the most authoritive early discussion of Whitney’s invention, herein after cited with the page numbers as they appear in the Cotton Planter’s Manual.

9 Olmsteed, Kemoir of Eli Whitney, 302: U.B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, (New York, 1936), 158.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid..; Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 16-28; F. L. Lewton, "Historical Notes on the Cotton Gin, "Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, (1837), 549-563.Tompkins and Lewton both reach the conclusion after presenting convincing evidence that Whitney did not invent the saws as he claimed in affidavits made some years after the facts sworn to. See also, "Remarks on the Sketch of the Life of Eli Whitney", Southern Agriculturist, V (1832), 526-529.

12 Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 16, Also, See appendix for certified copy of Holmes’ Patent, 471; Burke, List of Patents for Inventions and Designs used by the United States from 1790 to 1847, 75.

13 There were twenty-seven of these suits. They are listed in the appendix of Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 463-471.

14 For the case of Whitney vs Fort and Powell see the appendix of Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 463-471.

15 Olmstead, Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq., 301.

16 Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 158; Scarborough, "Sketch of the life of the late Eli Whitney wit some remarks on the

invention of the Saw Gin," Southern Agriculturist, V, (1832), 399.

17 See table showing the production of cotton from 1790 to 1900 in Tompkins,, Cotton and Cotton Oil, 5; Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 160, says that by 1801 the short-staple out put was about 40,000,000 ponds and the price at the ports forty-four cents a pound.

18 Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, 99.

19 M. B. Hammond, "Correspondence of Eli Whitney relating to the invention of the Cotton Gin," in the American Historical Review, III, 90-127.

20 Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 158.

21 Scarborough, "Sketch of the Life of Eli Whitney, with some Remarks on the invention of the saw gin," 399; Charles W. Capers, "Remarks on the origin and Invention of Whitney’s Saw Gins into the Southern States, with a notice of some errors in the life on Eli Whitney, by Professor Olmstead, contained in Sillimans Journal," Southern Agriculturist, VII, (1834), 74: An Alabama Territorial census taken in Madison County, Alabama showed twenty-four gins in operation in that county in 1818, all of which had been constructed locally. This census can be found in John W. Walker papers, Archives of History, Montgomery, Alabama.

22 Much of the material on Carver is taken from an unpublished manuscript now in possession of the Continental Gin Company in Birmingham, Alabama which was written by James F. Gates in 1910. At the time he wrote Gates had been in the gin business in Bridgewater, Massachusetts for more than fifty years. The manuscript is entitled, "How the Cotton Ginning Industry Came to Bridgewater." But most of the facts in this manuscript are well substantiated by other scattered printed sources.

23 Dunbar Rowland, History of Mississippi, the Heart of the South, (Jackson, Mississippi, 1925), II, 516; Wailes, Report on the Agriculture and Geology of Mississippi, 166; Charles S, Snydor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes, (Durham, 1938) 13-14.

24 Rowland, History of Mississippi, II, 516, 680; Gates, How the Cotton Ginning Industry came to Bridgewater, I.

25 Wailes, Report on the Agriculture and Geology of Mississippi, 167: Rowland, History of Mississippi, II, 515.

26 Wailes, Report on the Agriculture and Geology of Mississippi, 169; Kennedy.

27 Gates, How the Cotton Ginning Industry Came to Bridgewater,2.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 2-5; Mississippi State Gazette (Natchez), April 3, 1819, August 12, 1820, March 17, 1821, July 2, 1823, for a discussion of the Carver gin by M. W. Phillips, see Southern Cultivator, (Augusta), VIII, (1850), 5. He says: "The Cotton is beautiful, and for finish, Messr, Carver, Washburn and Company excel any one maker I know. But, there is too much labor to feed the gin..."

30 Burke, List of the Patents for Inventions and Designs Used by the United States from 1790 to 1847. 75-76; New Orleans Commercial Bullletin, November 7, 1856.

31 American Farmer, (Baltimore), III, (1821), 256.

32 Montgomery Republican, (Montgomery, Alabama), September 13, 1823.

33 For patents by the Keith Brothers see Burke, List of Patents for Inventions and Designs used by the United States from 1790 to 1847, 75; Scientific American, (New York), (October 1845) and (January, 1847) contains an account of improvement in the cotton gin brush by Edwin Keith. For improvements in the cotton gin grates by Keith see Farmer’s Register (Petersburg, Virginia) IV, (1837), 537.

34 Samuel P. Gates, History of the Eagle Cotton Gin Company, I. This is a manuscript in the possession of the Continental Gin Company in Birmingham, Alabama. The manuscript was written in November, 1910 and Gates had been secretary and treasurer of the Eagle Cotton Gin Company for many years.

35 Ibid.; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, February 26, 1849; February 27, June 30 and July 14, 1856.

36 Machine shops in the north occasionally manufactured a gin, especially the roller gins, and factories for textile mill machinery in the North sometimes made a few gins as a sideline. See advertisement of Alfred Jenks and Sons, Bridesburg, Penna., in De Bows Review, XXVI, (January, 1859) back cover. But the writer’s research for this paper indicates that less than one percent of the new saw gins were so manufactured, although a somewhat larger percent of the roller gins.

37 The Eagle Cotton Gin Company made 580 gins and the Carver Gin Company 410 gins in 1860, (Manuscript), Schedule 7, Products of Industry, (Massachusetts State Library, Boston), 1-2.

38 New Orleans, Commercial Bulletin, February 26, 1849, February 27, July 14, November 7, 1856, October 4, 1859.

39 Ibid. February 26, 1849; February 27, July 14, December 17, 1856, September 1, October 4, 1859; Gates, History of the Eagle Cotton Gin Company, 3.

40 R. Abbry, "Cotton and the Cotton Planter," DeBow’s Review, III, (1847), 11-13; R. Abbey, "The Cotton Culture," 136-140; M. W. Phillips, The Cultivation of Cotton, No.I, "American Agriculturist, (New York), II, (1843), 147; M. W. Phillips, "Cotton and Cotton Gin Stands," American Agriculturist, VI, (1847), 85-86.

41 The two largest southern cotton gin manufacturers, Samuel Griswold and Daniel Pratt both worked large numbers of slaves in making gins. Although most of them did the heavy work rather than expert mechanical work, some of them were expert gin mechanics. Griswold had 108 slaves and Pratt 107 in 1860. See Eight Census of the United States, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants, 489 for Griswold and Census of 1860, schedule II, Slave Inhabitants, 37, (manuscript, Washington, D.C.) for Pratt: Samuel H. Griswold, "An Interesting History of Gin and Its Maker," Jones County News, (Gray, Georgia), April 2, 1908. Samuel H. Griswold who himself had been in the cotton gin business all his life and he wrote in 1908 this interesting account of Samuel Griswold’s cotton gin factory.

42 Griswold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, September 1, 1859.

43 Griswold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and Its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908; Obituary of Samual Griswold in Georgia Telegraph, (Macon), September 18, 1867; George G. Smith, Story of Georgia and the Georgian People, 1732-1860, (Macon, 1900), 278.

44 Census of 1820, Products of Industry in Jones County, Georgia, n.p. (This manuscript can be found in the Industrial Records Division of the Archives, Washington, D. C.); Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.) June 14, 1825.

45 Georgia Journal, June 14, July 8, 1825.

46 Georgia Journal, June 26, 1826.

47 Georgia Journal, June 15, 1825.

48 Griswold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and Its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908.

49 Ibid.

50 Alabama Journal, (Montgomery, Alabama), March 5, 1850.

51 George White, Historical Collections of Georgia, (New York, 1854) 505; Alabama Journal, December 16, 1859.

52 White, Historical Collections of Georgia, 505, quoting the census of 1850.

53 These figures are taken from the slave schedules of the census of 1830, 1850, and 1860.

54 Griswold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908. Griswold lists some of these slaves as mechanics in the census returns.

55 Ibid, The Cotton Planter (Montgomery, Alabama), VI,(1858), n.p. (advertisement on back cover).

56 Ibid, "The town of Griswoldville," The Federal Union, (Milledgeville, Ga.) April 10, 1857.

57 Griwold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and Its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908.

58 S.F.H. Tarrant, Honorable Daniel Pratt a Biography (Richmond, 1904), 21.

59 For Joseph Winship’s Cotton Gin Factory see White, Historical Collections of Georgia, 567; The Scientific American, II, (1847) 210,290 contains an account of an order which Winship received from the Russian consul for his country. See also, The Federal Union, (Milledgeville), June 13, 1848, August 14, 1849. A biographical sketch of Joseph Winship is to be found in Richard R. Hutchings, Hutchings, Bonner and Wyatt families. (New York, 1937), 87-88.

60 The Taylor Gin Company was established in Columbus, Ga. in the eighteen -forties by E. T. Taylor of Georgia. See White, Statistics of the State of Georgia, (Savannah, 1849), 447. According to White the factory was run by steam, worked forty hands, and was manufacturing some eighteen gins a week in 1849. See also Scientific American, II, (1847) 412; White, Historical Collections of Georgia, (New York, 1854), 570; Debows Review, II,(1851) 226. The Soil of the South (Columbus, Ga.) III, (1853), 715 gives an account of the Taylor gin and the prize that it won at the Central Georgia Fair in Augusta, Georgia.

61 Columbus Esquirer, (Columbus, Georgia), January 1, 1858, August 22, 1859.

62 Farmer and Planter, (Pendleton, South Carolina), IV, (1853), III.

63 Tarrant, The Honorable Daniel Pratt, A Biography, 20-22; hereinafter cited as "Daniel Pratt of Prattville, Alabama," DeBows Review, X, 225-226; "Daniel Pratt," DeBows Review, IV, (1847), 136-137; "Manufacturing Towns of the South, Prattville, Alabama," DeBow’s Review, X, (1851), 102-103.

64 Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 107; American Guide Series, Georgia ,A Guide to its Towns and Country Side, (Athens, 1940), 505. Macon Telegraph, (Magazine section), September 1, 1929, November 16, 1942; Macon News, November 16, 29, 1945, December 11, 1945.

65 James V. McDonough in a paper read before the Southern Historical Association in Atlanta, November 9, 1950 entitled, "William Jay, Regency Architect if the Lower South," made the point that Pratt was a student of Jay. In this unpublished paper, McDonough, who is professor of architecture at Florida State University, declared that Pratt was one of the leading carpenter architects of the period.

66 Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 21, 107; "Prattville and its Founder," Alabama Journal, October 6, 1855.

67 "Prattville," Alabama Journal, March 1, 1851; Tarrant Daniel Pratt, 21.

68 Ibid, 22; "Prattville and Its Founder," Alabama Journal, October 6, 1855.

69 Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 22-23; Daily MontgomeryMall; September 8, 1855.

70 J. B. Grace (overseer) to Charles Tait, March 24, 1835;J. B. Grace to Charles Tait; June 18, 1835. These letters are in the Tait papers. Archives of History, Montgomery, Alabama. Charles Tait was an ex-United States Senator and very large planter in the Alabama River Valley.

71 "Daniel Pratt of Autauga," Alabama Journal, October5, 1855; "Prattville," Alabama Journal, March 1, 1851; for the recorded deeds which gives all details of the purchase see Deeds and Mortgages, Book D, Vol. 4; 1833-1937, 381, in Autauga County Courthouse, Prattville, Alabama.

72 "Prattville and Its Founder," Alabama Journal, October 6, 1855; Montgomery Daily Mall, (Montgomery, Alabama), August 22, 1857.

73 Seventh Census of the United States, Schedule I, Population, (Manuscript, Archives, Washington, D.C.); Alabama Journal, June 14, 1851.

74 "Daniel Pratt, of Prattville, Alabama," DeBow’s Review,I, (1851), 227; "Manufacturing Towns of the South, Prattville, Alabama," DeBow’s Review, X, (1851), 102; "Daniel Pratt." DeBow’s Review, IV, (1847), 137; Henry Ames Blood, The History of The Temple, New Hampshire, (Boston, 1860), 242-245. Pratt was a native of Temple, New Hampshire and some pages in this book are devoted to Pratt.

75 Autauga Citizen, (Prattville, Alabama) August 25, 185 ; Alabama Journal, September 1, 1855; "The prosperity and progress of Prattville," Southern Statesman (Prattville, Alabama) March 24, 1860.

76 Daniel Pratt to Elijah Chandler, July 19, 1854. This letter is in the Pratt manuscript collection in possession of Merrill Pratt, president of Continental Gin Company, Birmingham, Alabama.

77 N. B. Cloud, "A Day With Daniel Pratt at Prattville," American Cotton Planter, (Montgomery, Alabama), I, now series, (1857), 156-157.

78 Ibid., Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 63-64; "A Peep at Prattville," Montgomery Daily Mail, August 22, 1857.

79 Daniel Pratt, "Cotton Gin," De Bow’s Review, II,(1847), 154.

80 J.J. Hooper, "Peep at Prattville," Montgomery Daily Mail, August 22, 1857.

81 Ibid.; See also Alabama Journal, September 8, 1859.

82 The census figured (manuscript) of 1850 and 1860 and contemporary articles and newspapers substantiate this assertion. Pratt was manufacturing 1500 gins a year in the late eighteen-fifties and his nearest competitors, Samuel Griswold Cotton Gin Company in Griswoldville, Georgia, and L. T. Taylor Cotton Gin Company which became Clemons, Brown and Company in 1857 in Columbus, Georgia, are manufacturing from 900 to 1,000 gins a year.

83 American Cotton Planter, VI, (1859), 62; Montgomery Daily Mail, January 1, 1859.

84 Daniel Pratt, "Cotton Gins." De Bow’s Review, 154; Alabama Journal, June 14, 1857; Griswold, "An Interesting History of the Gin and its Maker," Jones County News, April 2, 1908.

85 Letters by Daniel Pratt in Alabama Journal November 4, 1849 and December 6, 1858.

86 There are twelve business letters from Pratt to Horace Ware in this collection. This first one is dated December 21, 1846, and the last one February 17, 1873. Pratt died May 14, 1873. The Shelby Iron Works account books also furnish interesting information here.

87 Montgomery Daily Mail, February 1, 1849; Alabama Journal December 14, 1852.

88 This information is taken from the account books of the Pratt Gin Company, which the author has in his possession. These books run from 1836 to 1872 with but few breaks.

89 Ibid.; Montgomery Daily Mail, August 1, 1859; Autauga Citizen, October 2, 1853.

90 Pratt went into the factorage business in 1844 in New Orleans with H. Kendall Carter, whom he had known in Macon, Georgia. The firm was known as H. Kendall Carter and Company. Pratt used the business as a medium in which to sell his gins and cloth from the Prattville Manufacturing Company. In the late fifties the following commission merchants were authorized agents for Pratt Gins: S. Mims and Company, Montgomery, Alabama; Campbell and Company, Mobile, Alabama; Hale Murdock and Company, Columbus, Mississippi; Fleming and Baldwin, Natchez, Mississippi; E. M. Apperson, Memphis, Tennessee; Mather Hughes and Sanders, Galveston, Texas; and Pratts own factorage house, H. Kendall Carter and Company, New Orleans, Lousiana. Account Book , (1859), 101; See American Cotton Planter, IX, (1861), 18.

91 Account Book, (1860), 26. They are listed on this and the following pages with the area assigned to each.

92 A letter entitled "Industry for the South," Alabama Journal, August 27, 1849.

93 His gross income in 1859 was $681, $637.55 in 1859. See American Cotton Planter, IX, (1861), I. He is referred to constantly in contemporary accounts in Alabama newspapers as "the millionaire builder of Prattville," (Alabama Journal, December 14, 1856) or "Daniel Pratt, the Millionaire of Prattville," (Montgomery Daily Mail), June 16, 1859.

94 Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 137, 142; Montgomery Daily Mail, October 21, 1859, obituary in Montgomery Advertiser, May 15, 1873; Letters in the Pratt manuscript collection in the possession of Merrill Pratt, Birmingham, Alabama, from the University of Alabama, (December 14, 1859), University of Georgia, (January 3, 1854), and East Alabama Wale Institute, (December 14, 1859) all thank Pratt for gifts to each institution.

95 Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 125-127; Descriptive Catalogue of the Paintings in the Gallery of Daniel Pratt, Prattville, Alabama, together with a Memoir of George Cooke, artist, (Prattville, 1854, 61 pages), 1-31, Montgomery Daily Mail, September 8, 1855.

96 Patent No. 17,806, in folder in Industrial Records Division Archives, Washington, D.C.

97 Montgomery Advertiser, January 1, 1869, May 6, 1873.

98 American Cotton Planter, IX, (1861), 18; Tarrant, Daniel Pratt, 67.

99 The writer spent some time in Washington studying the patents of cotton gins issued before 1860.

100 Daniel Pratt, "Cotton Gins," DeBow’s Review, II, (1847) 154.

101 Ibid.

102 67 patents on the saw gin by 1847 are listed in Burke, Lists of Patents for Inventions and Designs used by the United States from 1790 to 1847, 75-76. The 125 figure is derived from a study of the material in the patent office, Washington, D.C.

103 The limits of this paper do not allow a discussion of these gin patents, but on addition to those already cited, Eleazer Carver, of the Carver Gin Company, Edwin Keith, of the Eagle Cotton Gin Company, and Dwight Brown, of Clemons, Brown, and Company, did much to improve the saws and grates of gins, the most vital part of a gin as this determined in a large part whether the cotton would be napped. Edwin Keith also made improvements in the cotton gin brushes. For a good discussion of improvements in the gin by 1860 see, J.C.G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States, (in eighth census), (Washington D.C., 1864, XXVI)

104 Denison Olmstead, Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq. (New Haven, 1846); written by Professor Olmstead of Yale University is a very able discussion of Whitney and the cotton gin, but it is very pro-Whitney. Such claims as: "It is remarked, finally, that the cotton gins now in use throughout the whole South, are truly the original invention of Whitney---that no improvement or successful variation of the essential parts has yet been effected," do not agree with the facts. Another New England account which is very biased in favor of Whitney is: Edward Craig Bates, "The story of the Cotton Gin," New England Magazine, VIII, (1890), 293.

105 Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, II, 680.

106 Farmer and Planter, (Pendleton, S.C.), VI, (1855), 240. See J. W. Monett, "The Cotton Crop," Southern Agriculturist, IX, (1836), 86. In 1836, he wrote: "A good gin stand, with sixty or sixty-five saws, running constantly from day break in the morning until eight or nine o’clock at night, will gin out as much as will make three or four bales." See also, M. W. Philips, "The Cultivation of Cotton," American Agriculturist, II, (1843), 173. Phillips, a Mississippi planter who wrote constantly for the various agricultural journals said that planters in his area where averaging three or four bales a day.

107 Robert S. Munger was a citizen of Mexia, Texas. "Briefly described, his invention consist of a pneumatic elevator which takes the cotton out of the wagon or bin, lifts it above the gin, cleans and delivers it upon a spiked belt which distributes it into a battery of feeders, where it is thoroughly cleaned again before entering the gins from which it is delivered into a common lint flue attached to a battery condenser; thence it is delivered in a continuous bat and fed automatically into a double press box. In other words, the cotton passes from the wagon to the press in the continuous operation, in the course of which it is thoroughly cleaned." Cotton Seed Oil Magazine, (Atlanta, Georgia), February 1, 1916, 33.

108 J. W. Monett, a large Mississippi planter, wrote: "The large plantations are adopting steam engines, and erect for the purpose very large and expensive buildings, in which are placed two, three or four stands." J. W. Monett, "The Cotton Crop," Southern Agriculturist, IX, (1836), 86.

109 Manufactures of the United States in 1860, Eight Census, CCIVI;

110 Census of 1860, Schedule V, Production of Industry, Archives of History, A Montgomery, Alabama). The writer used the original manuscript of this census which gives more than the printed version. The name of the manufacturer, raw materials used, number of gins produced and other facts are to be found only in the manuscript.

111 Apparently the manuscripts of the Georgia censuses of1850 and 1860 have been lost. However, White copied much of the census of 1850 in Georgia into his Historical Collections of Georgia, (New York, 1854). One can estimate the number of gins made annually by using the statistics given in the printed census. The printed census gives: the value of the product made, number of hands employed, capital invested in the industry, etc. These statistics indicate that all other factories in Georgia were comparatively small. Manufacturers of the United States in 1860, Eight Census (Washington, Government printing office, 1865), 61-79.

112 Ibid., 15-20, 196-204, 552-576, 580-590.

113 Census of 1860, Schedule V, Productions of Industry, (Archives of History, Jackson, Mississippi).

114 Census of 1860, Schedule V, Productions of Industry, Massachusetts State Library, Boston, Massachusetts).

115 American Cotton Planter, X, (1860), 18.

116 980 gins is less than ten percent of the gins produced in 1860 in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, leaving out the small factories in other southern states.

117 The two northern factories did more advertising in De Bow’s review, the southern agricultural Press, and New Orleans newspapers, than any other factories. They tended to make exorbitant claims about the superiority of their gins, the number of their gins sold.

118 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1913, thirty-sixth number, (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1914), 509.

119 Griswold and Pratt were both ardent advocates of industrialization in the South.

120 American Cotton Planter, IX, (1861), 18.

121 This material is too numerous to cite in detail here. The writer had already collected from Southern newspapers and periodicals forty-two letters and articles by Pratt advocating industry for the South. The Pratt manuscript collection has much material on the subject.

05/09/2007