Word, was been passed down through a collection of handwritten notes from Kathryn Sappenfield, that the Crouse gin was bought and moved from New House in Cleveland County. No document confirming the move has been located, yet the event would have been memorable enough that the story is unlikely to have been invented. A photograph in the Milton Baker collection shows Miller Harvey, then a boy of about ten to twelve, on a wagon with a driver and the cotton gin in the background. Miller Harvey was born in 1885, so the picture is probably from around 1895 and offers a rough sense of when the gin stood in place.

The arrival of the gin from New House would have been a day the village did not forget. Teams of horses and a line of men, would have eased the heavy machinery and timber frame onto the new foundation behind the stores and beside the tracks. Neighbors who had heard the story of the move would have gathered to watch the last careful adjustments, the settling of the press and the saws into place, and the first trial turns of the machinery. For a farming community that had waited for a local gin, the moment the building stood ready on its new foundation marked the start of a new season’s work and a new reason to bring wagons to the center of the village.

By the early 1900s the firm of John F. Carpenter & Edmund C. Sullivan, Sr. was operating an elaborate gin at Crouse. On November 26, 1907, the Lincoln Times-News reported that a visitor found their outfit surprisingly complete. They used the celebrated Munger System, then the latest and most improved ginning machinery. Cotton was unloaded from the wagons by suction pipes, and labor was economized in various ways. The gin’s capacity was twenty-six bales a day.

Mr. Sullivan told the reporter that by the 19th of the month they had already ginned 425 bales that season. The crop in the neighborhood was about two-thirds of an average crop, and about half of it was being held for better prices.

In March 1909 Carpenter & Sullivan advertised the complete system for sale, noting that it had ginned 940 bales the previous season and that the reason for the sale was a change in business. By October 1910 the Ginning Company of Carpenter & Sullivan, who still owned the facility, had ginned about 400 bales to date. The numbers show a substantial local operation capable of handling hundreds of bales each fall.

Peter Columbus and Duff Fowler Chapman, brothers, also ginned near Crouse. In January 1911 the brothers posted notice that they would not gin cotton after February 3, closing the season. In November 1921 they limited ginning to Fridays and Saturdays only. Their notices confirm that more than one gin served the surrounding farms in those years.

E. C. Sullivan continued in the business. In October 1918 he announced that his new gin was in operation and that he was ready to gin cotton and pay the highest market price for both cotton and seed. He reminded readers that he had handled more local cotton over the past ten years than any man in the county and that he exchanged meal for seed. In September 1920 the first bale of the new crop in the section was ginned by Mr. E. C. Sullivan; the cotton belonged to Charles Reep.

By the mid-1940s J. D. “Wayne” McLurd was ginning at Crouse. On September 17, 1945, the Lincoln County News reported that the first bale of the 1945 crop to be ginned in the county was grown by George Shull of Route Four. It weighed 502 pounds, was of the Coker variety, was ginned by J. D. McLurd at Crouse on September 13, and sold to Lineberger Brothers for 25 cents a pound. Later that October a Crouse news item noted that Mr. J. D. McLurd was doing business at his cotton gin.

A local story attached to the years when Wayne McLurd ran the Crouse gin concerns the first bale of the season. Clegg Heafner was said to have arrived at 3 a.m. and beaten Hubert Carpenter, who had been expected to bring the first load. McLurd ginned both free because of the mix-up. Such races for the first bale were part of the seasonal rhythm of ginning.

Ginning was not without danger. On September 11, 1944, the Lincoln Times-News reported that seven-year-old Odus Richard Tutherow, Jr., son of Mr. and Mrs. Odus R. Tutherow, was fatally injured at the Fairview cotton gin when a side of the press, weighing around 300 pounds, came loose and fell on him. He was watching the operation of the gin, which was owned by his father. Fairview Gin was located on Route 1, Crouse, about three miles north of the village on a county road. The accident is a stark reminder of the heavy machinery involved once cotton left the wagon and entered the press.

The process itself, as described in the 1907 account of the Munger System at Carpenter & Sullivan, began with the arrival of loaded wagons. Suction pipes drew the cotton from the wagons into the gin, reducing the hand labor that earlier systems required. Inside, the machinery separated the lint from the seed. The lint was then pressed into bales. Seed could be sold or exchanged for meal. Capacity figures of twenty-six bales a day and seasonal totals of several hundred bales show that a single well-equipped gin could handle a large share of the local crop. Seasons typically ran from early fall into late winter; operators posted notices when they would stop for the year or limit days of operation.

These gins supported the local economy in direct ways. Farmers who grew cotton needed a place to process it before it could be sold or shipped. The railroad that stopped at Crouse made it practical to move the finished bales to larger markets. Newspaper accounts of market prices, of half the crop being held for better returns, and of the first bale of a new season being ginned and sold, show that ginning was the step that turned a field crop into cash. Local businessmen Carpenter and Sullivan, the Chapman brothers, and later Wayne McLurd, invested in the machinery and provided the service. In return they handled the volume of cotton that passed through the village each fall.

Lincoln County had a longer cotton-processing history. Early nineteenth-century industrial sites near Lincolnton included a cotton gin among other operations. Newspaper accounts have credited Jonas Whitley Mullen with establishing the first cotton gin in the county in an early twentieth-century context. Around Crouse itself, other gins appear in the record. In April 1913 M. Pless Stroup of Crouse R.F.D. 2 advertised a cotton gin outfit for sale that included a revolving press, steam tromper, boiler, engine, and related mills; this operation would have been located on present day Landers Chapel Road. The Fairview gin three miles north of the village was still operating in 1944. Together these places show that ginning was not confined to a single building in the center of Crouse.

The Crouse Gin, however, remained the one most closely tied to the village. Its location behind the stores and beside the tracks, the wagons that lined up each fall, the hundreds of bales recorded in the newspapers, and the stories of first bales and free ginning all point to its place at the center of local cotton handling. The building that still stands is the last physical reminder of that seasonal industry. When the wagons stopped coming and the suction pipes and presses fell silent, the economic rhythm they had sustained for half a century came to an end, but the record of those years remains in the newspaper columns and in the memories of the people who watched the cotton move from the fields on wagons and delivered to the gins.

Sources

·       Newspaper notices from the Lincoln Times-News and Lincoln County News, 1907–1945, transcribed for the Crouse Community History & Photo Project.       

·       Newspaper notices from the Lincoln Times-News and Lincoln County News, 1907–1945, transcribed for the Crouse Community History & Photo Project.

·       Local recollections and undocumented notes preserved by the Crouse Community History & Photo Project, including the Milton Baker photograph collection, stories concerning the McLurd years, and Kathryn Sappenfield transcribed memories.

·       Prior series installment Did You Know? #23 on Crouse businesses.