Sag-Ashus – Cotton Gins and More
In past visits with our readers we have parleyed at length about the giant strides that have occurred in the field of agriculture over the past century. In Ole Sag’s youth it was not uncommon for a family to be able to scratch out a living on a 160-acre or smaller farm by frugal living and raising and preserving the majority of their own food. In today’s world such small family-oriented operations are almost non-existent, having been rendered financially unfeasible by the ever-increasing costs of high-tech equipment and rising labor costs. Along with the evolution of small farms into much larger operations brought about by these and many other factors, which we have watched with a tinge of sorrow, the radical change in picking and ginning cotton has been almost unbelievable.
In Ole Sag’s cotton-farming days cotton was picked by hand and hauled in trailers or an old ’34 Chevy truck to the gin, where we usually waited for several hours to be ginned off and then returned 12 miles on a bad road to haul another load to the gin.
Would you believe that we can recall as many as nine cotton gins that were in operation in the Rio Grande Valley below El Paso? The farthest downriver was a three-stand Murray gin owned and operated by Dave Gill, a prominent early farmer and close friend of Sag’s family. As we related in an earlier story, he was the black man who negotiated a treaty with the Mexican government to build a dam in the river.
The next gin up the river was located at Esperanza. It was a four-stand Continental gin and was operated as a co-op, with most of the shares of stock being owned by local farmers including your respectful pencil pusher.
One of the earliest gins in the Valley was the one that was built beside the railroad track at McNary. The building was constructed of solid concrete, and the cotton bales rolled out of the press directly onto the loading dock, making it easy to load them in freight cars for shipment. That concrete building now houses a reverse-osmosis water-treatment plant.
Next up the Valley was the gin at Fort Hancock owned by Glenn and Nancy Camp, and we are sorry to say that we cannot give you very many details about it except that it was eventually closed.
Just up the road at Acala there was another gin owned by Haskel Van Horn Cook II. By the way, he was the feisty individual who whipped up on the railroad man at the McNary Bridge, which we described in “The Battle at Diablo Arroyo.”
Now we come to the gin at Tornillo, which was just across old Highway 80 from the Tornillo cotton oil mill, where all the gins took their cottonseed to be processed into cottonseed oil and a product that we called cottonseed cake. They made cube cake, flake cake and cottonseed meal, and all three were used for livestock feed. One of our favorite memories is of smelling the delicious aroma coming out of the seed mill as we drove through Tornillo.
The next gin was in Fabens, and this was where the cotton bales from all the gins were sent to the compress. At this facility the bales were compressed to half their original size to facilitate shipping twice the amount of product in a given space. It was here, in this huge warehouse, that an annual ball was held to celebrate the end of the cotton harvest. This was a big event, and we all dressed up in our finest to enjoy an evening of revelry, dancing to the dulcet tones of Lew Barton and his orchestra – great memories.
Clint was the site of the next gin, and the last one that we recall was in Ysleta, but we never had any personal dealings with either of these. All of these facilities ran full tilt in the harvest season to remove the seed and whatever other foreign material might be encountered in the total cotton crop raised in the Valley. Now, friends, all of that same crop is processed in a huge mega-gin located at Tornillo. We have never had the opportunity to tour that complex, but it must be one hell of an operation.
Until next week here’s one to chew on: “When looking for faults, use a mirror, not a telescope.”
SAG
