West Tennessee Cotton
The West Tennessee Cotton Museum traces the roots of cotton in West Tennessee, showing the impact cotton has had on the lives of the people in this region.
Featured in the Cotton Museum are old plows, fertilizers and planters pulled by mules and horses during the early days of cotton; an old roller gin; and cotton baskets, sacks and scales from when cotton was picked by hand.
1960s Cotton Gin
Using powerful pipes to suck the cotton into the gin building, the cotton moves through dryers and cleaning machines. These machines remove debris such as leaves, limb particles, insects and dirt from the cotton fibers. Then it goes to the gin stand where circular saws with small, sharp teeth pluck the cotton fiber from the seeds. The ginned fiber, now called lint, travels to huge presses where it is made into dense blocks, wrapped in burlap and contained in steel bands to create what we recognize as a cotton bale.
When a bale of cotton arrives from the field it weighs approximately 1500 lbs. After the ginning process it will weigh about 500 lbs.
This exhibit also features a cotton field and a number of tractors and machinery used during the farming process.
The exhibit was built from scratch by Darryl Cox of Henderson TN. It is a 1/16th scale model of an actual gin.
White Oak Basket Collection
These baskets are a part of the Newman Walpole collection and are made from white oak trees. Around the farm, baskets like these carried corn, eggs, purchases from the market, food for picnics, or anything else that needed to be moved. To get the strips, called “splits,” to weave into a basket, the basket maker has to cut a straight section of trunk without branches. The basket maker splits it into 8ths and then carefully splits off long pieces lengthwise, along the grain. They keep splitting them until they’re as thin enough to be woven into a basket.
West Tennessee is a part of the Delta region of the Mississippi River. Because of the alluvial soil left from the river’s deposits of sand, silt and clay over time, the soil and hot summers make the area perfect for cotton growing, along with other row crops such as corn and soybeans. Agriculture remains the regions #1 industry.