Agenda 10-17-23; 5-a - Joint Public Hearing with the Historic Preservation Commission Regarding the Proposed Designation of the Davis Cotton Gin and Press as an Orange County Historic Landmark

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8 ORANGE COUNTY LOCAL LANDMARK APPLICATION DAVIS FARM COTTON GIN AND PRESS kitchen. East of the log section and separated from it by an open passage is a ca. 1945 frame section.. The two are encompassed by a gable roof. Multiple open sheds were added over time to all sides of the barn. South of this barn stands the second barn, a frame structure dating from ca. 1950 that was used as a general storage building. It has a gable roof, double-leaf batten doors, and multiple closed and open sheds on all sides. Southwest of the frame barn and immediately northwest of the cotton gin and press building is a small frame granary with flush-boarded exterior walls (partially removed from the front, east), a single batten door on the north end, and a shed roof sloping downward from east to west. A flush-boarded partition wall divides the interior into two sections of unequal size, and an upper level contains multiple storage bins. Cotton Gin and Press In a wooded area at the southwest corner of the complex of farm buildings and directly west of the driveway is the most significant individual farm building on the property—the barn that houses the cotton gin and press and once also housed a small corn mill (Photos 1-6). The barn is a long, two-part, rectangular structure running east-west with large open sheds added in the twentieth century along both the north and south sides. The entire building treasures approximately fifteen feet wide and forty feet long with the open sheds on north and south sides measuring approximately fifteen feet wide. The extended-gable shed at the east end measures approximately eleven feet deep. The east section of the overall building (Photos 1-2 and 6) is built of V-notched logs and may date from around the same time as the house (1860s), although its log roof rafters are not mortise-and-tenoned as they are at the house, but instead exhibit a later method of joining by being attached to a roof ridge board. The bottoms of the rafters are shaped to fit snugly over the top logs of the north and south walls (Photo 6). The original use of the log building is not known. The frame west addition (Photos 4 and 5) has board-and-batten siding and likely was built in the 1880s specifically for the cotton gin and press. A five-V metal gable roof encompasses the two sections of the barn. The log barn rests on a fieldstone foundation. After it was built, an upper floor level supported by circular-sawn joists was inserted to accommodate the barn's new role as part of the cotton ginning process. This probably took place in the 1980s when the frame section was added to the west end. The added upper floor left a short main floor. The south side of the log barn has a large opening (Photo 3). A small opening on the east end allowed the machinery belt to pass through, and another small opening near the bottom of the east wall served the same purpose. A doorway on the west end wall of the log section (Photo 11) provides access to the main level of the frame section of the barn. When the log building became part of the cotton gin, a large open doorway was cut into the east end running from about halfway up the log wall into the weatherboarded gable end (Photo 2). This opening replaced an earlier, smaller window in the gable. A long gable roof supported by log corner posts extends eastward from the log barn (Photos 1-3). According to family tradition, wagons drove under the covered shed created by the extended gable roof to unload cotton into the large upper doorway. Sometimes there would be six to eight wagons lined up in the yard around the gin. Supported by the added floor, bins in the upper part of the log barn (Photo 15) stored cotton for farmers until they had enough cotton to gin and bale. 5