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13
<br /> ORANGE COUNTY LOCAL LANDMARK APPLICATION DAVIS FARM COTTON GIN AND PRESS
<br /> enough not to have been recorded in the industrial schedule of the census. Or perhaps the
<br /> Davises did not report the gin's production. Nevertheless, its surviving presence on the Davis
<br /> Farm as a gin that was obviously used, cannot be denied. There may have been many of these
<br /> small ginning operations in the county, especially in Chapel Hill and the surrounding townships
<br /> where the most cotton in the county was being grown, but none of the county-wide architectural
<br /> surveys conducted since 1990 identified the presence of any others.
<br /> The cotton gin at the Davis Farm was manufactured by the Daniel Pratt Gin Company, evident
<br /> from the several places on the machine that are stenciled or embossed with the company's name
<br /> and various patent dates from 1873 and 1877 (Photo 14). These dates, however, do not mean that
<br /> the machine was purchased by the Davises in the 1870s, only that the machine was patented in
<br /> those years.
<br /> Daniel Pratt was born in New Hampshire in 1799 and worked on his family's farm until he was
<br /> apprenticed to an architect at the age of sixteen. In 1819,he was released from him
<br /> apprenticeship and moved to Savannah. After transferring to Milledgeville, the cotton-growing
<br /> center of Georgia, he spent several years designing and building homes for wealthy planters.
<br /> While in Georgia, Pratt met another New England transplant, Samuel Griswold, who
<br /> manufactured cotton gins. After managing Griswold's factory for a year, Pratt became
<br /> Griswold's business partner. He later left that venture and moved to central Alabama with
<br /> enough materials to build fifty gins. He established the Daniel Pratt Gin Company around 1833
<br /> and began to manufacture gins around 1836. In 1838,he constructed a permanent factory and
<br /> founded the town of Prattville. During the 1850s, the Pratt Gin Company manufactured cotton
<br /> gins for planters all over the world, including Russia, Great Britain, France, Cuba, Mexico, and
<br /> several countries in Central and South America. By 1860, the Pratt Cotton Gin Company was
<br /> manufacturing at least 1,500 gins a year. Daniel Pratt died in 1873, and his estate went to his
<br /> daughter, Ellen, and his adopted son, Merrill, who bought out Ellen in 1881. Merrill Pratt's son,
<br /> Daniel, operated the gin manufacturing business from 1889 to 1899, when it was sold to
<br /> Continental Gin Company. That firm later became the Continental Eagle Corporation, which
<br /> continued to manufacture gins in Pratt's original factory buildings until at least 2009.14
<br /> One way to get a sense of the number of cotton gins in Orange County is through period business
<br /> directories, although they obviously—given the presence of the gin at the Davis Farm--did not
<br /> list all of them. In Levi Branson's business directories for North Carolina, no cotton gins were
<br /> listed in Orange County for the years 1869, 1890, and 1896. (Several were listed in 1869, but
<br /> they were in the area of Orange County that became Durham County in 1881.)15 However,two
<br /> cotton gins were listed for the county in the Industrial Schedule of the 1880 census. In 1907, The
<br /> North Carolina Year Book and Business Directory listed eight cotton gins in Orange County. By
<br /> 1915, the same directory listed fourteen cotton gins in the county, eight of which were in Chapel
<br /> Hill Township. In 1916 the number had grown slightly to fifteen gins, nine of which were in
<br /> '4 Herbert J.Lewis,"Daniel Pratt,"Encyclopedia ofAlabama.h!tp://Encylcopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1 184.
<br /> Accessed July 13,2021.
<br /> "Levi Branson,Branson's North Carolina Business Directory(Raleigh:Branson& Jones, 1869;Levi Branson,
<br /> Office Publisher, 1890 and 1896)
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