Pratt Mfg. Co. Cotton Gin, Alabama; ca. 1876
date: label: Date made
content: 1873-1899
name: label: manufacturer, textile machiner
content: Pratt Gin Company
label: distributor/retailer
content: Pratt, Daniel
label: maker
content: Pratt Gin Company
notes: label: Description
content: Cotton gin; wood grain painting with scene depicting the gin company's factory and the town of Prattville, AL; Daniel Pratt Gin Company, 1873-1899.
label: Description
content: Wood frame with iron gears, leather pulleys. Paint remains; Cover for ginning mechanism of painted wood with scene of Prattville Alabama. This lid lifts up to expose 50 circular gin saw blades..
label: Description
content: Daniel Pratt (1799-1873) moved to Georgia from New Hampshire in 1819. An architect/builder by training, he first built homes in Savannah and Milledgeville, then in about 1827 became a partner with Samuel Griswold, another New England transplant, in a cotton gin manufactory. Pratt interested Griswold in expanding the business to Alabama to take advantage of the expanding slave cotton territories, but Griswold pulled out and Pratt moved to Alabama on his own. The Daniel Pratt Gin Company was founded in 1833 and he began manufacturing in 1836. In 1838 he formally founded the town of Prattville, Alabama. His model town included homes for the workers, churches, and Alabama’s first free school (for white children only). By the 1850s Pratt gins were sold across the US and even in world markets. Prattville also boasted a cotton mill and a woolen mill. Pratt was a pro-slavery, pro-Tariff, anti-secession Whig until Alabama seceded from the Union, at which point he went with the state and his business interests. The Prattville mills supplied the Confederate army with cloth. After the war, Daniel Pratt kept his town going with his own money until his business picked up by 1870. His nephew ran the company after Daniel’s death. It was bought by Continental Gin Co. in 1899. Continental manufactured gins in Prattville until 2009, then moved production to India.
label: Description
content: Daniel Pratt has been called the South’s first industrialist. This is one of four known Pratt gins remaining. This one object allows us to tell stories of antebellum North-South migration; the antebellum tensions between the South’s planter elites and the new industrialists; slave versus free labor in antebellum southern factories; the importance of cotton beyond the cotton fields in the US and southern economies; the post Civil War expansion of southern industry beyond the borders of the US. It has tentacles that reach into economic, political, military, industrial, and social history. It belongs with the Eli Whitney cotton gin as a national treasure.
label: Description
content: ATHM Collection - # 1986.48.1; Gift of Edward Larter, Jr.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: distributor/retailer
content: United States: Alabama, Prattville
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Textiles
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: American Textile History Museum Collection
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2017.0232.20
label: catalog number
content: 2017.0232.20
label: accession number
content: 2017.0232
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Gin
label: Object Name
content: cotton gin
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: iron (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: wood (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: leather (overall material)