06/14/2023
History of Dallas and the Cotton Bowl at Fair Park
The Cotton Bowl is such a strange name for a venue in Dallas that most people who live here do not know why it is called that, other than it obviously has something to do with cotton. The name of this battlefield for rivalry bragging rights, originally between The University of Texas and Oklahoma University, is a nod to the history and economic boom that literally funded the bulk of the Dallas area. The Cotton Bowl brings one of the biggest weekend incomes to The State Fair of Texas every year. In past years it added a second rivalry on a fair weekend. In 2023, fair-goers should expect a rivalry game on every weekend as a third rivalry has been accepted and scheduled.
Cotton, however, is the main reason for the survival of Dallas from the early 1800’s through the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Historically, cotton was picked by hand into the 30s and delivered to “gins”, an 18th century invention that separated the seed from the “cotton lint” used to make the fabric we know today. After this invention, cotton production increased all over the South, especially in Texas.
Dallas County, in the 1930s, had 78 cotton gins or places where the picked cotton could be de-seeded and purified. Six of these were within the city limits of Dallas. Ellis county had 282 gins, Collin county 214, and Kaufman county had 170. Counties to the east of Dallas in the Blackland Prairie region gained notoriety for having optimal conditions to grow cotton, putting Dallas on the map for the cotton market.
“Anytime you wanted to enter the marketplace, it was typically cotton that you sold, cotton that was bought, cotton that went out in ports, cotton that kept the bank system going,” said University of Texas professor and Texas historian Walter Buenger.
“For that 125 years or so, you can almost follow the ups and downs of the overall Texas economy by following the price of cotton on the world market … just as with petroleum in the 1990s,” he said.
When the railroads were established in Dallas in the 1870s, the cotton market boomed around the 1870s. This transportation mad it easier to move the heavy bales to the manufacturing centers like Chicago and New York City.
Cotton naturally became a part of the city’s culture, with Dallas marketing through fairs and Cotton Parades that showcased the reason for the city’s growth. For nearly 125 years, until the 1990’s, Dallas led the nation in cotton gin manufacturing.
Munger Avenue is a tribute to the success Dallas found in cotton gins. Robert S. Munger developed a new way of processing cotton called “system ginning” or air delivery ginning. He moved to Dallas in 1887 to start manufacturing gin equipment and formed what eventually became the Continental Gin Co., the largest cotton gin manufacturer in the country.
Plantation-era gins would take a full day to process a 300-pound cotton bale, but an air-delivery gin could process a 500-pound bale in 12 minutes. Older gins had to be manually fed the raw cotton product, where the Munger devices were more automatic feed. This drastically reduced the time to ‘gin’ bales, allowing for quick production to be put on the rails to deliver to the textile industries like Chicago and New York.
The Continental Gin Co. stopped manufacturing gins in the 1960s. Today, it still stands as a historic site in Deep Ellum. The building was repurposed as loft space for artists in the 1980s, and this year it has undergone renovations for office space.
During the Great Depression, the price of cotton dropped, causing many cotton farmers to turn their attention to other crops and industries.
A 1939 article in The Dallas Morning News referenced “drastically reduced” cotton production in the Blackland Prairie region. Many farmers attributed the drop to soil erosion, saying the soil was no longer conducive to raising the product.
Cotton farming became more concentrated in West Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. With large, open spaces and freedom from dangerous pests like boll weevils, the region was an optimal area to grow cotton, said Aaron Nelsen, communication and special project manager for the Texas Cotton Ginners’ Association. In time, West Texas produced much higher cotton yields than North Texas ever did.
“The plots of land are normally smaller in Central Texas and D-FW and not conducive to larger equipment,” Nelsen said.
Today, only one active gin remains near Dallas: PPF Gin and Warehouse in Cooper. But Texas continues to be one of the nation’s largest cotton producers. The largest and newest gins can produce about 70 to 80 480-pound bales an hour.
