Port Lavaca, Calhoun County
After Texas was annexed into the United States in 1846, part of what was once De Leon’s Colony was organized as Calhoun County, giving the county access to valuable cropland and bays—the most important being modern-day Matagorda Bay. Indian point, later named Indianola, serviced the area as a port of entry for many of the German immigrants who came by ship in the mid-nineteenth century, until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1875. The area was not part of the plantation-based culture of the mid-1800s. Cotton was not a major crop until the late 1880s when the Michot brothers, Eugene and Jules, built a cotton gin three miles south of present-day Long Mott. Jules ran a gin as early as 1895 in Port Lavaca along present West Main Street. Calhoun County’s early gins utilized the continuous “system ginning” developed by Robert S. Munger. In this system, the cotton was vacuumed from a loaded wagon, cleaned, and pressed into 500-pound bales. This system would endure until post-WWII mechanization allowed farmers to greatly increase their cotton yield. The 1940s, 50s, and 60s saw a dramatic increase in cotton production. Calhoun County had reported five bales in 1860 and 10,500 in 1940. In the 1950s, the town’s two existing gins, The Farmers and The Boyd, were moved outside of the city. However, by the early 1970s, like most of the rural south, rising production costs coupled with decreasing cotton prices caused a drastic decline in Calhoun County’s cotton economy. The gins of Calhoun County served as a key piece of the county’s economic infrastructure. They also served as community centers for local farmers.