An old, wooden building crisscrossed with vines and weeds stands alongside the orderly rows of this season's cotton crop on Pleasantview Plantation near Money.
The turn-of-the-century cotton gin was last run in 1955, but it may see new life as a historical exhibit if a small, southeast Louisiana town gets its wish.
Cleveland Carmouche, the mayor of Cottonport, La., has been talking with Johnny Kearney for almost five years about the possibility of relocating the gin to Cottonport. The gin sits on farm owned by Kearney and his three sisters.
Carmouche visited Pleasantview Wednesday along with another Cottonport representative, an area historian and two directors from the Louisiana State Museum.
"My goal is to preserve this great gin," Carmouche said. "I would hate to see it turn into nothing and collapse. Probably the most unique thing about it is the cypress presses and turntables that you just don't see anymore."
Cottonport, a town of 2200 that lies 85 miles northeast of Baton Rouge, has its roots as a cotton community, but area farmers diversified into other crops during the 1900s until very little cotton was grown in the area.
"We still have some cotton, but now cane, beans and rice are also important," Carl Defour, a Cottonport resident said. "In recent years, though, cotton has made a comeback."
Defour said he hoped the city would be able to move and restore the gin because it represents an important part of the town's cotton heritage. He also hopes the gin will eventually be part of a cotton exhibit in the town that will draw tourists to the area.
The primary obstacle to moving the gin has been financing and securing a place to set up the equipment, Mayor Carmouche said.
"My family is ready to donate the gin to the city of Cottonport as soon as they are ready to have it moved," Kearney said. "All they have to do is come and pick it up."
The residents of Cottonport have enlisted Tony Dollar, who owns a cotton gin sales and service company in Pickens, to consult with them about the cost of moving the gin.
Dollar said the cost of dismantling and moving of the gin would be around $45,000 before any restoration costs.
"I don't deal with old gins as a rule, but this project interested me." Dollar said.
Dollar said the Kearney gin is unique because it still has many of the original wooden parts intact.
"This is the first wooden hydro-pumping unit I have ever seen," Dollar said. "I grew up in the gin business, and I've never seen anything like that."
Kearney's grandfather, E. N. Kearney built the gin at Pleasantview around 1900. The plantation itself dates back to 1884.
The gin was originally powered by a steam engine, but in 1920, E. N. Kearney added a second stand and a two-cylinder, Fairbanks-Morse diesel engine to power the new equipment.
The diesel engine, which still rests in the gin, sits on a 15-foot-thick concrete slab. The massive engine took eight months to install when it was delivered to Money in the early 1900s.
Dollar said he expects the huge engine to be the hardest part of disassembling and transporting the cotton gin.
With two, 80-sawtooth stands, Kearney said the gin could produce about 30 bales of cotton per day when his parents ran the farm.
Kearney's parents were Beryl and John Kearney, Sr.
Kearney's father, made the decision to close the gin in 1955 when the mechanical cotton-picker began to gain popularity over hand picking.
To keep the gin operational, the Kearney family would have had to install heated dryers in order to process the mechanically-picked cotton. Kearney's father chose not to upgrade the gin and closed it instead.
Although, Kearney was only 14 when the gin at Pleasantview closed, he still remembers working with tenant farmers and his family at the gin.
"Growing up on Pleasantview Plantation was the life back then," Kearney said, recalling his boyhood days around the gin. "Ginning season was in the fall, at school time, but every afternoon after school, I would go down to the gin until Momma called us in to supper."
