Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 56, No. 5, Ed. 1 Friday, December 16, 2011 Page: 4 of 12
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PAGE 4 HUDSPETH COUNTY HERALD - DELL VALLEY REVIEW DECEMBER 16, 2011
CROW FLAT
Dorolky Lewis
December 12, 2011 - It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. The winter weather
has folks in the holiday spirit. Many are decorating, baking and getting ready to have
family home for Christmas. The morning temperatures have been in the teens and low
20s. Ranchers have had to chop ice in some places. The daytime temperatures are stay-
ing cool, making the cowboys have to bundle up when going out to work.
Saturday, Nora Lewis and Janet Myers went to Dell City to help move Pat
Lewis’s mobile home from north of Dell City into town. Many Dell City friends and
family came together to move and set up Pat’s home. Kearney Lewis and his son Wil-
son came from Artesia and Gary and Kay Scarbrough came from Sierra Blanca to help
with the move and then came to Crow Flat to spend the night with Nora Lea and Janet.
While in Dell City, the movers and workers took a lunch break at the Spanish Angels
Cafe. This was a good time for visiting.
Saturday, Bobby and Shyra Tate went to Roswell to do some Christmas shop-
ping while their children, Eli and Kinsey, stayed with their grandparents, Quentin and
Dana Dean, on Crow Flat. That evening they all met in Carlsbad and took a “Christ-
mas on the Pecos” boat ride. Shyra says that the Christmas lights were beautiful and
that they had a very nice, but cold, experience.
James Evrage is home on Crow Flat recovering from major back surgery.
November 29th he was admitted to El Paso Specialty Hospital for the surgery. He was
in the hospital for several days before being sent to Las Cruces where he spent several
days in rehab. He is now home and doing well. Let us keep James in our thoughts and
prayers.
Thursday, I went to Las Cruces to see my parents, Russell and Edith Gray. I
spent the night and came home to Crow Flat Friday. Saturday, my good friend, Della
Tavarez, came from Dell City and spent the afternoon at my house. We had a good
visit.
Bobby and Pat Jones hope to get their cattle work finished this week. They
plan to ship some old cows and bulls Tuesday. Bobby and Pat are looking forward to
having their grandchildren here for Christmas and are getting things ready.
The right tools, quality materials, and expert advice make it
easy for you to save money on all your home improvement
projects.
915-964-2881
J
PERRY HARDWARE & SUPPLIES
Hardware • Pump Service
P.O. Box 66 110 hl. Main
Dell City, Texas 79837
Cotton Gins and More
Filosofy and Phoolishness
by Sag-Ashus
In past visits with our readers we have parleyed at length about the giant
strides that have occurred in the field of agriculture over the past century. In Ole
Sag’s youth it was not uncommon for a family to be able to scratch out a living on a
160-acre or smaller farm by frugal living and raising and preserving the majority of
their own food. In today’s world such small family-oriented operations are almost
non-existent, having been rendered financially unfeasible by the ever-increasing
costs of high-tech equipment and rising labor costs. Along with the evolution of
small farms into much larger operations brought about by these and many other
factors, which we have watched with a tinge of sorrow, the radical change in picking
and ginning cotton has been almost unbelievable.
In Ole Sag’s cotton-farming days cotton was picked by hand and hauled
in trailers or an old ’34 Chevy truck to the gin, where we usually waited for several
hours to be ginned off and then returned 12 miles on a bad road to haul another load
to the gin.
Would you believe that we can recall as many as nine cotton gins that were
in operation in the Rio Grande Valley below El Paso? The farthest downriver was a
three-stand Murray gin owned and operated by Dave Gill, a prominent early farmer
and close friend of Sag’s family. As we related in an earlier story, he was the black
man who negotiated a treaty with the Mexican government to build a dam in the
river.
The next gin up the river was located at Esperanza. It was a four-stand
Continental gin and was operated as a co-op, with most of the shares of stock being
owned by local farmers including your respectful pencil pusher.
One of the earliest gins in the Valley was the one that was built beside the
railroad track at McNary. The building was constructed of solid concrete, and the
cotton bales rolled out of the press directly onto the loading dock, making it easy to
load them in freight cars for shipment. That concrete building now houses a reverse-
osmosis water-treatment plant.
Next up the Valley was the gin at Fort Hancock owned by Glenn and Nancy
Camp, and we are sorry to say that we cannot give you very many details about it
except that it was eventually closed.
Just up the road at Acala there was another gin owned by Haskel Van Hom
Cook II. By the way, he was the feisty individual who whipped up on the railroad
man at the McNary Bridge, which we described in “The Battle at Diablo Arroyo.”
Now we come to the gin at Tornillo, which was just across old Highway 80
from the Tornillo cotton oil mill, where all the gins took their cottonseed to be pro-
cessed into cottonseed oil and a product that we called cottonseed cake. They made
cube cake, flake cake and cottonseed meal, and all three were used for livestock
feed. One of our favorite memories is of smelling the delicious aroma coming out of
the seed mill as we drove through Tornillo.
The next gin was in Fabens, and this was where the cotton bales from all
the gins were sent to the compress. At this facility the bales were compressed to half
their original size to facilitate shipping twice the amount of product in a given space.
It was here, in this huge warehouse, that an annual ball was held to celebrate the
end of the cotton harvest. This was a big event, and we all dressed up in our finest
to enjoy an evening of revelry, dancing to the dulcet tones of Lew Barton and his
orchestra - great memories.
Clint was the site of the next gin, and the last one that we recall was in
Ysleta, but we never had any personal dealings with either of these. All of these
facilities ran full tilt in the harvest season to remove the seed and whatever other for
eign material might be encountered in the total cotton crop raised in the Valley. Now,
friends, all of that same crop is processed in a huge mega-gin located at Tornillo- e
have never had the opportunity to tour that complex, but it must be one hell of an
operation.
Until next week here’s one to chew on: “When looking for faults, use a
mirror, not a telescope. ”
P Sag
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Stuart, Andrew. Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 56, No. 5, Ed. 1 Friday, December 16, 2011, newspaper, December 16, 2011; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1200269/m1/4/: accessed July 10, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .