Gober family’s cotton gins were a local engineering feat, saw the highs, lows and end of the industry
RED BAY | For much of the 20th Century, cotton was king, the biggest agricultural crop in the South. Growing it was one thing; getting it from the fields to the factories was another.
And, for much of the 20th Century, the Gober family played a major role in ginning cotton in the Red Bay region. Four different Gober cotton gins operated in Red Bay over the years, beginning around the turn of the 20th century and continuing until the last of them shut down in the mid-1970s.
Felton Gober remembers that final gin particularly well. He watched it being built as a boy, later went to work there himself and remembers an era when cotton truly was king in the region.
But the family’s involvement began decades before he was born.
“The first Gober Gin was located in Red Bay, in Gober Hollow,” Gober said.
It stood across the road from the old Gober home place and was owned by Leonidas Felton Gober – grandfather of the Felton Gober interviewed here – a prominent figure in early Red Bay history. Leonidas was Red Bay’s first mayor, was instrumental in founding the Bank of Red Bay (today Community Spirit Bank), and was also a schoolteacher.
Felton Gober recalled Leonidas being exceptionally quick with numbers. Gober told a story of a salesman once attempting to sell Leonidas an adding machine. Leonidas agreed to consider buying it if the machine could beat him at addition. It couldn’t.
“Most people, when they add numbers together, they add one column at a time,” Gober said. “Leonidas added two columns at a time.”
Leonidas won the contest and declined to buy the machine.
His cotton gin in Gober Hollow burned in 1903, bringing the first chapter of the family’s ginning history to an end.
The second Gober gin was built and run by Leonidas Gober at what is now the site of Sunshine Mills.
“This gin was powered by a steam engine,” Gober said. “Wood had to be cut in the summer in order to heat the water to make the steam so in the fall the gin could run.”
The third Gober gin was located across main street from the Bay Tree Park on what is now a vacant lot, directly in front of the fourth and final Gober gin that still stands today.
Felton remembers seeing the third gin, although he was too young to remember much about its operation.
“It reminds me of a sawmill,” he said. “It was very primitive compared to modern gins of this day and time.”
A new gin for a new era
The fourth Gober gin, the building that still stands behind Red Bay City Hall, represented a major leap forward.
Owned by E. Gober, whose full name was Eric Jerome Gober, the gin was erected in 1949 at a cost of approximately $90,000 (approximately $1.262 million in 2026 dollars), a substantial investment at the time. The money was borrowed from the Bank of Red Bay. Felton Gober was about six years old when construction began.
“I can remember going down and looking, climbing up on the piles of dirt and looking at the footings that were being poured for the foundation of that old gin,” he said.
The story of how it was built became almost as noteworthy as the gin itself.
The machinery came from Continental Gin Company in Prattville, Ala., which wanted to send an engineer to Red Bay to oversee installation. The Gobers declined.
Felton’s father, James Felton “Jim” Gober, Sr., was prepared to install the machinery himself.
Former mayor David Tiffin said the story illustrates the mechanical knowledge possessed by E. and Jim Gober despite neither carrying the formal title of engineer.
According to Tiffin, when company representatives questioned whether the Gobers could properly pour the concrete foundation and precisely position the numerous bolts needed to anchor the machinery, the answer was simple. Did they have the blueprints? If so, that was all the Gobers needed.
Continental initially refused to sell them the equipment under those conditions, Tiffin said, but returned a few days later and agreed to the deal. The Gobers poured the slab, positioned the bolts and prepared the foundation themselves. When installation began, one bolt appeared to be incorrectly positioned.
“So, when they started putting the gin up there was one bolt that was not right,” Tiffin said. “And so the Gobers got told about it and they said, ‘Where’s the blueprint?’ So, they went and got the blueprint. And come to find out the blueprint was wrong!”
Jim Gober went on to operate the machinery for his brother E. for many years.
The gin was a Continental four-stand model with approximately 80 to 88 saws, Felton recalled. Much of its machinery was driven by a single 150-horsepower General Electric motor connected through a line shaft running from one stand to the next. For its time, it was an impressive operation. It could gin approximately six or seven bales of cotton per hour.
“That’s pretty slow compared to modern gins, but in that day, most of the cotton was hand-picked and they didn’t have as much need for cleaning equipment, and it didn’t have to have as much pre-cleaning in order to prepare the cotton to be ginned,” Felton Gober said.
Growing up in the gin
Eventually, Felton and his brother went to work there, too. Felton estimates he was about 11 when he started. His pay was 75 cents an hour.
“I remember we had 10 hours to make $7.50,” he said. “It was hard work.”
His assignment included tending the lint cleaners. Cotton could build up on the bars and had to be cleared while the machinery was operating. There was no reaching in with a hand to remove it.
“I had to use a stick because you couldn’t put your hand in there,” he said. “You’d lose it.”
During the busiest periods, the gin occasionally operated around the clock. Felton remembers his Uncle Jack – real name Carnie Verle Gober – taking over at night while his father went home to rest.
“We would gin all night, and they would shut down, grease up, and crank back up and go again all day long,” he said.
Ginning season generally stretched from October into December, although the work of keeping the gin operating began months earlier. Bearings and worn components were replaced during the summer, and repairs were made before the first cotton arrived.
The machinery occasionally broke down, Felton said, but the gin was maintained well enough that serious interruptions were uncommon.
The agricultural calendar dictated life beyond the gin, too. Felton remembers a time when school would dismiss for roughly two weeks around late summer or early fall as families dealt with the demands of the harvest. Felton did some cotton picking himself.
“I picked a little but I never was any good at it,” Gober said. “There were people who could pick 100 or 200 pounds a day. I think the most I ever picked was about 60 pounds.”
And despite the image of cotton tearing at a picker’s hands, Felton remembers another part of the body suffering more.
“It’s rougher on your back,” he said. “You were bent over picking that cotton.”
When cotton was king
Once processed, a bale weighed about 500 pounds and was moved from the gin to a warehouse. Felton remembers most of Red Bay’s cotton warehouses being owned by the Bullen family.
At times there was more cotton than the warehouses could hold.
Felton remembers cotton prices falling to around five cents per pound. Instead of selling at such low prices, farmers would “pool” their cotton into a government program. Warehouses filled, and bales were eventually stacked outside on the vacant property where the third Gober gin had once stood.
Yet farmers continued planting cotton. There was not simply another crop they could easily fall back on when prices declined.
“That was their livelihood, and they didn’t know anything else,” Felton said. “There was no such thing as switching over to soybeans or something like that.”
Farmers traveled considerable distances to Red Bay to have their cotton processed, some arriving behind teams of mules pulling wagons.
“Cotton was king back in that day,” Felton said. “Cotton was quite a bit less than 30 cents a pound. The farmers thought 30 cents a pound was a big price for their cotton.”
Branching out
The Gober family’s businesses also extended beyond cotton. An ice plant operated next door to the gin, producing ice in massive 300-pound blocks. Before household refrigeration became common, the blocks were cut into smaller pieces and hauled into the countryside. Families would sometimes wrap ice in quilts to slow its melting and used it to preserve perishable food.
A funny story came to Gober’s mind while recounting his time working at the ice factory.
“One day I was there at the ice plant with my brother, Roy Lee, and a fellow drove up,” Gober said. “I said, ‘What will you have?’ And he said, ‘A Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.’ I said, ‘I can’t help you with that, sir.’”
As electric refrigeration became widespread and household demand declined, commercial poultry processors became major users of ice, Felton recalled. Eventually, he believes one of those operations purchased the old ice plant equipment.
The end of an era
Jim Gober continued operating the family’s fourth gin for years. Later, Billy Moore, husband of Katrine Gober Moore, one of E.’s two daughters, took over its operation. Felton believes it ran for the final time sometime in the mid-1970s.
Now, more than a century after the Gober family entered the cotton-ginning business in Red Bay, that final building remains as a physical reminder of an era when agriculture and not industry was the dominant driver of the region’s economy.
The old cotton gin, which is not open to the public and should not be entered without permission, is in remarkably good condition considering it has sat dormant now for more than five decades. Cut out sections in the foundation for gin plumbing reveal concrete two-feet deep. Pouring that much concrete in 1949 was no small feat, either.
And lest there be any question what this old factory is, there is still, to this day, remnants of cotton caught up and hung in the teeth of the saw blades in the gin stands.
In an interview in the 1980s with Carl Elliott, Sr., for the book, “One Hundred Years of Memories: An Oral History of Red Bay, Alabama (1988-1998),” E. Gober’s wife, Pauline, recalled the family’s time of running that final gin.
“E. was a good manager with that gin,” Pauline Gober said. “When he first bought it, a certain man here in Red Bay said that the gin and ice plant would sell under the auctioneer’s hammer someday. Well, you know, things were hard with us. This area was going out of the cotton business. There were fewer and fewer bales of cotton to gin. Likewise, there was less and less demand for ice for refrigeration. But we worked hard, all of us – E., myself, and our daughters as well. We finally paid off the mortgage on the gin and the old ice plant. It didn’t sell under the auctioneer’s hammer, but we all walked a tight rope.”
One can’t help but wonder if E. Gober and Jim Gober had any idea the building and gin they built nearly 80 years ago would still be standing today as a vestige to what used to be the underpinnings of the South’s economy, and as a testament to the Gober family’s importance in helping shape Red Bay decades ago.
Publisher’s note: Limited copies of “One Hundred Years of Memories” are still available for purchase at the Red Bay Museum.
