Daniel Pratt's Company Town: The Gin That Built the Black Belt

In the eighteen thirties, a New Hampshire carpenter named Daniel Pratt arrived in Alabama and saw an industrial opportunity hiding inside a slave economy. Cotton was everywhere. But every bale that left the field had to pass through a gin first, and the gins were imported, expensive, and slow. Pratt set up a shop on Autauga Creek and began building his own.

Within a decade, his factory was the largest cotton gin manufacturer in the world, supplying machines to every corner of the Black Belt and shipping as far as Russia. By eighteen sixty he was producing fifteen hundred gins a year. He used the profits to build something almost unique in the antebellum South: a planned industrial town. He named it Prattville, and it was modeled not on a plantation but on the mill villages of his New England childhood , with worker housing, a church, a school, a flour mill, a carriage shop, a woolen mill.

But the contradiction at the center of Pratt's enterprise was inescapable. In eighteen thirty-seven, he used four enslaved mechanics as collateral for a two thousand dollar bank loan. He purchased skilled enslaved workers specifically to do the precision metalwork that white laborers refused. By eighteen sixty he personally owned one hundred and seven enslaved people. The cotton gins he manufactured fed a plantation system that consumed the lives of hundreds of thousands across the South.

The historic district that bears his name today covers a hundred and forty acres and a hundred and fifty-four buildings , the oldest continuously operated industrial complex in Alabama until the gin-manufacturing operations were eventually outsourced overseas in the two thousands. The red brick factory buildings still stand along Autauga Creek, their thick walls silent about the coerced hands that built them.

Pratt's story is Alabama's story in miniature: industrial ambition and antebellum contradictions pressed together so tightly they became inseparable. The company town he imagined as a model of Protestant thrift rested, like everything else in this corner of the South, on foundations that could not survive the Civil War.