The Last Cotton Press: Tarboro's Living Relic

On the Tarboro Town Common, built of massive yellow pine timbers, stands a rare surviving cotton press. It is called the Norfleet Cotton Press, and it began its working life not as a cotton press at all.

Isaac Norfleet owned it on his plantation about two and a half miles southwest of Tarboro, where it began as a cider and wine press. For decades it squeezed juice from orchards, but the cotton fields were spreading. By around eighteen sixty, Norfleet's descendants had converted the press to compact raw cotton into heavy bales for shipment. The timing was no accident. Edgecombe County was a major cotton-producing county, and the Norfleet Press stood at the center of that wealth.

The press works on leverage and compression. Enslaved workers loaded cotton into a wooden box, then mules or oxen walked the long booms to turn a massive central screw that bore down on the cotton, crushing the fibers into a dense rectangle that could be wrapped in burlap and rolled onto a wagon. The mechanics are ancient, Roman-era screw presses used the same principle, but the results shaped the economy of the entire Coastal Plain.

The press survived the Civil War and the collapse of the plantation system, but it was not going to survive in place. In nineteen thirty-eight it was carefully disassembled, moved to the Tarboro Town Common, and later restored in nineteen seventy-six. The National Register of Historic Places added it in nineteen seventy-one.

Few presses like it survive. This one endures because someone recognized what it represented: not just a machine, but an artifact of a landscape that once grew rich on cotton and the forced labor of the people who harvested it.