Prattville is the company town that was designed by Daniel Pratt to support his factory. [apnews]
The factory was built near a waterfall or steep rapids because back in the 1830s, water was the only source of power other than horses.
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| Street View, Jan 2026 |
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| Facebook Reel |
The factory was built near a waterfall or steep rapids because back in the 1830s, water was the only source of power other than horses.
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| Steve Cole posted The Ole Pratt Cotton Gin Factory Spillway !! Prattville |
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| TripAdvisor, Carol H, Jan 2020, 19th of 71 photos, cropped |
The Daniel Pratt Gin Company was founded in 1833 and he began manufacturing in 1836. In 1838 he formally founded the town of Prattville, Alabama. His model town included homes for the workers, churches, and Alabama’s first free school (for white children only). By the 1850s Pratt gins were sold across the US and even in world markets. Prattville also boasted a cotton mill and a woolen mill. Pratt was a pro-slavery, pro-Tariff, anti-secession Whig until Alabama seceded from the Union, at which point he went with the state and his business interests. The Prattville mills supplied the Confederate army with cloth. After the war, Daniel Pratt kept his town going with his own money until his business picked up by 1870. His nephew ran the company after Daniel’s death. It was bought by Continental Gin Co. in 1899. Continental manufactured gins in Prattville until 2009, then moved production to India. Daniel Pratt has been called the South’s first industrialist." [AmericanHistory, I can't believe that they did not include a photo of the gin.]Of the buildings still standing, Pratt built the earliest structure in the mid-1840s after he soon found that the building in which he began his gin business was much too small for the rate at which his business was growing. A second structure was built in 1852 adjoining the first. The narrow, multistory buildings were designed in such a way that the factories’ machines could be powered using the fall of water from the Autauga Creek which flowed into shafts inside the buildings. Tall, narrow windows were the only source of light and fireplaces provided the only heat, making fire a real possibility. The factory operated with a small workforce, relatively small machines, and a high proportion of handwork. One notable feature of the 1852 building is the angle which no explanation could be made for, but one theory is that Daniel Pratt’s office was located at the end of this building, and from this vantage point he could survey not only his factory but also the buildings across the creek and those located along the main street of Prattville.A much larger three-story building was constructed in 1854, double the size of Pratt’s previous buildings and an indication of how fast both Pratt’s business and the town were growing. Probably the factory’s most striking feature, the cupola located atop the building housed signaling devices throughout the years, first a bell, later a whistle, to advise factory workers when shifts began and ended.
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| HABS ALA,1-PRAVI,3- 1. Historic American Buildings Survey W. N. Manning, Photographer, March 26, 1935 COPY OF 'DANIEL PRATT COTTON GIN MANUFACTORY - Daniel Pratt Cotton Gin Factory, Prattville, Autauga County, AL Photos from Survey HABS AL-685 |
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| HABS ALA,1-PRAVI,3- 2. Historic American Buildings Survey W. N. Manning, Photographer, March 26, 1935 COPY SHOWING FACTORY AFTER BEING ENLARGED |
When his business recovered from the Civil War in the 1870s, he invested in the iron & coal resources and the railroads around Birmingham. [AbadonedAlabama]
The five historic buildings have been converted into 127 upscale apartments. [apnews]
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| Hailey Conway, May 2023 |
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| hillworks "The former rail line bisecting the site is marked with large paint stripes" |
