COTTON GIN
Ghost Town — Fredericksburg, Freestone County County, Texas
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/cotton-gin-texas/

Ghost town in Texas; research record.

Cotton Gin is a ghost town in Fredericksburg, Texas. Ghost town in Texas; research record. It sits in the archive under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.

Cotton Gin, in western Freestone County near Teague, was settled before it was named. Families were on the ground by the mid-1840s; in 1848 Dr. James S. Wills built the mule-powered gin that gave the community both its name and its function, and he opened its first store. The post office followed in 1851 — the year the county organized — with Wills as postmaster, and the town grew into Freestone's earliest center: the 1860 census counted 508 people, and the marker record lists three churches, a good school, a Masonic lodge, stores, saloons, a weekly paper called the Herald, and a main street improbably named Mule Rabbit Street.
Wills even gave a block of land for a courthouse, hoping to draw the county seat. Voters declined. The refusal mattered less than what came after: in 1872 the Houston and Texas Central Railway built a few miles west, through what became Mexia, and Cotton Gin's businesses went with the rails.

THE LONG THIN DECLINE
Cotton Gin's death was graduated — 206 residents in 1904, post office closed 1908, seventy-five through the postwar years, then twenty-eight, a figure the record held steady from 1968 into the 2000s. The 1967 marker's own verdict survives: the town 'illustrates fate of hundreds of early Texas towns by-passed by railroads, highways and industry.'
The file keeps it as that type specimen — a town that lost the county seat by vote and the county's business by rail — with the research notes' caution that the marker's UTM coordinates stand unconverted and the marker locates Teague, not a surveyed townsite.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· The THC marker describes settlement before 1848, a cotton gin established by J. S. Wills in 1848 and decline after a railroad bypass in the 1870s. Cotton Gin's history is documented — boom, bust, and desertion all on record, the lore layered on top. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. Sources including 'Cotton Gin historical marker' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Cotton Gin historical marker — Texas Historical Commission
  https://atlas.thc.texas.gov/Details/5161009870

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