Adams Land Company Gin

In 1992 Cotton Grower Magazine declared that “the biggest gin in the world” was being built in the Arkansas Delta. Indeed, the Adams Land Company gin buildings are monumental against the flat Delta landscape, even if not the biggest in the world. The gin was constructed for Boe and Myrna Adams, who moved here in 1985 from Atlanta in order to purchase the B.C. Land Company. Adams retooled the cotton business in this area, introducing the most technologically advanced ginning machinery. In the first year the new gin was operational, Adams, who was also the largest land owner in the area, purchased thirty-five module builders (machinery for picking and binding the cotton in a fixed shape to feed into the gin) and gave them to the farmers; he also furnished the binding covers. Adams’s innovation was to use a cotton picker developed by the John Deere Company that forms a cylindrical module and wraps it. In no more than two seasons cotton trailers disappeared and modules appeared in fields across the Delta. For his ginning process Adams introduced a device developed by Roy Owens of Cherokee Fabrication that is able to handle a round module. Adams Land Company also serves as a Loan Service Agency for the Department of Agriculture, handling payments between farmers and the federal government.