In the early twentieth century, many larger Mississippi towns boasted a cotton oil mill, typically standing adjacent to the railroad. By the 1930s, Jackson had six mills crushing 135,000 tons of seed, making it the third largest cotton oil producer in the nation. Ivory soap, Wesson Oil, and Crisco (short for “crystallized cotton oil”) were among the many popular products that used cottonseed oil. Other seed byproducts included meal used in fertilizer and animal feed, and cellulose made from tiny seed lint used for plastics and rayon. But the rise of soybean crops and consolidation of oil mills after World War II left many older oil mills abandoned.
This vacant mill is one of the most intact in the state. The original two-story brick building (1898) with a gabled roof, corbeled cornice, and segmental-arched windows was at the heart of the crushing process. Here lint was removed in the linter gin on the second floor, and the crushing and meal rooms occupied the first. A Quonset warehouse for meal was added to the east end around 1957, replacing a separate hull house. The one-story wooden office at the complex’s north-west corner dates to the 1920s. Corrugated-metal seed houses with their distinctive steep hipped roofs and gabled monitors ( pictured above) dominate the complex. Seed house Number 1 (1930) is at the northwest corner, Number 2 (c. 1957) lines the south side at the center, and Number 3 (c. 1965), similar to Number 1, anchors the southwest corner. Three cylindrical iron “bean tanks” on the south side were constructed in 1957, as the plant diversified to soybean oil production.