You Can't Get Gin from Corn or Corn from the Gin

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Motorists not in tune with our back road ways seldom see any sort of crops until they roll into the produce department of a grocery store. Interstate cruisers probably think that unseen farming is devoted entirely to food crops if, in fact, they give the matter any thought. Well, don't be toting your corn here or the boys at the Williston Gin might find a way for you to wear the cob home. This gin is for cotton, but then they might raise a glass of good seasoned corn if the gin has a good season.

King Cotton was once the major economic force in the U.S. prior to the onset of the Civil War. Cotton was our major export much of which went to England and as such was significant to the economy of the North as well. Cotton could be seen as white oil in that it was to the industrial revolution what oil is to our way of life today. We have, of course, had some fussing over both.

It is making quite a comeback in South Carolina which anyone who drives the secondary roads of our state during growing season has seen. Williston Gin has been in business for just over a hundred years. It's not a museum. When you slip into that eighty dollar Izod shirt or fall upon your high thread count sheets, that cotton might have been ginned at Williston right on Hwy 78 in South Carolina.

We know where cotton is planted and ginned, but we speculate that polyester is grown out there on the interstate closer to its market.