Comeback of a cotton gin
By Bob Bowman

Dozens of old cotton gins dot the landscape of East Texas, the last relics from the days when cotton was a major cash crop for farmers.

And most of them are slowly rotting away without historical markers to remind people of how important they were to communities decades ago.

But that isn't the case at Point, a small town of some 700 souls in northern Rains County.

Here, a sturdy old gin has found a new life as an entertainment venue that draws crowds from all over East Texas. Performers like Mark Chestnut, Pee Wee Walker, and Gary Busey perform regularly in the gin.

And the sounds of the Saturday night music and comedy go out on the air waves of the best named rural radio station in Texas -- KMOO of Mineola. You'll find it at 99.9 on your radio dial.

The old cotton gin sat unused beside U.S. Highway 69 since the 1970s, when it stopped ginning cotton for Rains County's farmers. But about five and a half years ago, Brent Cason and his mother and father, Lena and Joe Ben Cason, saw something different in the dirty, neglected old building.

With the support of Point's people, they turned the gin into The Cotton Pickin' Theater and opened it to music performers of all kinds.

Today, each Saturday night, the old gin comes alive as people drive to Point for some of the best entertainment in East Texas. While country music is the mainstay at the gin, the second and fifth Saturday nights of each month are devoted to gospel music. And on the fourth Saturday night, the Rural American Idol contests pull in contestants from all over the map. Performers come in all sizes and ages, from three years old to 85.

No one really knows when Point's gin was built, but it probably dates back to Point's beginning.

The town began as a flag station and post office around 1880 on a section of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad from Mineola to Greenville. Residents proposed the name `Rice's Point' for William Rice, a Kentuckian who settled in the area, but the post office rejected the name and several others because they were already in use.

In 2006, Point opened another landmark, also related to the community's farming heritage.

A large monument, sitting beside the old cotton gin, was built to recognize the establishment of the National Farmers Union by Isaac Newton Gresham at Point in 1902.

Founded to address farm issues during a time when America was courting the American industrial revolution. Gresham was a small town newspaper editor who was sympathetic with the problems faced by small farmers around the turn of the century.

Today, the NFU has a membership of 250,000 farm and ranch families in 26 states and continues with Gresham's mission of protecting the economic well-being of farmers and ranchers and their rural communities.

Meanwhile, the Point gin keeps on ginning -- not with cotton, but music.

The other day, however, Joe Ben Cason found a survivor of the old cotton days -- a live boll weevil. No one knows how he survived or why he stayed.

Maybe he just liked the music.