To honor the work and memory of Tommy Oliver, Landmarks Foundation will name the cotton gin the Thomas W. Oliver Gin on Saturday, May 8, 2004. The naming ceremony will take place in the North Block at the Cotton Gin at 5:00 pm. Throughout the years, Tommy was a loyal supporter and friend, always ready to lend a helping hand to further the mission of Landmarks Foundation.

It is with great admiration and joy that we remember him and his contributions to the saving of the cotton gin, once the old Chapell Gray Gin at Teasley’s Mill in south Montgomery County, and the importance of preserving the past.

From the Recollections of Tommy Oliver…
"Billy McLemore informed this writer one day in the early 1980s that the site of the old Chappell Gray Gin had been purchased and the old gin was to be demolished to make way for a new building. This gin had been built about the turn of the century by Continental Gin Company for Chappell Gray at a location in southern Montgomery County known as Teasley’s Mill at the intersection of U.S. 231 and Cantey Road. Upon making a trip to Teasley’s Mill to see the gin, we were not impressed. The gin house was rotten beyond repair and dangerous to enter, the floor having fallen in. Yet upon further inspection we began to see a diamond in the rough. This gin, unlike so many old gins which had been built in the days of clean, easily ginned hand-picked cotton, had never been “improved.” No effort had been made to upgrade the machinery over the years as newer and better cleaning and drying equipment was developed to keep up with the growing use of cotton picking machines. The gin had not run since the start of World War II. We decided to buy it."

"In taking the machinery apart the fact that the building was in such hazardous condition caused a great deal of breakage of some of the cast iron parts. We knew that these could be repaired. Having dismantled all of the gin machinery, we stored it in several empty buildings behind Mr. McLemore’s house."

"By the late 1880s Landmarks Foundation had acquired the land necessary for the gin. We built an exact replica of the original gin house from Continental Gin Company plans furnished us by Horace Barker, a retired engineer who had worked with Continental for many years assembling gin plants for customers. When we brought the machinery to the site, we stored the wooden parts in a warehouse close by so that these parts could be restored out of the weather. This warehouse space later became the Drug Store Museum and the Print Shop. We laid out the metal parts alongside this building, preferring to do our welding and repairing outdoors. This jumbled pile of metal was not very encouraging looking to those not familiar with gins. In fact, one of our staff, on walking by these metal parts the day after they were laid out, remarked that it “looked like a truck had had a wreck on the way to the junk yard.”

"We restored this rare old gin with private donations alone. Old ginners were ready to help in cash and in kind. Horace Barker, the retired Continental engineer provided us with old catalogs, pictures, measurements and good advice. Indispensable also was a welder known as “Hawkeye” who did amazing things in making repairs to our machinery in such a way that the mends were all invisible. We thought of Hawkeye as “Michelangelo with a Torch.” Hawkeye, not a pretty person, was a little late to work one day. He told us that he had made the mistake of looking in the mirror that morning and had been unable to tear himself away from such beauty. Given such a logical explanation, we forgave his lateness."

Carl Fuller, who ran a modern gin at Eclectic, helped us find a 40 horsepower Atlas steam engine, which had been used at a sawmill in Coosa County and was just the kind that had originally pulled our gin. Carl also helped us locate a cotton wagon, greatly in need of repairs, in the wilds of Coosa County. Horace Barker provided us with the fans we were missing, Gene Handy gave us a steelyard (stilyd) bale weighing scale, George Waltall donated a wagon scale and so it went. Pretty soon we had a turn-of-the-century two stand Continental cotton gin in pristine condition.

"We could not bring ourselves to restore this gem in any but running condition. We took no short cuts; used no dummy parts. If power were applied the gin would run. However it will never run for a number of reasons. First, these old gins were built for rugged dependability and not for safety. Our gin could never be brought into compliance with OSHA rules. Second, gins of this era were built for clean hand picked cotton only. They never saw moisture, sticks, stems, burrs, bolls and the other trash incident to today’s machine picked cotton. Not being equipped with all the drying equipment, seed cotton cleaners, burr machines, lint cleaners and other machinery of today’s gins, they would immediately choke up on the seed cotton produced now. Even given that someone would hand pick a bale (1,500 pounds) of clean cotton and assuming that some grower would allow it to be done, this would run the gin for only about twenty to thirty minutes. Third, and last, we have no power. Our steam engine has been rigged to turn over slowly by a hidden electric motor to demonstrate its motion. We have no boiler or furnace with which to fire it. We thought at one time to run the engine for short, demonstration periods on compressed air in lieu of steam, but discovered that this would have been prohibitively expensive. We may hear the distinctive sounds of this old gin in our memories, but, alas, we will never hear it in real time."