me from the
neighborhood of Statesburg, but its history could not be ascertained.

In 1793 Eli Whitney petitioned for a patent for the invention of the saw
cotton-gin. His claims were disputed, and he defended them in the State
and Federal courts for nearly a generation, obtaining at last a verdict
in his favor. Meanwhile the saw-gin had become an established fact, and
the planter at last had a machine which enabled him to produce cotton at
a cost that would leave him a good profit. The first saw-gin to be run
by water-power was erected in 1795 by James Kincaid near Monticello, in
Fairfield County, South Carolina. Others were put up near Columbia by
Wade Hampton, Sr., in 1797, and in the year following he gathered and
ginned from six hundred acres six hundred bales of cotton.

The cotton exportation from the United States increased from four
hundred eighty-seven thousand six hundred pounds in 1793 to one million
six hundred thousand pounds in 1794, the year in which Whitney's gin was
patented. In 1796, a year after he had improved his machine, the
production had risen to ten million pounds. In fact, the increased
production was so great that the planters began to fear they would
overstock the market, and one of them, upon looking at his newly
gathered crop, exclaimed: "Well, I have done with cultivation of cotton;
there's enough in that gin-house to make stockings for all the people in
America." Yet the production of cotton did not advance with that
rapidity to which we are now accustomed.

The cotton industry being of secondary importance prior to 1790,
information and statistics relative to the amount produced are not
available, but within one hundred years, from 1790 to 1890, the
production of cotton in the United States increased from five thousand
bales to over ten million bales.

The first cotton-mill erected in the United States was built at Beverly,
Massachusetts, in 1787-1788. This was soon followed by others in various
towns along the east border of the country, especially Pawtucket and
Providence, Rhode Island; Boston, Massachusetts; New Haven and Norwich,
Connecticut; New York City; Paterson, New Jersey; Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania; and Statesburg, South Carolina. In them carding and
spinning were done by machinery, but the weaving was on hand-looms
until 1815, at which date a power-loom mill was started at Waltham,
Massachusetts. The use of hand-looms and spinning-wheels for cotton
manufacture was common