Cotton Gin

Cotton-pickers were slaves on the large plantations who could spare the labor to pluck the cotton from its bowls. As this occurred, there emerged a person by the name of Eli Whitney. Catherine Greene, wife of General Greene, learned about Eli from Phineas Miller, manager of their Greene plantation. They were now the owners of Mulberry Grove plantation and Eli was brought there to devise the cotton gin. Whitney was from New England and she met him on a ship which was taking her back from her former home in Rhode Island to Savannah. Whitney was going South to fill a teaching post at the then new University of Georgia which was situated in Athens. She persuaded him to visit Mulberry Grove.  It was during this visit that he invented and patented the cotton gin.  Another inventor with a patent but the courts upheld the Eli Whitney patent as legitimate. Ultimately Whitney grossed about $200,000 from the gins which were sold throughout the South.  The invention launched the South into a prosperous age, so needed after the devastation of the Revolutionary War.

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