The Rebirth of the
Stovall Gin Company

The gin had been really quiet since the last bale left in 1991 and all the equipment left shortly thereafter.
And when the Stovall Store closed for good in the early 2000s,
what had been a center of activity had become 21 acres of old unused buildings.

Howard Stovall was looking for a festival site. An outdoor and corporate event producer by trade, he had worked as technical director and talent buyer for the Mighty Mississippi Music Festival in Greenville, MS for its six year run. When that festival ended, Stovall sought to establish something similar, but farther north and closer to Memphis.
After scouting locations in Desoto and Tunica counties north of Stovall,
he turned onto Stovall Road by the gin one day and hit The brakes.
Suddenly it seemed obvious. But not easy.

February 2020

March 2020

Pretty much a family affair getting started . . . first inspiration to use old irrigation pipe as fence and barricade. Huge pits in the floor of the gin

April 2020

We got a new sign made and we started work re-roofing.
We got the big seed barn done and moved onto the porte-cochere (as we like to call it).
Along the way we uncovered the 19th cetury gin’s brick foundation and the 1988 seed tower cornerstone.
The seed tower was added only three years before the gin would close.

So at least we had a solid roof over the seed barn . . .

April 12, 2020

We finished the seed barn roof on April 10.
On April 12 Stovall was hit by a massive wind storm that toppled scores of trees,
including dropping a 100 year old oak tree onto the Stovall family home.

It peeled back that new seed barn roof and sent a large section of it soaring into the field behind it,
and it tore the top off the oldest structure on the farm, which dates back to the original farm shop..

An unpleasant setback on a new project.

Meanwhile

The Stone Gas Band started holding rehearsals in the Stovall Store,
the only building that had electrical power, even if it didn’t have heat.

We got some gravel for the parking lot, and we found more old stuff.

May 2020

Time to go to war on the foliage that’s blocking where our stage is going to be.

June 2020

We got the earthwork done to level the land around the gin building and got the gravel spread for the food court area.

We got the new signs up.

We built some bistro tables in the seed barn - made from slices of some of the 100+ year old trees we had lost in the April storm.

July 2020

By July it became apparent that our plan to stage an October 2020 music festival would fall victim to the pandemic.

But we instigated some serious, largely invisible and unsexy, infrastructure improvements.

We filled in all the holes and pits in the gin floor that prohibited using most of that space.
That improvement activated the entire gin building for events.

After determining that the old water lines were irreparably rusted and leaky,
we installed 1,500 feet of 2” water line to bring water to the site for the first time in decades.

We land formed the area between the gin and the equipment shed to make it level and usable.

We installed a 1,000 gallon septic tank.

We ground down all the old bolts that used to hold down big gin equipment
and cut off many dangerous bits that could be a hazard in the gin.

Nothing that looks good in a photo, but critical to activate the space.

December 2020

We got power! And streetlights! (It was really dark on site without those.)
The site had not had power or lighting since 1992.

We got the custom steel work to cover the old bale machine pit installed and put lighting behind it.

We tested out string lights to see how many we needed to light the building without being too bright.

Suddenly the place looked pretty nice - at night!

April 2021

The gin operated on a pneumatic vacuum system that sucked the cotton out of the trailer

and blew it through a series of machines to separate the cotton fiber from the seeds and the motes.

That means somewhere there is a large column of air being expelled to create that vacuum.

At the Stovall Gin, that exhaust was confined in a “wind room” structure that contained the blast to a relatively small area.

The wind room was collapsing. So we tore it down, taking care to save as much of the old, weathered corrugated steel as we could.

Note: those steel panels became the Stovall Store awning in 2023

Also April 2021

Thanks to the Delta Blues Museum and the US Department of Agriculture,
we got a grant to add lighting, fencing, fence poles, and a new John Deere tractor!

Now things really started coming to life.

We rented a lift and hung massive amounts of string lighting across the site.
It made the seed barn where the roof got torn off look like a great al fresco area!

We got our new signs lit up, and we lit the logo in the gin floor!

And the place started looking like something.

June - July 2021

Three months until the Mighty Roots Music Festival, and we kept the momentum going.

We built “Squiggy” - our lighting fixture for the porte-cochere fashioned from found objects on site,
and we built lighting fixtures with old tin for the interior

We did some structural work on the old headquarters shed.

We moved around with our tractor some stuff that we had not been able to address before.

We acquired a set of church pews to use for seating,
and we built out more of the divider and bistro tables in the seed barn.

And more gravel.

August 2021

With the Mighty Roots Festival around the corner,
we decided to ramp up the store,
including stage lighting,
which we had so far generally ignored in the project, even though it seemed to be the space we would use the most outside of the festival.

We built the Mighty Long Bar from old pallets and tin, and then built several more smaller bars.

We used our USDA/DBM poles and fence panels to erect a perimeter around the festival site.

We did more gravel work.

And we burned out an old tree
that was worrying us.