This small-town festival offers up a bale of Texas history

Pick any one of the nearly 1,000 Texas towns and odds are you’ll pick a small town with a festival folks are right proud of. Fests for peanuts, peaches, pecans, tamales, tomatoes, dewberries, blueberries, melons, mosquitos and more.

Burton — west of Brenham, nestled between Round Top and the ghost town of Gay Hill — is no different. This Saturday’s 30th Annual Cotton Gin Festival certainly has all the hallmarks of small town fun.

There’s a parade: if entering, please provide make, model and year of your tractor.

There’s contests: who’s up for pie eating and bubble gum blowing and cotton seed pulling?

There’s live entertainment: polka with the Dujka Brothers!

And there’s free admission and funnel cakes and craft booths and quilts and a zone for kids and another spot for old men to talk about old things and old times.

But Burton has something these other fests don’t have: A cotton gin. Just down the street from Dale’s Automotive is the Burton Farmers Gin — a Texas Historic Landmark.

Built in 1914 and powered by a 16-ton 1925 Bessemer diesel engine, the Burton Farmers Gin is the oldest operating cotton gin in Texas. No, it’s not a going concern, but they will gin and bale cotton on Saturday at the festival.

The process is as steeped in Texas history as any you can still see today. The old engine chugs then rumbles. Picked cotton is vacuumed up just as it was in the days between the world wars. Ultimately, the lint is separated from the seed and banded bales will tumble out.

They’ll fire up the machinery about 3 p.m. on Saturday. Once you’ve seen Texas agriculture through the eyes of a farmer generations distant, well, the polka and the funnel cakes are an added bonus.