Here is some history of the cache area, I pulled it from the
web site www.Texasescapes.com:
Dozens of old cotton gins dot the landscape of East Texas,
the last relics from the days when cotton was a major cash crop for
farmers. And most of them are slowly rotting away without
historical markers to remind people of how important they were to
communities decades ago. But that isn’t the case at Point, a small
town of some 700 souls in northern Rains county.
Here, a sturdy old gin has found a new life as an
entertainment venue that draws crowds from all over East Texas.
Performers like Mark Chestnut, Pee Wee Walker, and Gary Busey
perform regularly in the gin. And the sounds of the Saturday night
music and comedy go out on the air waves of the best named rural
radio station in Texas--KMOO of Mineola. You’ll find it at 99.9 on
your radio dial.
The old cotton gin sat unused beside U.S. Highway 69 since
the 1970s, when it stopped ginning cotton for Rains County’s
farmers. But about five and a half years ago, Brent Cason and his
mother and father, Lena and Joe Ben Cason, saw something different
in the dirty, neglected old building. With the support of Point’s
people, they turned the gin into The Cotton Pickin’ Theater and
opened it to music performers of all kinds. Today, each Saturday
night, the old gin comes alive as people drive to Point for some of
the best entertainment in East Texas. While country music is the
mainstay at the gin, the second and fifth Saturday nights of each
month are devoted to gospel music. And on the fourth Saturday
night, the Rural American Idol contests pulls in contestants from
all over the map. Performers come in all sizes and ages, from three
years old to 85.
No one really knows when Point’s gin was built, but it probably
dates back to Point’s beginning. The town began as a flag station
and post office around 1880 on a section of the Missouri, Kansas
and Texas Railroad from Mineola to Greenville. Residents proposed
the name Rice’s Point for William Rice, a Kentuckian who settled in
the area, but the post office rejected the name and several others
because they were already in use.
In 2006, Point opened another landmark, also related to the
community’s farming heritage. A large monument, sitting beside the
old cotton gin, was built to recognize the establishment of the
National Farmers Union by Isaac Newton Gresham at Point in 1902.
Founded to address farm issues during a time when America was
courting the American industrial revolution. Gresham was a small
town newspaper editor who was sympathetic with the problems faced
by small farmers around the turn of the century. Today, the NFU has
a membership of 250,000 farm and ranch families in 26 states and
continues with Gresham’s mission of protecting the economic
well-being of farmers and ranchers and their rural communities.
Meanwhile, the Point gin keeps on ginning--not with cotton, but
music. The other day, however, Joe Ben Cason found a survivor of
the old cotton days--a live boll weevil. No one knows how he
survived or why he stayed. Maybe he just liked the music.