He was the youngest son. He lived in New York, New York in 1783, and was probably a Loyalist. Joseph Eve travelled to Nassau, Bahamas in 1795. It is believed that his first wife Martha died on the voyage from Charleston to Nassau. Joseph married shortly afterwards in Nassau. He was an engineer and architect who invented a wind powered cotton gin and designed St. Matthew's Church in Nassau. In February 1800, he bought and became Publisher of The Bahamas Gazette of Nassau. His 300 acres on the southern end of Cat Island were sold at auction April 1800, and he then left for Georgia.

"Uncle Joseph Eve lived very near Fathers (Capt. Oswell Eve, Jr.) He had one daughter, Mary and three sons, Joseph, Edward and Francis who died when twenty-one years old." ®1893 Mrs. Emma Eve Smith (1798 - 1882)


DR. JOSEPH EVE: Born, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 24 May 1760; Died, at his residence near The Cottage Cemetery, Augusta, Georgia on 14 November 1835.

Joseph Eve was one of the four sons of Captain Oswell Eve, Sr. of Philadelphia, and brother of Captain Oswell Eve of Charleston, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia. Joseph Eve was an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush, to whom Joseph's sister Sarah Eve was engaged to be married. Joseph was a teenager when his sister died suddenly a few weeks before her planned marriage to Benjamin Rush, when the family was forced into exile due to Revolutionary politics. Although Dr. Benjamin Rush was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was powerless to save either the Eves or members of his own family from the destructive vengeance of the day. Doctors Joseph Eve and Joseph Rush, along with Joseph Eve's father, Captain Oswell Eve, Sr., went into exile in the Bahamas where Joseph Eve purchased property between 1788 and 1796, primarily on Cat Island. Captain Oswell Eve, Sr. died at Joseph's plantation home on Cat Island, then known as San Salvador.

Joseph Eve was a scientist, architect, inventor, poet and newspaper editor. Having learned the secrets of gunpowder production from his father's gunpowder manufactory, the only one in the colonies at the beginning of the Revolution, he later produced gunpowder for the United States during the War of 1812; he became editor of the Bahamas Gazette in 1800; he designed St. Matthew's Church, a Nassau historic landmark; and, he invented the cotton gin (not Eli Whitney), which he produced, at first in the Bahamas in the 1780s, and then in a factory he constructed at Charleston, shortly after 1800. Some of the South's most prominent early planters imported the Eve cotton gin in the 1790s, including the legendary Pierce Butler; John Couper of Cannon's Point, St. Simon's Island; and apparently General Nathaniel Greene. It was at one of Greene's plantations where Eli Whitney reputedly saw an Eve gin in operation and shortly thereafter submitted such a machine to the Patent Office under his own name -- even as Eve's patent application and model, which had been submitted earlier, was "lost". Regardless, the Eve gins were much in demand and demand was increasing. Meeting the orders was essential; by 1804 Joseph Eve was desperately advertising for "six or eight" additional qualified cabinetmakers who were needed "immediately" in the Charleston factory.

In 1805, in the middle of the night, Joseph Eve's Charleston cotton gin factory was burned to the ground. This was but the latest blow in a series of incidents from the theft of materials and tools, to the disappearance of horses used in propelling mills for production of the gins.

While still in the Bahamas Joseph Eve married Hannah Singleterry of South Carolina. They and the Joseph Rushes moved from the Bahamas to Charleston, and then, after the disastrous 1805 burning of the Eve factory, the Joseph Eve's moved to Augusta to be near his brother Oswell Eve, and his factor, Charles Cunningham, Oswell's son-in-law. Dr. Joseph Eve's home was near The Cottage and Cottage Cemetery, where Joseph and Hannah are buried. Dr. Joseph Rush and his wife Catherine settled on John's Island at Charleston; their estate was left to friends including members of the Mathews, Roper, Holmes, Legare and Flud families -- Harriet Flud was Mrs. Wade Hampton I, mother of Wade II who married Ann FitzSimons, niece of Joseph Eve.


http://www.pratthistory.com/1793-1860.htm


The Manufacture of Cotton Gins

1793-1860



By Dr. M. C. McMillan Auburn
University Auburn, Alabama



Much has been written about Eli Whitney and the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Many writers have stressed its importance to the whole economic, social, and even political development of the South as a section and the country as a whole. They have emphasized the fact that this invention, together with the inventions in spinning and weaving which occurred in England between 1764 and 1785, made possible the great textile revolution in England and the United States. Other writers have found that the invention of the gin brought into existence a chain of factors and events which inevitably led to the Civil War. Yet almost nothing has been written on the history of the gin after Whitney’s invention. It is the purpose of this paper to examine in the time allowed the history of the manufacture of gins from Whitney’s invention to the Civil War. Who were the leading gin manufacturers in this period, where were their factories located, what raw materials were used in the manufacture of gins and where were they secured, what major improvements had been made on the cotton gin by 1860, and what part did the gin manufacturer play in building the cotton kingdom? In considering the Whitney gin for short staple of green seed cotton it should be remembered that the roller gin for long staple or black seed cotton had been in use in the West Indies and India for centuries before 1793. Its exact origin is unknown. The roller gin was a very simple machine and worked well on long staple cotton. It was based on the principle that when long staple cotton was forced through two parallel rollers placed closely together the lint would go through and the seed remain behind. The most popular roller gin for long staple cotton in Georgia and South Carolina in 1793 was that of Joseph Eve. Eve was a member of a Philadelphia Loyalist family who had fled to the Bahamas during the American Revolution. In the Bahamas in the seventeen-eighties he invented and began manufacture of a much improved roller gin. His improvements on the crude roller gin consisted in building a machine with two sets of double rollers, lengthening the rollers, coordinating the parts of the whole machine so that it ran with greater ease and ginned with more rapidity than ever before, and adapting various motive powers, including horse, wind, and water power to the machine. When cotton was introduced into the United States for the first time as a commercial crop by Loyalist who were returning from the Bahamas in the first decades after the American Revolution, Eve’s gin was introduced along with the Sea Island cotton. At first Eve manufactured and shipped his gins from the Bahamas, but in the seventeen-nineties he returned to the United States and began the manufacture of his gins in Augusta, Georgia. His gins continued for decades to be the most practical and popular gin for Sea Island cotton in those areas of Georgia and South Carolina (and later certain limited areas of Florida and the Gulf Coast) where climate and soil allowed the growth of the long staple. However, only the short staple or green seed cotton would grow in the great upland area that was most of the South, and the roller gin would not separate short staple or green seed cotton lint from the seed, to which it clung tenaciously. If the South were to become the cotton kingdom, a gin suitable to this type of cotton was necessary. These were the circumstances when Whitney invented his gin for short staple cotton on Nathaniel Greene’s Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, in 1793. Whitney solved the essential problem of a gin for short staple cotton by setting wires in a wooden cylinder and revolving this against the slatted side of a box of cotton. The wire points upon entering the slats of the box caught bits of the fiber, and as they made it they tore the lint from the seed which were too large to follow between the slats. As the cylinder continued its revolutions through the box it cleaned virtually all the lint from the seed, which then fell through a crevice on the further side. In order to keep the wired cylinder from becoming clogged with lint, Whitney equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite direction and at a greater speed. This is a description of the gin on which Whitney made oath on October 28, 1793 and secured a patent from the United States government on March 14, 1794. Whitney and his partner Phineas Miller, the second husband of Mrs. Nathaniel Greene and the man who had financed the invention, began the manufacture of the new gin in New Haven, Conn., where Whitney had made friends and business connections during his college days at Yale University. The company of Whitney and Miller planned to maintain a monopoly in cotton ginning by following a policy of not selling the machine, but rather establishing gins in the South which would buy all cotton, gin it, and
sell the lint. This policy proved to be a major business error, however, as they could not manufacture enough cotton gins to gin the rapidly increasing crops, nor could they raise sufficient capital to finance the purchase of the entire cotton crop. In 1793, news of Whitney‚s invention spread throughout the upland cotton growing area where much cotton had been planted even before his invention, in anticipation of someone inventing a successful gin. Infringing machines were constructed in many mechanic’s shops, some of which at least were an improvement on Whitney’s original model. Edwards Lyons, a mechanic of Wrightsboro, Georgia and Hodgen Holmes, a mechanic of Augusta, Georgia, made gins in which circular saws (which all gins for short staple cotton were soon to use) were substituted for the wire spikes of Whitney’s original model. Holmes has the best claim to the invention of saws as he secured a patent on his gin with saws on May 2, 1796. Beginning in 1795, Whitney brought suit against one rival gin manufacturer after another. Long litigation in the courts followed which did not end favorable to Whitney until 1807. In that year in the case of Whitney vs. Arthur Fort involving Holmes gin, Whitney secured an injunction from a Federal court in Georgia protecting his patent rights. In answer to the claim of the defendants lawyers that the Holmes gin was materially different . . . lots more on the website, with pictures of gins, including Joseph Eve's.
http://www.pratthistory.com/1793-1860.htm

http://www.pratthistory.com/whitney_or_homes.htm
When the Franklin Mint's research turned up information about ginning, they didn't research well enough. The coins they minted for a collectable coins arewrong. The coins shows a roller gin and states "Eli Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin". Eli had a patent on a spike gin not a roller gin as shown.
The illustration below on the left is a Whitney type gin. The illustration in the middle, from Harpers, is a roller gin. The caption states "The First Cotton Gin". The roller gin was the first cotton gin. The roller gin shown was a modification of the early "Churka" or Indian roller gin. The improved roller gin facilitated the ginning of Sea Island or Long Staple cotton. The coins should have stated Eli Whitney the first to patent a Spiked Cotton Gin, because the roller gin as been around for many years. Dr. Joseph Eve residing around Augusta, Georgia, introduced the first powered roller gin, in 1790. The Daily output of five Eve Type Roller Gins was 135 pounds per day, but one Whitney Type gin produced 600 to 900 pounds per day. English Textile mills wanted the slower roller ginned sea island cotton (Long Fiber Length) because of quality, but production won over the plantations. When the plantations planted short staple cotton the roller gin was not used. TB

Parrish, Lydia. Harvard University, Harvard College
Library, The Houghton Library, Manuscript Department,
Cambridge MA. Records of some southern Loyalists,
1940-1953, 2 v. (494 p.) Bound mss. about ca. 80
Loyalist families, most of whom went to the Bahamas
during and after the Revolution.
~~~~~~~~~~~
"Among the Loyalist cotton planters in the Bahamas was an inventor who rivaled Eli Whitney. Like many
inventors he remained unsung and is today forgotten. Joseph Eve, probably born in South Carolina, was
living in Pennsylvania at the time of the American Revolution and was thought to have been a Quaker. He and his brother, Oswell Eve, moved to the Bahamas with the general evacuation and became cotton planters on Cat Island. At this time cotton was ginned by a simple instrument composed of two parallel rollers spiked with nails and turned in opposite directions by either a hand- or a foot-operated crank. Joseph Eve invented a machine turned by wind and he advertised that he could make one to be turned by cattle or even by water power where there was an inlet through which the tide flowed. Eve's machines must have been quite complex for they were costly. An appraisal of the "True Blue Estate" of William Moss in 1797 listed a "cotton machine of Eve's to go by wind or cattle" and put the value of 175 pounds. Eve advertised that once a machine had been purchased he would keep it in repair at an annual rate of four guineas. The machine was able to gin upwards of 360 pounds of cotton in one day. A glowing testimonial to the efficiency of the machine was written by a fellow planter of Eve's, Charles Dames, and was published in the Bahama Gazette of May 1, 1794:

Dear Sir, . . . This is now the third year in which I have enjoyed the benefit of your most useful machine
for cleaning Cotton. The favorable opinion I conceived of it on the first trial, must be in your recollection. . . . Preparing our Cotton for market was formerly considered as the most tedious,
troublesome, and laborious part of the agricultural process in this country. To you we are indebted for
its having been rendered pleasant, easy, and expeditious.

Bahama Gazette, November 28, 1793.

Bahamas, Reg. Of., E/2, 44. Oswell Eve died at Cat Island in 1793 and Joseph Eve moved back to the United States about 1800. There was then no one to build the gin or to keep it in repair. According to the journal of a cotton planter in 1831 the ginning of cotton was again done by hand."

1830 Census Lived in Augusta Ward 3, Richmond County, Georgia Index ref. GA560129519

Dr. Joseph Eve 1760-1835: Married Hannah Singletary. He and was a scientist, inventor and poet. He is brother to Capt.Oswell Eve. In his 20s he invented a machine to separate seed from cotton. Many scientific and literary accomplishments are associated with his life. Among his friends were Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush. ®3633