Cotton Hall was built in the mid-1930s by Earnest and Ella Sheffield. The building was built as a bonded cotton warehouse that stored cotton that was ginned at the Sheffield Gin, which was located directly across the street where the parking lot is now located.
The warehouse was built as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The government would loan farmers money to grow cotton if the cotton was stored in a bonded warehouse. However, the warehouse was in operation for only five years, because of one tiny thing our government had not planned for… the boll weevil.
Earnest Sheffield paid the laborers who built his new warehouse 50 ¢ a day. According to his grandson B.A. Jones, Sr., he sat in the doorway and supervised every nail that was driven.
The building is approximately 150 feet by 100 feet, and is made of bricks and concrete, supported by forty rough-cut heart pine timbers. A second owner purchased the building with the intentions of salvaging the bricks. He found this feat to be impossible, however, due to the building’s sturdy construction.
The building sat vacant from the 1940’s onward, and gradually became a community
storage bin until 1994, when The Colquitt Miller Arts Council borrowed the building from the owner, Lavon Hall, to perform Swamp Gravy. That was the same year the Georgia General Assembly proclaimed Swamp Gravy the Official Folk-Life Play of Georgia.
The building was cleaned out with the help of Don Chandler and the Georgia Department of Corrections. That first major production set into motion many changes for Cotton Hall. Newton Allen, a former resident of Colquitt, attended one of those first ten performances in Cotton Hall and was so moved that he made a donation that enabled the Arts Council to purchase the building.
Then, in 1995, a Capital Campaign was held to renovate the theater, install heating and cooling, and replace the roof. Cotton Hall is now the theater you see around you, with design inspired by the layout of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. The theater seats 284 audience members and upwards of 80 cast members every year in March and October for each new edition of Swamp Gravy.
Cotton Hall 