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In front of the museum is the hipped-roofed brick cotton gin, built as the Gilmore Ginnery, where Riley B. King worked before he became famous as blues musician B. B. King. A shed-roofed porch across the front remains, but on the west side, the gabled drive-through for unloading cotton has been removed. In 2008, the long-vacant building was renovated as a meeting and exhibition space for the museum, which stretches behind the gin on a perpendicular axis. Wood planks and corrugated metal clad the addition, recalling the horizontal aesthetic and industrial texture of the standardized metal cotton gins of the 1930s and later.