Sources

Bessemer City Cotton Mills
Bessemer City, NC
Circa 1890
(Building Certification #1.004)

Some would call the beginnings of the Bessemer City Cotton Mills inauspicious, starting with its founder. The mills were just one business venture in a series of cotton mills established and eventually sold by John Askew Smith, one of the founders of Bessemer City, located in Gaston County, North Carolina.

In addition to his ventures in cotton, Smith was publisher of the town newspaper. As the story goes, he built a hotel high above the town on Whetstone Mountain, from which he would use a spyglass to look down on the town below, observing the actions of the townsfolk and then writing about them in the paper. It was most certainly an unconventional way of reporting, a trait that seemed to extend to his other business endeavors. According to Robert A. Ragan, author of several works about the Gaston County textile industry and a descendant of one of the county's original textile families, "Smith and his partner, J.A. Pinchback, were better dreamers than doers or accomplished businessmen."

Chartered in 1897, the Bessemer City Cotton Mills did not open for several years, eventually going into operation sometime in 1901 or 1902. At the time, cotton mills and textiles were the lifeblood of the town and the economic engine that drove the entire South. Operating on a paternalistic system, mill owners built homes for workers and erected stores and schools for their families. The costs of water, fuel and light were deducted from the workers' pay. For those who ran low on funds between paychecks, some mills issued coupons or metal tokens to be used as currency, with the amount drawn against the next month's wages.

"The cotton mills pretty much were the town," said Allan Farris, city manager and 51-year resident of Bessemer City. Farris used to take dinner to his uncle who worked in the mills and readily recalls the constant noise and cotton dust.

In just a few years, the Bessemer City Cotton Mills had reached a size of 9,000 spindles and 414 looms, only to fail after a national depression in 1908. It changed hands several times until 1914, when M. Gambrill and associates bought the property. The partners of M. Grambrill, who operated out of Maryland and later New York as Gambrill & Melville Mills Co., also purchased the old Smith mill next door, which by then was Saunders Spinning Co.

Gambrill & Melville operated the two facilities as one for the next 48 years. By World War I, the textile industry in all of Gaston County had experienced phenomenal growth. Local promoters continued organizing new mills, and the price of a share of the stock in a new venture would double before a brick was laid. The cotton industry weathered the Great Depression and union strikes, but the downward pressure on prices caused by low-wage foreign competition (not domestic woes) would finally mark the decline of cotton mills in Gaston County.

In the case of the Bessemer City Cotton Mills, Gambrill & Melville sold the adjoining mills to Fulton Industries of Atlanta in 1963. Fulton sold five years later to McBess Industries, a low-margin operation, which kept the textile mills going another 15 years until it went out of business. Atlantic Spinners Inc. took up residence for a while in part of the aging facility, but most of the structure stood empty.

Eventually, it became clear that the former Bessemer City Cotton Mills were aging structures that would probably never function again as a viable business.

According to Farris, townspeople asked its last owners to save it, as the mill had special meaning for the town. The taller of the mill's two square towers was the landmark by which townspeople directed out-of-towners, and every year the tower was decorated for Christmas. It became, Farris said, symbolic of Bessemer City.

The owners tried to honor the townspeople's request to keep the mill standing. Plans to put the facility to new use, such as a mall for new businesses, were considered. In the end, though, it was found to be structurally unsound. The old mill and town landmark came down, but rather than being demolished, it was carefully deconstructed by Turning House, and the beautiful heart pine and oak from the mills were reclaimed and made into solid wood furniture. In this special way, the old cotton mills live on.

Sources: The Textile Heritage of Gaston County, North Carolina, 1848-2000: One Hundred Mills and the Men Who Built Them by Robert A. Ragan (2001); Centennial 1893-1993: Bessemer City, North Carolina edited by Charlotte Crawford, Hilda Gunst, Enid Kiefer and Elizabeth Thornburg (1993); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly (1987); Interviews with Allen Farris, Robert Ragan and Turning House Millworks (2009).