Tag Archive for: #aroundoldgranville

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Black History in Old Granville County

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By the end of the American Revolution, the population of what was then known as Granville County was about 8,000 people. Of that number, 40 percent – or 3,200 – were enslaved.

The plantation system created by wealthy landowners was utterly dependent on that labor to get in tobacco and other crops.

But mostly, it was tobacco, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at the Richard Thornton Library in Oxford.

In their tri-weekly discussion Around Old Granville, Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris reviewed the lives of numerous prominent Black Americans who made a mark in their communities and beyond.

Up until the time of the Civil War, farms were getting bigger and bigger so owners could produce more and more tobacco. That meant the number of enslaved people grew, too. This was a common practice particularly in the northern parts of present-day Vance, Granville and Warren counties, Pace said.

But there also were many free African Americans living in the area before 1865, Pace said. He attributes that to this area’s proximity to the Virginia border. Virginia had passed a law in 1807 that said emancipated persons had one year to leave the state or risk being re-enslaved

“They didn’t want a lot of free blacks,” Pace said of the folks in Virginia, “so a bunch just came across the line.”

Some enslaved people planted crops on land given to them by their owners. They’d work on Sundays – their only day off – to tend their crops. Some planted tobacco, and over time, they saved up enough money to buy their freedom, Pace explained. Until Granville County passed a law in 1800 banning the practice.

One of the most prominent and well-known Blacks in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s was John Chavis. Born in Virginia to parents who were free Blacks, Chavis graduated from Princeton and Washington & Lee University and became a Presbyterian minister and a noted tutor to many children of wealthy White families.

“He was a brilliant guy,” Pace said. “He was very urbane, he was well read, knew the Greek classics. He had a lot in common with prominent wealthy landowners and by all accounts, was an excellent speaker.”

The Presbyterian Church was dedicated to the idea of improving the lives of black people, particularly those who lived in the pre-Civil War South. As a Presbyterian minister, Chavis was a key player in that mission.

Other prominent men included Henry Plummer Cheatham, James Hunter Young and George Clayton Shaw, all born between 1857 and 1863. Cheatham and Young both had white fathers. They became state legislators and their rise to prominence was well known.

Shaw, meanwhile, established Mary Potter Academy in Oxford in 1889 to educate African Americans. He was the principal until 1936. The school later became a private boarding school until the 1950’s when it became a public high school and later a middle school.

At about the same time that Shaw was establishing Mary Potter Academy in Oxford, there were similar efforts in Vance County as Henderson Institute and Kittrell College were being established.

“In the 1880’s, education is starting to become important,” Pace said, and it’s where many local African Americans made their mark.

Founded and operated by the United Presbyterian Church, Henderson Institute was originally established by the Freedmen’s Board. It was a four-year school – the only high school in this part of the state for African Americans, Pace noted.

John Adams Cotton led the school for 30 years. He was a Presbyterian minister and the namesake of Cotton Memorial Presbyterian Church in Henderson.

“The school stayed in business in one form or another until 1971,” Pace said.

The N.C. Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church established Kittrell Junior College in 1885-86. The two-year school was housed in the old hotel building in Kittrell for the first few years before James B. Duke dismantled numerous buildings on the Trinity campus and sold the bricks to the Kittrell school as he made space for what would become Duke University.

Warren County native John R. Hawkins was a driving force behind Kittrell College, Pace said. Hawkins joined the faculty and later was elected president of the school.

“People from all over the world came to Kittrell College.”

Now the site of the Kittrell Job Corps, the campus had a series of fires in the early 1970’s that destroyed those structures that had their beginnings in Durham.

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Stories Of The American Revolution From Old Granville County

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The phrases “Fourth of July “ and “Independence Day” are used interchangeably to note THE date when the American Colonists declared formal independence from Great Britain.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of that official Declaration of Independence, with ongoing celebrations marking the historic moment.

But it took eight years for the 13 Colonies – including North Carolina – to gain independence from Great Britain. What began in New England in April 1775 made a slow march south. Famous battles that took place in North Carolina include those at Guilford Courthouse near present-day Greensboro and Moores Creek near Wilmington.

And while there weren’t any battles fought in Granville County, local historian Mark Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris agree that the area contributed mightily to the effort.

Indeed, there were folks who lived in North Carolina in the 1760’s and 1770’s who had grown weary of British rule. In 1771, these “Regulators” took up arms against Gov. Tryon and his troops. They didn’t prevail, but Pace said the effort helped establish a pattern in North Carolina where the people didn’t like an overbearing and authoritative government.

“By the time the unrest from New England came, they were ready,” Pace said.

The colony was fairly evenly divided between Patriots and Loyalists – a third were loyal to the Crown of England, a third supported independence and a third were going to wait to see which side prevailed and then side with the winner. Not surprisingly, wealthy landowners tended to side with Loyalists, with smaller farmers feeling a greater economic pinch from all the taxes imposed on them by the British.

The way Pace and Harris figure it, there were about 600 individuals from the original Granville County that served in the American Revolution. Of that number, about 35 lost their lives in the war.

But “service” isn’t limited to donning a uniform and seeing action on the battlefield.

There were key figures from North Carolina who played integral roles during this eight-year struggle for freedom, among them Thomas Person, Gen. Jethro Sumner, Col. Robert Burton and Col. John Williams, just to name a few.

Person was a general in the militia and Pace called him a “driving force” behind independence.

Although he didn’t see much action on the battlefield, Person was in charge of training troops and, as quartermaster general, provided food, weapons and lodging. He ponied up a lot of his own money to the war effort, Pace said, and had a training facility at Goshen, his plantation near what is now Berea in Granville County.

Like Person, Sumner, who lived in present-day Warren County, trained troops. With his “regular army” background, Gen. Nathanael Greene sought his help and Sumner’s brigades fought in South Carolina at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in 1781. Sumner missed out on the famous Guilford Courthouse battle in March 1781, but his remains were re-interred there in 1891 to commemorate his contributions to the Revolution.

Burton hailed from Williamsboro and lived in a home called Blooming Hope, later changed to Cedar Walk. Pace said he was a significant figure in establishing Patriot troops and getting them organized.

Incidentally, Burton ran a distillery and sold livestock, Pace said. There’s a ledger entry from 1774 that notes the sale of a gray mare to a member of the Transylvania Company that helped to settle Tennessee and Kentucky. Who was it? A fellow named Daniel Boone.

Williams, for whom the Vance County community of Williamsboro is named, was one of the signers of the Articles of Confederation, which was used as a framework for governance between 1775 and 1789, when the U.S. Constitution was finally in place.

The Articles of Confederation focused on keeping a federal style of government weak – there was no president, no executive branch, no national army or national tax as part of these articles, Pace explained.

For the period around the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, the government of North Carolina was moved temporarily from Hillsborough to Williamsboro and legislators stayed at Williams’s house.

Williams’s home, Montpelier, was supposed to be “the nicest old home in Williamsboro,” Pace said.

The home burned in 1885, when it was owned by the Bullock family. The home was rebuilt and that home burned around 2000. Williams, Burton and Leonard Henderson, for whom the city of Henderson is named, are all buried on the property.

If you’d like to research your family tree to find out if your ancestors fought in the American Revolution, check out the North Carolina Room at Thornton Library in Oxford. In addition to online research tools like ancestry.com, the North Carolina Room has a five-volume set of the Daughters of the American Revolution that includes information on every soldier they know of who fought in battles between 1775 and 1783.

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(This story was originally posted on Jan. 29, 2026)

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – National Register of Historic Places In Granville, Vance

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Asking local historian Mark Pace to divulge which old house is his very favorite is akin to asking a parent which of their children they prefer: indeed, there may be one, but you don’t want to admit it.

In their discussion of old homes in the area listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Pace singled out Vance County’s Pleasant Hill, softening his pronouncement a bit by saying it’s one of his favorites.

There certainly are a lot of contenders in the four-county area, and WIZS’s Bill Harris and Pace reviewed a number of homes and other structures listed on the National Register in Vance and Granville counties on Thursday’s TownTalk segment of Around Old Granville.

Now known as Rivenoak, the stately old home near Middleburg underwent a restoration in the late 1970’s and gained its National Register status in 1979.

And as impressive as the home is, with its double-shoulder brick chimneys (special-ordered from Williamsburg), and Greek Revival style with Georgian elements, it’s the family that built it and lived there that adds to its significance, Pace said.

The family gained prominence for developing the railroad in the area, and for a period of more than half a century between 1778 and 1848, there was a member of the Hawkins family serving in state government.

Future N.C. Governor William Hawkins was probably born at Pleasant Hill, built by his grandfather, Philemon Hawkins, Jr. Research confirms that at least part of it was built as early as 1760.

And those chimneys, located on either side of the home? “Those chimneys are really impressive,” Pace said. Each chimney is constructed of about 20,000 bricks – that’s 80,000 bricks. All imported from Virginia.

Homes like Pleasant Hill are nominated and then placed on a study list before getting their official designation.

Not all of the structures are homes, though, Harris noted. There are farms, churches, bank buildings and more that share spots on the National Register.

Local history buffs may be familiar with Henderson’s Historic District, which Pace said contains 91 of the county’s 114 historic structures.

As he explained, Henderson was a pretty big deal from, say, the 1800’s to the 1940s and 50s.

“There was a lot of impressive architecture that you won’t find anywhere else in North Carolina,” he said. There were several architecture firms located in Henderson. Steve Flannagan designed First Methodist Church and the original Henderson High School, for example. And the iconic fire station and clock tower? Yep, local architect Robert A. Bunn designed it.

Another local architect, James Thrower, designed the original courthouse. It wasn’t until Frank Milburn designed a major renovation that the columns were added.

So many of the old architectural gems remain today in Henderson’s historic district, a tribute to the community’s interest in preserving and repurposing buildings with historic significance.

Like Pleasant Hill, there are numerous homes dotting the countryside that once were part of huge plantations. Ashland near Satterwhite Point, Machpelah and Pool Rock close to Townsville, and Ashburn Hall near Kittrell are some examples.

Many have been lovingly restored and meticulously maintained over the years, preserving those architectural details that make them exemplars of the periods when they were built.

But there’s one house on the National Register that was neither showy nor huge, but impressive all the same.

During a restoration project a decade or so ago, workers removed some siding from a structure to reveal a log home that was built in the 1760’s. Tests on the yellow pine in the center part of the home reveal they were felled in the winter of 1763, according to information on the nomination form that was submitted in 2014.

Present-day Granville County has its share of historically significant homes and buildings, too, but like Vance County, the northern portion of the county has more listed on the National Register than the southern portion.

The Allen-Mangum house in the community of Grissom in southern Granville County was built in the mid- to late-1800’s. It was one of more than 30 Granville County structures added to the National Register in 1988.

This coincided with the publication of an architectural survey, Pace said, that is still the “go-to” reference book for historic architecture.

Brassfield Baptist Church near Wilton is the oldest church in the county, built in the 1840’s. It’s on the list, as is the First National Bank Building in Creedmoor.

Pace said the Obediah Winston Farm in Creedmoor is on the list because “it was one of the most intact old-timey tobacco farms in existence,” with outbuildings intact to give a true flavor of what tobacco production involved.

Red Hill, on Townsville Road off Highway 15 near the Virginia line, has a few different styles, thanks to several renovations and additions over the years. The oldest part of the house dates to 1776.

There’s Hill Airy, which has been on the register since 1974, part of the expansive Gregory family holdings.

Another one of the Gregory family plantations, Elmwood, is what Pace calls one of the finest Georgian style homes in Granville County. Built it 1850, it had been abandoned for decades.

Pace said he was sure the home was “as absolute goner.” All the interior features had been removed over the years, leaving just a shell of a building.

But thanks to a renovation project, Pace calls it “one of the most impressive historic structures” in the county.

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(This story was originally posted on January 8, 2026.)

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – National Registry of Historic Places in Old Granville, Franklin & Warren

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Anyone interested in historical architecture and preservation of homes, businesses or other structures that have been around a really long time surely would have a field day in the four-county area. Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties are replete with buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which operates under the auspices of the National Parks Service.

If you’ve ever wondered how these homes, churches and other buildings get on “the list,” WIZS’s Bill Harris can provide a firsthand account: His family home is set to be included on the National Register in 2026.

Harris and local historian Mark Pace ran through a list of properties in Franklin and Warren counties on Wednesday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

One of the newest additions to the Warren County list is All Saints Episcopal Church, officially included in August 2025.

The church served the African American community in the Warrenton area beginning in the 1910’s. The famous Delany sisters – known for their longevity – have a connection to the stone veneer church; their father was pastor there in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Like so many of the historic structures you’ll find on “the list,” All Saints is still standing today. But, as Pace pointed out, “just because a house is on the national register doesn’t mean it will be preserved forever.”

The Little Manor is one such example of a home still listed but is now in ruins.

According to Pace, Warren County has 228 total structures listed on the National Register – 27 individual buildings and 202 included in the Warrenton historic district. Franklin County has 240 structures – 213 of which are situated in Louisburg’s historic district.

A structure must be nominated for inclusion on the National Register, so there needs to be an advocate of some sort to fill out and submit the paperwork that’s involved.

According to information on the National Parks Service website, a property must meet the National Register Criteria for Evaluation that includes the property’s age, significance and integrity.

For all you Baby Boomers out there, don’t be shocked: a structure can be considered historic if it’s at least 50 years old.

But, Pace said, the list includes more than just homes or other structures that have been around for centuries. For instance, the Wheless home in Louisburg was built in the mid 1950’s.

It meets the age criteria – barely – but it’s the style of architecture – reminiscent of the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright – that put this relatively young home among other homes that have graced the landscape for centuries.

Franklin County has many entries on “the list,” but there are many more located in northern Franklin County than in the southern part of the county, Harris said.

One of the newer additions is the Pearce-Massey-Stallings in southern Franklin County. It was nominated about five years ago and Harris described it as a “handsome” house built in a couple of different sections, the older back part dating back to about 1820.

The front was added about 1910, but the property is also significant because of the large number of outbuildings that are still standing. It’s also remains in the family, Pace said.

Another example of generations of ownership by the same family of a historic property is Cassine, near Louisburg. Descendents of the original members of the Perry family retain ownership of this historic property, which dates back to the 1760’s.

Want to check out some of these examples of historic architecture? Arm yourself with a list available at https://www.hpo.nc.gov/ or bring along the county’s architectural survey and chances are you’ll wend your way by a good number of homes, churches – and if you’re in the Inez area of Warren County – even a fire tower, all considered worthy of inclusion on that NPS’s National Register of Historic Places.

Just remember to drive by – don’t trespass, Pace reminds.

“Most of us are proud of our old houses,” Harris said. So if you happen to see someone out in the yard when you’re driving by, it could be worth a try to stop in and say hello. You might end up getting a tour.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – National Register of Historic Places in Old Granville pt. 1

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Bill Harris and Mark Pace dig deep into the places around Old Granville County that are a part of the National Register of Historic Places.

(Our WIZS written coverage will appear here soon.)

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Sassafras Fork Township

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OK, local history buffs, here’s a question for you:

What do the Declaration of Independence, inventor of a Space-Age portable stereo and the poet Langston Hughes all have in common?

Ready for the answer?

Sassafras Fork township.

Northern Granville County residents may be more familiar with Sassafras Fork than others, but back in the 1760’s, Sassafras Fork encompassed the general area now known as Bullock, Grassy Creek, Gela, Stovall and Soudan, just across the NC/VA border.

WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace talked about what that area used to look like in the recurring TownTalk segment “Around Old Granville.”

Now, here’s how those three seemingly unrelated items intersect in northern Granville County:

The town of Stovall recently held a Harvest Festival, featuring a celebration of one of its famous residents, John Penn. Penn was one of the state’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence and he moved from Virginia to North Carolina in part because there were too many lawyers where he was from in Virginia, but also because his wife’s family lived near Sassafras Fork.

Now, about that Space-Age portable radio…

Pratt Winston, who died in 2024, was an entrepreneur and inventor. He created the iconic Weltron radio product line, which sold all over the world into the late 70’s.

Winston’s home, Rose Hill, originally was part of the Speed holdings, still stands.

Pace said it’s probably the oldest brick home in the area, having been built around 1834. The two-story Greek Revival-style home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

Ready to make the connection between Sassafras Fork and Langston Hughes?

“Shaw School was so well known back in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, Pace said, that it was able to attract numerous speakers of some renown.

The poet Langston Hughes, of Harlem Renaissance fame, visited the school in 1953 for a poetry reading, Pace said.

At the time of Hughes’s visit, Stovall was enjoying a population of close to 500, but over time, that number dwindled.

The 2010 Census reported just more than 400 people living in Stovall, and that number dropped to 324 in the 2020 count.

But Stovall once boasted a booming economy for the times – with a funeral home, doctors, a bank, factories, lumber mill, hotel, numerous churches and a railway station. There were close to 800 people living in Stovall in the 1920’s, Pace said.

A man named John Stovall gave land to have the rail depot put on his land, which is what prompted the name change from Sassafras Fork to Stovall, he said.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – PCB Landfill of Warren County

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The tiny community of Afton in Warren County was at the center of a big environmental mess in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when the state bought up some land to build a landfill to store hazardous waste.

That hazardous waste was a PCB-laced oil, a product that had been used for decades to help cool electric transformers. When the chemical was declared illegal because of health implications, the companies that used it had to have somewhere for it to go, said local historian Mark Pace.

Under the cover of darkness, trucks drove along rural roads in out-of-the-way counties like Warren and dumped the oily substance along the roadsides. More than 200 miles of roads in Warren County had that familiar brown grass – dead grass – where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.

There were some spots in Franklin County, too, that were affected. WIZS’s Bill Harris said he remembers riding the school bus as a teenager and seeing the brown grass along the side of the road.

Harris and Pace talked about the protests that ensued, as the state went head-to-head with community activists in opposition to the dump in Thursday’s TownTalk feature, Around Old Granville.

Pace said the state got involved in the disposal of PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls –

in the summer of 1978, and it was in 1982 that civil rights leader the Rev. Ben Chavis, is credited with coining the term “environmental racism” to describe the placement of the landfill.

In 1980, Warren County was among the state’s poorest counties, majority African American and lagged behind in most areas, including income. Close to half of the workforce commuted out of Warren County to work, Pace said.

It didn’t take long for leaders to select Warren County – a county once known for producing prominent politicians – as the site of a toxic dump. And trucks beginning to haul the tainted soil to the landfill sparked protests that lasted for weeks.

The protests made national headlines, especially when notables like the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Floyd McKissick, the Rev. Leon White and Golden Frinks showed up in support of protesters.

More than 500 people were arrested over the course of six weeks or so, Pace said, as the non-violent protests continued.

“These people literally laid down in front of these dump trucks,” Pace said. More than 7,000 truckloads of tainted soil was brought to the landfill, scraped up from those rural roadsides where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.

A company in Raleigh, Ward Transfer Co., disposed of materials like PCBs, but there was so much of it –  and it was going to cost a lot of money to send it to an incinerator for proper disposal, Pace said.

“So they just loaded up a truck in the middle of the night and rode up and down roads,” he said, choosing rural, remote places. Like Warren County.

The owner ultimately was caught, fined and sent to prison.

But that still left the problem of what to do with the tainted soil. It had to be removed and put somewhere.

That “somewhere” ended up being a 20-acre landfill site in Warren County.

It was fraught with problems, Pace said, including inadequate liners to keep the landfill contents from seeping out into the groundwater.

Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr. promised to “detoxify” the landfill when the money was available and the technology was developed to do it.

In 1993, with $13 million from the EPA, 60 tons of the toxic contents of the landfill were declared detoxified by conducting a complex process that separates the moisture from the soil and then chemically removes the toxins.

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Ridgeway

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Visitors to New York City back in the late 1800’s may have seen advertisements from Ridgeway

Estates Co., a group of local men who had big plans for enticing Northerners to move South, to the tiny little community that sits today between Middleburg and Norlina, just over the Warren County line.

This corporation had big plans – the Raleigh to Gaston railroad had a stop in Ridgeway, and there was even a fancy new 3-story brick hotel right across from the depot with a h 27-stall barn, carriage houses and all the finest amenities a traveler could want.

Yep, thing were looking up in Ridgeway. The group of men created a vision of a town with streets laid out and 1,800 building lots on about 350 acres of property. All they needed were the buyers.

“It didn’t take off like they anticipated,” said local historian Mark Pace on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.

Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris talked about the community known for its German settlers and super-sweet cantaloupes. In 1869, Ridgeway became an incorporated township in anticipation of the influx of Northerners, Pace said. There’s a stone marker near what would have been the center of town, which lost its charter about 10 years later.

In 1901, a man by the name of Ed Petar happened to plant a few cantaloupe seeds in the Ridgeway area and, it turns out, the ripe melons were really sweet and delicious. From that modest beginning grew a craze for the super-sweet produce that lasts to this day. By 1932, with the help of the railroad, thousands of crates of cantaloupes were shipped from Ridgeway. The peak year was 1956, Pace said, when 30,000 crates of the smallish melon with the light orange flesh and ropy exterior found their way all across the country via refrigerated trucks and boxcars.

Pace said that 75 percent of the cantaloupes grown in Ridgeway at the time were cultivated by farmers of German descent. Families with surnames like Kilian, Holtzmann, Bender and Daeke – just to name a few – began to settle in little ol’ Ridgeway.

But how’d they know to come? It seems a traveling preacher with ties to the German community and the Lutheran Church in Germany started spreading the word about the area. He was a German-born missionary and when he came upon the advertisements in New York City, he translated them and sent them to friends in Germany.

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Henderson Cotton Mill Strike Pt.2

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The Henderson cotton mill strike of 1958 began as a relatively peaceful protest when workers and company leaders couldn’t agree about how to settle disagreements – for years, both sides had agreed to use arbitration as a way to settle disputes about a variety of grievances, said local historian Mark Pace.

And, Pace said, it seemed to work out that, over those years, about half the judgments were found in favor of the workers, and half in favor of the company.

The strike made headlines across the country and beyond, Pace noted in Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk with WIZS’s Bill Harris. And in February 1959, after months of being shut down, the mill management decided to take action.

“The Coopers put out a call for strike breakers,” Pace said. “they wanted to run one shift and crank up production.” The inventory of yarns and cotton that had been stockpiled was running low, and so the mill needed to be running again.

“Until that point, the strike had been relatively peaceful,” Pace said. But when strikebreakers were brought in, that’s when things turned violent.

There were at least 16 cases of bombings between February and May 1959. Warehouses were bombed, homes were bombed, windows shot out. About 150 people were arrested, but Pace said local law enforcement was stretched beyond its limits.

The mills in North Henderson and South Henderson both were outside the city limits, so it was up to the sheriff’s office to keep things calm near the mills as best they could.

Gov. Luther Hodges, himself once a textile mill vice president, Pace explained, called the State Highway Patrol into action to help keep the peace in Henderson. Eventually, however, the National Guard got involved.

A man making a cotton delivery to one of the mills was attacked by a mob of protesters,prompting a judge to rule that a maximum of eight strikers could be at the mill gate at any one time.

“At this point the textile workers were desperate,” Pace said. “They had tried going on strike, but that had not worked.” Although the union gave them stipends, it wasn’t enough.

And the longer the strike lasted, the less money the union had available.

In May 1961, there was a call to end the strike.

By then, however, the mills were back to running three full shifts – this time with non-union workers. Pace said 90 percent of the people who went on strike never went back to work at the cotton mills.

Harriet-Henderson was Vance County’s largest employer from 1895 to 2003 and had a footprint of close to half a million square feet at the height of its success.

The strike was significant, “not just for Henderson but for the South,” Pace said. The textile workers’ strike in Henderson was the last major attempt by unions to build effective unions in the southern United States in the textile industry, which was the largest industry in the South at that time, he said.

“By and large, they failed,” he said.

 

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mill Strike of 1958

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Many folks who were born and raised in Henderson or Vance County either remember the 1958 cotton mill strike or have grown up hearing stories about it. But even the youngest mill workers during that time are in their 80’s now, so there are fewer and fewer folks still alive to tell the story of how the strike affected the community then and now, more than 60 years later.

In Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk, WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace add some context to the events that led up to the strike, which lasted until 1961.

In 1895, brothers David Y. and John D. Cooper founded the Henderson Cotton Mill in North Henderson.

They’d made their money in the tobacco business after the Civil War ended and later set their sights on establishing a mill.

Textiles, tobacco and furniture, Pace said, were all North Carolina industries that began with a “relatively cheap raw material that you could manipulate into something much more profitable.”

The profit margins were much higher in textiles than for, say, tobacco, but it came with more risk, Pace explained.

The price and quality of the raw material, workers’ wages and overseas competition were just some of the factors that the Cooper family had to consider with the mills, which numbered three by 1913. Harriet Mills opened in South Henderson in 1909 and then Harriet Plant No. 2 opened in 1913.

“It took off like gangbusters,” Pace said. Indeed, the textile industry was not only big in Henderson, but also in the southern United States, possibly “the most important industrial endeavor in the South, even up until the 1980’s and 1990’s,” Pace said.

It was 1943 when the union first came to the Harriet and Henderson plants, he said. By this time the mills were under the leadership of John D. Cooper, Jr., who ran it until 1962, Pace said. By the time World War II ended, the U.S. found itself in the unique position of being pretty much the only textile producers left – between the devastation across Europe and civil wars in India and Pakistan, the domestic textile industry was looking good.

Harris said a post-war economic boom led to a 1949 downturn, and as other countries rebuilt and retooled, it was more difficult for the local mills to keep their equipment current.

“They were very forward thinking,” Pace said, and wanted badly to modernize the mills after World War II, but faced years long backorders as a result of post-War reconstruction.

Throw in the rise of synthetic textiles like rayon and nylon – no cotton needed – and the textile industry began to falter.

Harriet and Henderson produced thread and yarn from the raw cotton, and employed as many as 1,000 people during its peak, when it was the largest yarn manufacturer.

“Within the confines of the industry,” Pace said, the Coopers were “very innovative and forward-thinking.”

To keep the mills running despite high absenteeism, management had dozens of employees at the ready each day to fill jobs when employees didn’t show up for work, Pace said. Even if they weren’t needed inside the mill, the stand-by workers would get two hours’ pay for showing up.

“A lot of plant managers would not have put up with that,” Pace said of the often high absentee rate. “But the Coopers wanted the work force to be happy.”

Women made up half the work force, and sometimes had to take off with little or no prior notice but management tolerated it because they felt an obligation to the workers, he added.

Pace said he considers the mill strike of 1958 as one of the top two or three most important events in the history of Vance County, “right up there with Civil Rights or the coming of the railroad and the creation of the tobacco industry.”

Listen back to the entire show at www.wizs.com.

 

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