Rocky Mount Mills

About this property

Rocky Mount Mills, located in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, was the second cotton mill constructed in the state of North Carolina, dating back to 1816. Capitol Broadcasting Company bought the 150-acre (61 ha) mills in the 2007 and has since redeveloped it into a mixed-use campus of breweries, restaurants, lofts, office, and event space. The first use of slave labor in a cotton mill in North Carolina occurred in 1817, when Colonel Joel Battle and Henry A. Donaldson founded the Rocky Mount Mills on the Tar River. The mills had over two thousand spindles and had a working force made of only black people. The majority were slaves but a few were free people. Black people were continuously used by the mills for thirty-four years. In 1825, Henry A. Donaldson built a new mill in Fayetteville roughly the size of the one in Rocky Mount. The mill in Fayetteville used only slaves. "...Especially before the Civil War, according to historian Holland Thompson, "a majority of the people in the Middle and Western counties [of North Carolina] dressed chiefly in the clothes of domestic or local manufacture." A superintendent of the Rocky Mount Mills recalled that in the 1850s he sold most of the coarse yarns produced at the mill "in five pound bundles for the country trade- this was woven by the country women on hand looms." He sold the surplus yarns for "coarse filling for the Philadelphia market." During the antebellum period and well into the twentieth century, North Carolina was known for its "little spinning mills" that produced lower grades of yarn for home manufacture and later for the weaving mills of New England and the Middle Atlantic States." During the last months of the conflict, the Confederacy drew its entire supply of textile goods from North Carolina mills. Northern troops recognized the significance of the textile industry's contribution to the war effort. In raids led by General William T. Sherman, Union troops laid waste to most of Eastern North Carolina's manufacturing base by burning the Rocky Mount Mill on the Tar River, the Great Falls Mill in Rockingham, NC, and five of the six mills in the Fayetteville vicinity. In the western counties, Union General George Stoneman stationed his cavalry in the Fries Woolen and Cotton Mill while his troops destroyed nearly 1,700 bales of cotton the company had stored in High Point, NC. Stoneman's raiders also set fire to Patterson's Mill in Caldwell County, a woolen mill in Guilford County, and a cotton mill in Salisbury, NC that had served as a Confederate prison during the war. Those mills that escaped direct physical destruction during the final months of the war nevertheless entered the postwar period in a weakened condition with little operating capital, obsolete or worn-out machinery, and a sharply reduced demand from local markets.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Nash County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Nash County.

More historic places in North Carolina

Browse all historic places in North Carolina.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

North Carolina history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.