Erlanger, once the promised land

 

Parkdale Mill, Lexington NC, June 15, 2024

High cotton, Stanly County

Loray tower, Christmas Day 2011

Loray

photographs: Kim Church

Many thanks to Lucy Penegar and Preservation North Carolina.

Lewis Hine, photographer, activist

 

Loray Mill, 1908



Loray girls, 1908


Images from the exhibit, "Lewis Hine: Exposing Child Labor in North Carolina, 1908-1918," North Carolina Museum of History.

Triangle Fire, 100 years later

Workers from as far away as California gathered in New York on March 25 to observe the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  A stirring experience, being in that crowd.  We had sunshine; we had commemorative shirts and hats and buttons and signs; we had solemn, earnest speakers; we had a sense of purpose.  What we were missing was music.  This country desperately needs some new union songs.

* * *

The Villager

Volume 80, Number 42 | March 17 - 23, 2011
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933

Thousands will mark Triangle factory fire 100th anniversary

By Albert Amateau

On Saturday afternoon near closing time on March 25, 1911, a fire flared up in a scrap bin on the eighth floor of the Asch Building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory employed about 500 young workers on the top three floors.

Within a half-hour, the fire raged through the lint-laden eighth, ninth and 10th floors where 146 workers, mostly Jewish and Italian girls from immigrant families, lost their lives either in the fire or on the pavement below where 62 of them jumped to escape the inferno.

The door to the Washington Place stairway was locked; the single exterior fire escape soon collapsed from heat and excess weight, spilling victims to the pavement 100 feet below. The Fire Department’s ladder reached only to the sixth floor.

The owners of Triangle Shirtwaist, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were in their factory with their young sons when the fire broke out but they were able to reach the building’s roof and survived. The two owners stood trial for negligent homicide but they were acquitted when their lawyer, Max Steuer, suggested that the surviving victims’ testimony was staged and that prosecutors failed to prove the owners knew that any exit doors were locked at the time of the fire.

However, the owners lost a civil suit in 1913 and had to pay the plaintiffs compensation of $75 for each deceased victim. Nevertheless, Blanck and Harris collected insurance of about $60,000 more than their reported losses, or about $400 per casualty, according to the Web site of the Kheel Archives of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

On Fri., March 25, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the fire, Washington Place between Washington Square East and Broadway will be crowded with an expected 10,000 people commemorating the tragedy that sparked epochal changes in laws regarding safety and working conditions.

Organized by the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, along with Workers United — the labor union that evolved from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union — a procession will begin at 9:30 a.m. at Union Square.



film & photo collage: Kim Church



Erlanger Mill Village

The mill village where my grandmother lived and worked most of her life, and where I spent Sunday afternoons and many long summer days when I was growing up, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.


My grandmother's house, 223 Hames Street.  In disrepair now,
but not beyond salvation.  Which is how my grandmother
regarded most things.



Excerpts from the National Register nomination document:

The houses fall into two main categories: simple, basic house types with spare detailing and Craftsman Bungalows, some of which are remarkably stylish for a mill village. The more basic house types are, for the most part, distributed throughout the earlier sections of the village — a roughly eight-block area just north, east, and south of the mill complex that was built out by 1916-17. In keeping with dwelling types found in other North Carolina mill villages, the majority of these early houses are modest one-story single and double-pile side-gable-roofed dwellings with shed-roofed front porches; a few L-plan, front-gable, and pyramidal-roofed were also erected during this initial construction phase. 

Bungalow, Broad Street

The distinctive bungalows appear in the next development period (1917-23), when approximately fourteen blocks on Broad, Olympia, First and Second Rainbow, and the south end of Short Streets were laid out. The dwellings on the north side of Second Rainbow Street, erected between 1923 and 1929, were the last to be constructed. A 1917 Erlanger Mill Company recruiting brochure states that "the employees' cottages in the newer portion of the village are the most modern bungalow designs, being built with great individuality from thirty original special drawings." Mill employees remember that the houses were painted "green, maroon, and brown" while owned by Erlanger.
 


Double dormers, Broad Street

Historical Background: New York textile magnates Abraham and Charles Erlanger purchased a 250-acre portion of the Grimes estate north of Lexington for a new mill site in 1911. The Erlanger brothers wanted their own source of checked cotton dimity fabric for the one-piece men's underwear (union suits) manufactured for the BVD company in their Baltimore plant, and a group of Lexington businessmen, led by George Mountcastle, persuaded them to locate a production facility in North Carolina. Charles Erlanger's son Milton hired local and out-of-state carpenters and masons to build Erlanger Cotton Mills and supervised the undertaking that began with the construction of a concrete dam in December 1913.

A long, rectangular, brick building with a two-story main mill at the south end, a larger one-story weave shed at the north end, and a two-story picker room in between encompassed the eastern section of the 1913 Erlanger Cotton Mills complex. This building originally housed 25,600 steam-powered spindles and 680 looms; the first cloth was woven on March 28, 1914. A boiler house and turbine room extended from the east elevation of the main mill. Early photographs of the east elevation illustrate that the area bordering Mill Street was nicely landscaped with small trees, a variety of shrubs, and a paved sidewalk. The western section of the mill complex included a two-story brick warehouse (divided into three sections by interior firewalls) with one-story waste and opener rooms on the north end. The large rectangular reservoir north of the warehouse and two towers between the main mill and the warehouse supplied water to the mill's sprinkler system.

Production doubled by 1916 with the introduction of two labor shifts and the installation of new equipment and facilities including 15,360 additional spindles, 420 new looms, and a 5,000-spindle yarn plant. Erlanger Mills employed approximately 1,400 workers during its first years of operation and produced eight million yards of fabric annually. Mill employees worked an average of fifty-five hours a week and lived in the village of frame houses surrounding the mill complex. Workers could rent a variety of houses at the rate of twenty-five cents per room per week, which included the cost of electric lights, water, and sewer.

The Erlanger Company published the first issue of The Erlanger Community, an illustrated newsletter that contained commentary on life in the mill village, in November 1919. A letter from Dr. P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of Education, to Erlanger residents declared that: "Erlanger is beautiful for its broad streets and clean sidewalks, its cozy houses with their large yards ... its playgrounds and its plots of ground for the common use of the people.... Close enough to the town of Lexington and the railroad station to give the needed contact to the outside world, Erlanger is still free from the crowding and noise and dust and dissipations and vices of the city."



A rare two-story


The Erlanger Cotton Mills complex included an office (circa 1915), additional warehouses north and south of the reservoir, and a two-story yarn mill (completed in 1916) off the main mill's southeast corner by 1923. A one-story brick cloth room and storage space stood directly west of the of the north end of the main mill building. The warehouse north of the reservoir was expanded between 1926 and 1929. Production shifted to cotton dress and shirt fabrics around 1925, when men started wearing two-piece underwear instead of union suits. The Erlanger plant included 46,000 steam- and electric-powered spindles and 1,240 cloth looms operated by 1,600 employees by 1927, when annual production was twenty million yards of cotton fabric. The growing popularity of rayon fabrics in the early 1930s resulted in the gradual incorporation of synthetic fibers into Erlanger products, which translated into a need for new equipment and the space to house it.



One of the newly restored houses on Park Circle



Modifications to the Erlanger plant reflected changes in the textile industry as a whole, as textile manufacturers focused on expanding productive capacity, improving textile quality, and reducing labor costs in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The mechanization of the textile industry during this period resulted in the loss of jobs, decreased pay, and poor working conditions; unions consequently found more support among mill employees. The Great Depression further contributed to layoffs and pay cuts at Erlanger and elsewhere, and set the stage for mill workers across the South to participate in the General Textile Strike of 1934. The strike temporarily shut down the Erlanger plant, and after the strike ended the Erlanger Mill Company fired known union sympathizers.

   

Alley behind Park Circle: no dumping



Text excerpted from: Erlanger Mill Village Historic District, nomination document, 2008, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Washington DC. 

Thanks to my mother for her help and company.