Cotton Mill City: The Huntsville Textile Industry, 1880-1989

Abstract

Cotton Mill City: The Huntsville Textile Industry, 1880–1989 IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, a cotton mill campaign transformed Huntsville from a largely agrarian community into one of the largest textile cities in Alabama. Inexpensive labor, tax exemptions, free water, and lax southern labor laws attracted northern investors who provided capital and technological knowledge for mill endeavors. By fostering manufacturing, financial growth, and demographic change, these mills—despite their numerous reactionary tendencies —are excellent examples of southern industrialization. They also shine light on how, except in times of strike, rivalry and competitiveness fueled interaction between the various mills and their mill villagers. When the mills began to close, Huntsville, if not for the opening of chemical and ordnance plants followed by the arrival of Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, would probably have gone the way of so many textile-mill towns by becoming a “noindustry ghost town.”1 Huntsville is hailed as the home of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, but not until the city’s textile past is given just attention will its transition from Cotton Mill City to Rocket City seem all the more remarkable. The area that became known as Huntsville, then located in the Mississippi Territory, was settled in 1805 by John Hunt. When Hunt failed to register the land properly, LeRoy Pope bought the area, and on December 22, 1809, named it Twickenham after the birthplace of Alexander Pope. Situated in Madison County, which had formed on December 13, 1818, Twickenham attracted many settlers. Not unW H I T N E Y A D R I E N N E S N O W Whitney A. Snow is a doctoral student at Mississippi State University. The author would like to thank Dr. Sarah Shouse and Dr. Elise Stephens for their contributions to the oral history interviews that proved invaluable to this work. 1 James Cobb, “Beyond the ‘Y’all Wall’: The American South Goes Global,” in Globalization and the American South, ed. James Cobb and William Stueck (Athens, GA, 2005), 4. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 244 til November 25, 1811, did the name finally change to Huntsville in honor of Hunt. Alabama became a territory in 1817 and then a state in August 1819; Huntsville was its capital for a short time. In its early days Huntsville was largely plantation and farm-oriented but had beer, candle, plow, hardwood, brick, hat, tanning, and water pump factories. Despite these varied enterprises, cotton remained the foundation of Huntsville’s nineteenth-century industrial growth.2 From 1810 to 1860 several cotton mills appeared in Madison County outside of Huntsville along the Flint River. Formed by Charles Cabaniss sometime between 1809 and 1817, the Cabaniss Cotton Spinning Factory became the first mill in Madison County and, consequently , in Alabama. In 1819 the Horatio Jones Cotton Spinning Factory, which relied on slave labor, began operation. Years later, in 1832, it became the Bell Factory, the most widely known antebellum mill in the state due to its high levels of production. Mill endeavors did not stop there. The Flint Manufacturing Company opened its doors in 1850, and the McFarland Mill began production sometime before 1860. Across the state the expansion of cotton mills kept pace with the growth in Madison County.3 2 Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800–1840 (Baton Rouge, 1997), 38; Edward Chambers Betts, Early History of Huntsville, Alabama, 1804– 1870 (1909; repr., Huntsville, 1998), 5,11, 26, 32, 35, 48–49. See also William H. Brantley, Three Capitals: A Book about the First Three Capitals of Alabama: St. Stephens, Huntsville & Cahawba . . . (Tuscaloosa, 1947). 3 On the Cabaniss factory, see Cecelia Jean Thorn, “The Bell Factory: Early Pride of Huntsville ,” Alabama Review 32 (January 1979): 28; Huntsville Alabama Republican, February 18, 1818; Randall Martin Miller, “The Cotton Mill Movement in Antebellum Alabama” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1971), 11. On the Horatio Jones Cotton Spinning Factory, see Huntsville Alabama Republican, September 14, 1819; James William Bragg, “Frontier Entrepreneurs of Madison County, Alabama: The Bell Factory Enterprise, 1819–1842” (master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1958...