Cone Mills Corporation

One of the first company cotton mill plants, ca. 1900

The Cone family history in the United States began in 1845 after Herman Kahn (1828–1897), a Jewish-German immigrant, and his sister's family left their home in Bavaria, Germany, for a new life in the United States. Herman changed the spelling of his surname from Kahn to Cone almost immediately upon arriving in the country, thinking it a "more American spelling".[5][6]

Herman Cone and his brother-in-law Jacob Adler started a dry goods business in the German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutch town of Jonesboro, Tennessee. Cone & Adler sold the usual items like groceries, hats, boots, and shoes. An exception to this was they also sold ready-to-wear clothing, unusual in the antebellum South where most clothing was made at home.[7]

Cone met Helen Guggenheimer (1838–1898) on one of his business trips to Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early part of the 1850s. She was also a German Jew. They married in 1856 when she was eighteen.[7] Their first child was Moses H. Cone, born in 1857, founder of Proximity Manufacturing Company (the original name for the Cone Mills enterprises). Their next child was Ceasar, born in 1859, the co-founder.

The family showed in the pre-Civil War 1860 census that their real estate holdings and personal property holdings were an impressive $29,365. By 1861 they closed their business because of the war and invested their money into real estate instead.[8] At the end of the war, the family sold some of their real estate to reopen their retail business under the name Adler, Cone, and Shipley.

A division of Cone Mills with a mill village, ca. 1914

They engaged in the barter system to trade goods, since cash was then scarce. They traded their goods for textiles and then resold these in the South for cash. On many occasions they took credit secured by personal property and land. They foreclosed on many of the debts owed them, acquiring hundreds of acres of real estate in the process.[9]

In 1870, the family was fairly wealthy. They moved to Baltimore, Maryland, and started a wholesale grocery business called Guggenheimer, Cone & Company. The family now included seven children, five boys and two girls, Claribel and Etta, who later gained a reputation as the art-collecting Cone sisters.[10] This business, owned by several relatives, was ultimately disbanded in 1873 and Herman went into business with his eldest sons, Moses and Ceasar. This new firm was called H. Cone & Sons. The two brothers worked with their father in his grocery business while in their teens traveling the Southeast as drummers (traveling salesmen). They took and bartered orders from southern merchants for their father's wares. By 1876 the business had expanded to include tobacco and leather goods.[11]

Interior of a North Carolina cotton mill, ca. 1909

In 1887, Moses and Ceasar Cone invested $50,000 in the C. E. Graham Mill Manufacturing Company in Asheville, North Carolina, which manufactured cotton plaids. The mill became the Asheville Cotton Mills in 1893. In 1888, the brothers invested in the Salisbury Cotton Mills in Salisbury, North Carolina. They also invested in the Minneola Manufacturing Company in Gibsonville, North Carolina. Moses and Ceasar Cone established the Cone Export & Commission Company in 1891. The selling agent for southern textiles was called a "plaid trust" by its competitors.[1] Chartered in New Jersey, the company's headquarters were in New York City, and Moses served as its president. In 1893, the Cone brothers built one of the first textile finishing plants in the South, called Southern Finishing & Warehouse Company.

Moses Cone built his first denim manufacturing plant in Greensboro in 1895 called the Proximity Cotton Mills because of its location to the nearby cotton fields.[1][6] Near the mills "Brother Moses" and "Brother Ceasar", as they were called by their siblings, built a facility to serve as the company's headquarters. Ceasar was its first president.[12]

The Cone family, many of whom were later involved in Moses and Ceasar's enterprises, included: Carrie (1861–1927), Monroe (1862–1891), Claribel (1864–1929), Albert (1866–1867), Solomon (1868–1939), Sydney M. (1869–1939), Etta (1870–1949), Julius W. (1872–1940), Bernard M. (1874–1956), Clarence N. (1876–1929), and Frederick W. (1878-1944).

White Oak Mills in Greensboro, North Carolina, ca. 1909

In 1899, Moses and Ceasar partnered with Emanuel and Herman Sternberger of South Carolina to build a flannel production plant called Revolution Mills. Under Proximity Manufacturing Company, the Cone brothers built White Oak Cotton Mills in Greensboro in 1905. By 1908 it was the world's largest producer of denim.[13] The heavy-duty blue denim manufactured by the mills controlled by Moses led to his title "Denim King".[14][15] [16] From 1915, until it closed in 2017, Cone Mills produced the denim fabric Levi Strauss & Company used exclusively in their 501 brand jeans.[17]

The company opened Proximity Print Works in 1912.[6] This plant was one of the earliest color cloth printing facilities in the Southern United States. In 1927, the company acquired Cliffside Cotton Mills, a manufacturer of terry cloth, and Haynes Plant, which produced chambray. By 1929 they had acquired Holt-Granite Puritan Mills Company of Haw River, North Carolina. They then acquired the corduroy producing Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, founded by Sidney Small Paine and named for his children, Tad, Barbara and Audrey. By 1932 the Cone company had gained controlling stock of Eno Cotton Mills of Hillsborough, North Carolina. They bought the Florence Mills of Forest City, North Carolina, in 1941 and also its subsidiary called American Spinning Company of Greenville, South Carolina.[1]

In 1945, the company merged all of its separate mill properties into Proximity Manufacturing Company. The manufacturing companies, mills, and various subsidiaries owned by the Cones underwent a major reorganization in which the separate business operations of Proximity Manufacturing Company (including Proximity Cotton Mills, Proximity Print Works, White Oak, and Granite), the Cliffside Mills (including the Cliffside and Haynes plants), the Florence Mills (including American Spinning Company), Minneola Manufacturing Company, Salisbury Cotton Mills, Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, and Cone Export & Commission Company, were all reorganized.[4]

Then in 1948 another major merger occurred. Revolution Mills and Proximity Manufacturing Company were consolidated and named Cone Mills Corporation. In 1950, the company announced a merger with the twill and drill manufacturer Dwight Manufacturing Company of Alabama. The following year it purchased the company outright, the same year the Corporation went public trading on the New York Stock Exchange.[4]

Cone Mills Corporation purchased the Union Bleachery of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1952. They gained the first license for the sanforizing process—a treatment to prevent fabric from shrinking—granted in the United States.[1]

Cone Memorial YMCA
( White Oak Branch )

Cone Mills Corporation was involved with Cone Memorial YMCA (the White Oak, Proximity, and segregated branches), Camp Herman, night school, and employment of nurses. They built both boarding houses and single-family homes near their mills. Stores sold dairy products and meat produced on company farms. The company built a school and donated land for churches for each village. The company also instituted a Welfare Office.[6]

They were also involved with state and regional cotton and textile associations, the Mill Workers Mutual Benefit Association, and Summit Avenue Building Company. The company was also associated with the Cone Country Club and founded the Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital.[4]

From 1958 to 1969, they were involved with the annual Miss North Carolina Pageant. The company provided fabric for wardrobes given to each year's winner. They also provided fabric for the presentation gown each winner wore to represent North Carolina in the annual Miss America Pageant.[18]

ITG (International Textile Group), parent company of Cone Denim, announced in 2017 that after more than 110 years of continuous production its White Oak mill in Greensboro would cease operations. The company worked closely with its White Oak customers to their orders. The company transitioned styles to its ten manufacturing operations across the U.S., Mexico, and China. ITG continues to be headquartered in Greensboro.[19][20]

When the mill closed, it was the last large-scale denim mill to shut down in the US, meaning American made selvedge denim was no longer available.[21]

Some of the last denim produced at White Oak was given to the artist Ian Berry, who is known for his work with denim, to make the Secret Garden installation at the Children's Museum of the Arts in New York.[22][23][24][25]

The textile companies and plants owned and operated in full or in part by the Cone family were: Revolution Cotton Mills, Asheville Cotton Mills, Minneola Manufacturing Company, Salisbury Cotton Mills, Cliffside Mills, Eno Cotton Mills, Granite Finishing Works, Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, Florence Mills, John Wolf Textiles, Olympic Products, and American Spinning Company.[1]

The company went private again in 1983 with the threat of a takeover by Western Pacific Industries. At the time the company had twenty-one plants and 10,800 employees, and was valued at $385 million.[26][27] In 2003, Cone Mills Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. By 2004, W. L. Ross and Company had acquired all of Cone's assets, which had been combined with what remained of Burlington Industries to form International Textile Group.[28]

Mill villages were company-owned towns, built from scratch by textile mills to house their factory workers and their families. In the early 1900s, Cone Mills Inc. built five self-sufficient villages to serve its Greensboro factories. They included churches, schools, baseball fields, community centers, and company stores in addition to houses leased to mill workers. At their peak, the Cone mill villages covered 450 acres (180 ha) and housed 2,675 workers in about 1,500 houses. A separate mill village, East White Oak, housed African-American workers. Thousands of workers and their families made their lives in these "towns within a town" until the company began selling the houses (sometimes to workers) in the late 1940s.[29]

• Gabriel, Mary, The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone, Bancroft Press 2002, ISBN 1-890862-06-1
• Renouf, Norman, Romantic Weekends the Carolinas & the Georgia Coast, Hunter Publishing 1999, ISBN 1-55650-854-9
• American Council of Learned Societies, Dictionary of American Biography, Scribner 1958, original at University of Michigan library.
• Noblitt, Philip T., A Mansion in the Mountains: The Story of Moses and Bertha Cone and their Blowing Rock Manor, Parkway Publishers 1996, ISBN 1-887905-02-2
• Inventory of the Cone Mills Corporation Records, 1858-1997, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill