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in Deep River Landmarks, History

Island Ford Mfg. Co.

On September 5, 1846, Elisha Coffin and three of his sons and nephews, along with A.S. Horney, George Makepeace, Thomas Rice and nine other men and women, incorporated the county’s third textile mill, the Island Ford Manufacturing Company.  The factory “went into operation in 1848, supplied with the latest and most approved machinery. The dam and canal, factory house and houses for the operatives, store house, cotton house and all necessary appendages (were) constructed by experienced workmen and in the most elegant and durable style.” The four-story story “House” was essentially the same size and plan as the Franklinville factory just upriver, but at Island Ford a wooden superstructure was built upon a brick first floor, and a fourth floor was lighted by a clerestory monitor roof. This last feature was widely used in English and New England factories, and foretold the spread of mainstream industrial technology into the infant Deep River manufacturing community. The corporation prospered for a few years, but deteriorating economic conditions forced the company to declare bankruptcy on July 14, 1856.  By October 1859 the property had been sold to a group of local investors including A.S. Horney, Reed Creek merchant Isaac H. Foust and Foust’s store clerk Hugh Parks. In 1862, following Foust’s death, a revised partnership was incorporated as the “Randolph Manufacturing Company.”  The corporation at that time had capital stock worth $30,000, seventy employees, and consumed 850 bales of cotton to produce 3,000 yards of 4-4 sheeting.

In 1895, the “Cotton Mill Edition” of the Raleigh News and Observer wrote of the Island Ford mill, saying that “the fates have decreed that it shall not stand to see the flowers bloom again, for the architects and brick layers are building long, new brick walls all about it, and so soon as new floor space is ready, the quaint old wooden building will tumble to the the of the new order of things…” The new factory was built immediately to the west of the Island Ford structure, which was located approximately where the present engine room and smoke stack stand.  The 1895 factory straddled the existing mill race, the only trace of the antebellum mill which is still evident. The building’s central three-story stair tower was accessible only by a bridge over the race, and was capped by a very unusual bell cupola. The stair tower was destroyed in the mid-1950s when new construction filled the central courtyard area, leaving the gable ends of the east and west wings the only visible parts of the 1895 factory.

 

in Company Store, History

Company Store

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, one of the most vital parts of any textile mill village was a Store, owned and operated by the company.  The Company Store was open to the general public, but credit offered by the store to company workers was a vital part of the employee compensation system.

A store was built by the original Randolph Manufacturing Company, across the road and facing the main entrance of the mill, before 1840.  Known as “the old red store,” it burned April 18, 1884 and was immediately rebuilt in the popular “Carpenter Gothic” style.   The one-story board-and-batten building was painted pink with alternating gray battens.   The interior walls were plastered with a tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling.  In later years a millinery shop was added on the north side, toward the railroad tracks, and a larger office for the mill was built on the west end.

As part of Hugh Parks Jr.’s post-world war improvements, the Upper and Lower company stores were consolidated into a new brick Franklinville Store Company built on the northeast corner of Rose and Main Streets in 1920.  That building included space not only for general merchantile and grocery operations, but featured a butcher shop, “soda shop,” post office and doctor’s office.

The old Lower Store was renovated into the town’s first movie theater, and the Upper Store remodeled into a steam laundry. Around World War II, the Lower Store was demolished to build “Mill #3,” and the Upper Store was refitted as a machine shop.  It was abandoned about 1960, when a brick machine shop was built beside Mill #3, and finally burned in 1986.

 

in Community News in Franklinville, NC

Hurricane Florence Flood

From the 1770s to the present, Franklinville has been putting Deep River to work, with water-powered mills, steam generators, and now a hydroelectric installation which sends electricity to the Duke Energy grid. But man’s harness on the energy of the flowing water is put to the test when storms, hurricanes and floods send more water downstream than usual.

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