Cone Mills Corporation

The history of the Cone Mills Corporation had its beginnings in 1845 after Herman Kahn (1828–1897), a Jewish-German immigrant, and his sister's family left their home in Bavaria for a new life in the United States. Almost immediately upon arriving in the country, Herman changed the spelling of his surname from Kahn to Cone, thinking it a "more American spelling",[1][2] as "Cone" had been a surname known in America as early as 1657.[3] 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, though exceptionally they also sold ready-to-wear clothing, unusual in the antebellum South where most clothing was made at home.[4]

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.[4] 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 Caesar, 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 (equivalent to $885,627 in 2021). By 1861 they closed their business because of the war and invested their money into real estate instead. 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.[5]

The new business 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. Later they legally redeemed property on many of the cash debts owed them by the debtors and by default had seized and collected hundreds of acres of real estate. By 1870, the family was wealthy because of the real estate they had acquired.[5]

The Cone family 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.[6] This wholesale grocery business, owned by several relatives, was ultimately disbanded in 1873, and Herman went into business with his eldest sons, Moses and Caesar. 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 southern and eastern parts of the United States as drummers (traveling salesmen). They took and bartered orders from southern merchants for their father's wares. The business had included tobacco and leather goods by 1875.[7]

Interior of a North Carolina cotton mill, circa 1909

Moses and Caesar Cone in 1887 invested in the C. E. Graham Mill Company, which manufactured cotton plaids in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1893, the company became the Asheville Cotton Mills. In 1888, the brothers bought part of the Salisbury Cotton manufacturing factories in Salisbury, North Carolina. They also invested in the Minneola Manufacturing Company in Gibsonville, North Carolina. Moses and Caesar Cone formed the Cone Export & Commission brokerage company in 1891. The selling agent for the textile companies in the southern United States was called a "plaid trust" by its competitors.[8]

The company's headquarters were in New York City while it was chartered in New Jersey and Moses served as its president. In 1893, the Cone brothers built a pioneering textile finishing plant in the southern part of the United States and called it the Southern Finishing & Warehouse Company. Moses built his first denim manufacturing plant in Greensboro in 1895 called the Proximity Cotton Mills because of its location to the nearby cotton fields.[8][2] Near the mills, Moses and Caesar built a facility to serve as the company's headquarters. Caesar was its first president.[9]

The Cone family, many of whom were later connected with Moses and Caesar's enterprises and became wealthy, 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).[10]

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

In 1899, Moses and Caesar formed a partnership with Emanuel Sternberger and his brother Herman to construct a flannel production plant called Revolution Mills that would be located in South Carolina. The Cone brothers constructed White Oak Cotton Mills in Greensboro in 1905. By 1908 it had become the world's largest denim manufacturer.[8][11][12] The heavy-duty blue denim fabric produced by the mills managed by Moses ultimately gave him the title "Denim King".[13][14][15] From 1915 until the plant closed in 2017, Cone Mills produced the denim fabric that Levi Strauss & Company used exclusively in their 501 brand jeans.[16]

The company opened Proximity Printing Works in 1912.[2] This plant was one of the earliest color cloth printing factories 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 the Holt-Granite Puritan factory 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 most of the ownership of Eno Cotton Mills company located in Hillsborough, North Carolina.[8] The recession of 1937–1938 forced Cone Mills in North Carolina to cut wages by 12.5 percent in the summer of 1938.[17] They purchased the Florence factory mills of Forest City, North Carolina, in 1941 and also its subsidiary called American Spinning No. 2 of Greenville, South Carolina.[8]

The company merged all of its separate mill factory properties into Proximity Manufacturing Company by 1945. The manufacturing companies and mills owned by the Cones were restructured so that the individual business operations of the Proximity Manufacturing Company, the Cliffside Mills, the Florence Mills, the Minneola Manufacturing Company, the Salisbury Cotton mill factories, the Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, and the Cone Export & Commission Company, were all reorganized. Then, by 1948, another merger occurred where the Revolution Mills group and Proximity Manufacturing were consolidated and named Cone Mills Corporation. In 1950, the company announced a merger with the twill and drill manufacturer Dwight Manufacturing of Alabama. The following year it purchased the company outright. In 1951, the corporation went public, selling capital assets on the stock exchange at New York City. In April 1951, a strike involved 55 percent of the Cone Mills unionized workforce; the Dwight mill was completely shut down, whereas the others in the Cone chain continued to operate at various capacities.[18] Cone Mills purchased the Union Bleachery of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1952. They obtained the first license in the United States for the sanforizing treatment to prevent fabric from shrinking.[8]

White Oak Cone Mills with
worker's mill village, 1914

White Oak Cone Memorial YMCA

Mill villages were company-owned villages constructed from scratch to house Cone Mills factory workers' families. In the early twentieth century Cone Mills built five self-sufficient villages to serve its Greensboro factory workers. 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.[19]

East White Oak mill village housed African American workers. There were thousands of workers' families that lived in these villages contained within a town until the company began selling off the houses to the public and their workers in the 1940s. African American workers in East White Oak could, "until the 1960s, ... hold only the most menial jobs in the factories, often custodial".[20][21]

The Cone Mills Corporation was well known for the first three decades of the twentieth-first century for their compassionate administration of their mill villages for their workers.[22] The company was involved with their employees housing, schools, churches, stores, and recreational events.[23] It hired nurses and established a night school, Camp Herman, and the Cone Memorial YMCA. The Cone Mills Corporation built both boarding houses and single-family homes near their mills. Their company stores sold their own dairy merchandise and meat products that was produced on the company farms. The company constructed a school for children and gave land for church construction in each village. The company also made available a Welfare Office to assist the employees.[2]

The company was also associated with the Cone Country Club and endowed Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro.[24] From 1958 to 1969, they were participants with the yearly Miss North Carolina Pageant. Cone's factories furnished fabric for wardrobes that each year's winner wore. They also provided fabric for the presentation gown for each winner so they could exhibit North Carolina in the yearly Miss America Pageant.[10]

The textile companies and factories owned by the Cone family were: Revolution Cotton industries, Asheville Cotton shops, Minneola Manufacturing association, Salisbury Cotton congregation, Cliffside assemblies, Eno Cotton community, Granite Finishing, Tabardrey Manufacturing, Florence team, John Wolf Textiles, Olympic Products, and American Spinning group.[8]

In 1983, Western Pacific Industries attempted a takeover of the firm after a deal to acquire shares from Caesar Cone II.[25] At the time, the company had 21 plants and 10,800 employees and was valued at $385 million.[26][27] The deal was thwarted by a leveraged buyout by 47 members of management, after which the company made several cutbacks.[28] Among the measures taken was the sale of the former Union Bleaching facility in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1984; the plant burned down in 2003 and was declared a Superfund site.[29] It was not the first time Cone Mills's environmental practices had come under scrutiny. In 1977, the Environmental Protection Agency sued, claiming the firm had violated an order by continuing to pollute a creek with residues from its Proximity mill in Greensboro;[30] in response, Cone Mills shut it down and laid off 600 workers.[31] Lawsuits about the buyout lingered into the 1990s.[32] Debt refinancing from the 1984 buyout continued as late as 1992, when the company offered shares to the public and obtained new loans.[33]

The 1990s and early 2000s saw a series of closures of manufacturing facilities owned by Cone Mills. 380 of the 500 workers at its Haw River, North Carolina, operation, were laid off in 1992 due to lower demand for corduroy;[33] the plant itself shuttered in 1997, with dyeing and finishing operations centralized in Carlisle, South Carolina.[34] The firm closed its operation at Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1999, citing additional overseas fabric imports and years of heavy losses; the Salisbury mill had been in business since 1888.[35] In 2000, the Raytex plant at Marion, South Carolina, was closed, taking with it 200 jobs, as demand for comforters and bedspreads declined.[36] Among the few new ventures started was a joint venture with Compañía Industrial de Parras to build a fabric plant in Mexico.[37]

Weakened by foreign competition and lower consumption of denim,[24] The Cone Mills Corporation in 2003 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[38] Two of the company's three facilities in Rutherford County, North Carolina, were then shuttered, resulting in the loss of 625 jobs.[39] By 2004, WL Ross & Co had acquired all of Cone's assets, which were merged with what was left of Burlington Industries to create the International Textile Group.[40]