Burlington: Company Shops to Mill Town

Burlington started life with an entirely functional name: Company Shops. In eighteen fifty-seven the North Carolina Railroad chose this Alamance County site as the place to build, repair, and maintain its locomotives and rolling stock. Within a few years the little settlement of dozens of buildings had grown into the railroad's beating mechanical heart.

When the railroad eventually moved its shops elsewhere, the town renamed itself Burlington in eighteen eighty-seven and pivoted to textiles. Alamance County already had a head start: Edwin Michael Holt had built a cotton mill on Alamance Creek in eighteen thirty-seven, and by the Civil War era his Alamance Plaids were described as the first goods woven of colored yarn south of the Potomac River. Burlington built mill after mill through the early twentieth century and eventually became one of the leading hosiery and textile centers in the nation.

The old railroad origin is mostly forgotten now, but the name Company Shops lives on in local memory as a reminder that Burlington was, from the very beginning, a working town.