Company Shops to Burlington: Born from the Railroad

This city did not begin as a town. It began as a maintenance yard. In eighteen fifty-one the North Carolina Railroad chose this spot to build its repair and upkeep facilities, and the settlement that grew around those shops was literally named Company Shops. Incorporated in eighteen sixty-six, it existed purely to keep the trains running.

When the railroad relocated its operations to Spencer, North Carolina in eighteen ninety-six, the town might have died. Instead it reinvented itself around textiles. By nineteen nineteen Burlington was known as the Hosiery Capital of the South, running thirty cotton mills and employing fifteen thousand people in Alamance County. In nineteen twenty-three a young businessman named J. Spencer Love founded Burlington Mills here, which eventually grew into Burlington Industries, one of the largest textile companies in the world. The city had renamed itself Burlington in February of eighteen eighty-seven. The railroad town had become a company town of a different kind.