Elkin, North Carolina

Elkin grew from a grist mill Richard Gwyn built on the Yadkin River in the eighteen forties. By eighteen seventy-seven, Alexander Chatham and Richard Gwyn had converted the operation into a woolen mill, and Chatham Manufacturing Company was born. Over the next seven decades, the company grew into one of the largest blanket manufacturers in the world, supplying millions of military blankets to American forces in both World War One and World War Two and earning an Army and Navy Award of Excellence for wartime production.

At its peak, Chatham Manufacturing employed thousands in this small Surry County town. The company moved into automotive upholstery fabric beginning in the nineteen thirties and eventually passed out of family hands, but the mill buildings still stand along the river, and Elkin's identity as a hard-working textile town traces a direct line back to that first wooden mill in eighteen forty-seven.