Erwin Mill: Where Duke Money Built a Textile Empire

The brick complex you can see from here started as a bet Benjamin Duke placed in eighteen ninety-two. Duke, already rich from tobacco, incorporated Erwin Mills and recruited William Erwin from a Burke County plantation family to run it. Erwin put in forty thousand dollars; Duke and his partner George Watts put in eighty-five thousand.

Within three years it was Durham's largest mill and one of the biggest in North Carolina: a thousand workers, twenty-five thousand spindles, a thousand looms, producing tobacco bag cloth and then broader textile lines. A second mill followed in nineteen oh four, and the company town that grew up around it was simply called Duke in honor of its backers, until nineteen twenty-six, when the town changed its name to Erwin. The Durham mill itself ran until nineteen eighty-six, a full ninety-three years of continuous spinning under the Duke-Erwin family enterprise.