Haw River: From Trollinger's Mill to Cone Mills

Haw River got its start in seventeen forty-five when Adam Trollinger, a German immigrant from Pennsylvania's Rhine Valley, chose this spot for one simple reason: the current was strong enough to turn a mill wheel. His son Jacob built a grist mill in seventeen forty-eight, and a village called Trollinger's Ford grew around it.

By the eighteen hundreds the site had become a full cotton mill village, where the company owned the workers' houses and ran the company store. When the North Carolina Railroad came through in eighteen forty-nine, a Trollinger heir paid for the river bridge himself just to secure the route, and the place became Haw River Depot. By nineteen twenty-eight the cotton factories had passed to Proximity Manufacturing, later Cone Mills, whose plants here became the largest corduroy producers in the world. A German miller's creek crossing became one of the South's most enduring textile towns.