Mayodan — Where the Tobacco Money Built a Mill Town

The town of Mayodan did not exist in eighteen ninety-four. By nineteen fifty-five it had a mill employing fifteen hundred workers in a community of three thousand, and the name of its main factory was stitched into the underwear worn by millions of American men. The speed of that transformation tells you something about the ambitions of the people who built it.

Francis Henry Fries was a Winston-Salem manufacturer and banker who had overseen construction of the Roanoke and Southern Railway connecting his city to the Virginia markets in the early eighteen nineties. After the rail line was complete, he turned his attention to the Mayo River in Rockingham County, where he bought land on the west bank and began planning a cotton mill. The mill was chartered on June twenty-first, eighteen ninety-five, capitalized at three hundred thousand dollars, the highest for any textile mill in the county at the time. His investors included Washington Duke, the tobacco patriarch, and George Washington Watts, two of the most powerful industrialists in the Carolina Piedmont.

The spinning mill opened in eighteen ninety-five. A village immediately grew around it, platted on company land and filled with mill workers' housing. The town was officially chartered in eighteen ninety-nine, taking its name from a combination of the Mayo River and the county name: Mayo plus Dan, the river running just to the south.

By nineteen eleven the company had added a knitting factory producing men's and boys' long underwear and the iconic red flannel styles that became a staple of working-class American wardrobes. In nineteen twenty-one the Mayodan plants merged with mills in Fries, Virginia, to form Washington Mills Company. At peak employment in the nineteen fifties, the ratio of mill workers to total residents was extraordinary, essentially a one-industry town at full capacity.

Competition from overseas manufacturing eroded that model through the nineteen eighties and nineties. The mill was purchased by Tultex of Martinsville in nineteen eighty-two and closed in December of nineteen ninety-nine. The physical plant was demolished in two thousand twelve, removing the buildings that had defined this town for over a century.