Moses and Caesar Cone: The Denim Kings of the Piedmont
Near Greensboro, North Carolina
Moses and Caesar Cone arrived in Greensboro in the eighteen eighties as commission agents, brokering Southern textile products for Northern buyers. They were the sons of a German immigrant merchant who had come to America after the eighteen forty-eight revolutions in Europe. Within a decade of arriving in the Piedmont, the brothers had decided that the real money was not in brokering but in making.
In eighteen ninety-five they broke ground on Proximity Cotton Mills in Greensboro. Caesar Cone, who ran the operation, had an insight that would prove correct for more than a century: denim, a heavy twill fabric used for work clothes, would be in constant demand as the United States industrialized and expanded westward. Men who built railroads, worked mines, and tended farms needed fabric that did not fall apart. Cone would make it.
In nineteen oh-five they built a second mill on the west side of Greensboro. They named it White Oak, after a two-hundred-year-old tree that stood near the site. White Oak became, within a few years, the largest denim mill in the world.
In nineteen fifteen, Levi Strauss approached Cone about becoming the exclusive supplier of denim for the Levi's Lot five-oh-one jean. The two companies shook hands. The arrangement, known in the denim industry as the Golden Handshake, was a gentleman's agreement that lasted more than a century without a written contract.
The Cone mills also built mill villages: company-owned housing, company-built schools, company-donated land for churches, and a company YMCA. It was paternalism, thoroughly top-down, and it was also something workers in unaffiliated mills did not have. After the Second World War, Cone sold off the villages and ended the welfare programs. The shift from paternalism to detachment was abrupt.
White Oak made its last roll of selvedge denim in two thousand seventeen. After one hundred twelve years. The global market had moved. American-made selvedge was a niche product for premium brands. The mill that had once employed thousands closed with relatively little notice.
