Rocky Mount Mills: One Hundred Eighty Years on the Tar River

In the late eighteen tens, four men, Joel Battle, Peter Evans, Henry Donaldson, and John Hogan, began buying land along the falls of the Tar River. What they built at those falls became one of the first cotton mills in North Carolina and one of the longest-lived industrial enterprises in the American South.

They called the original building the Great Falls Mill: a three-story stone structure that used the river's drop to power wooden machinery. At first, local planters brought their raw cotton to be spun into yarn, then wove it into cloth at home. But the mill grew. By the eighteen eighties the Battle family, who had owned it since eighteen twenty-five, had installed electric lights and automatic sprinklers, among the earliest in any North Carolina factory. In nineteen eleven they added one of the state's first steam turbines. During the Second World War, the mill supplied cotton yarn to the United States Army.

For a hundred and forty years the mill was the economic center of the community around it. Workers lived in company houses, shopped at the company store, and sent their children to schools the mill funded. The village on the riverbank was Rocky Mount Mills as much as it was the name of the factory.

The end came in June of nineteen ninety-six. A combination of cheaper imports, high cotton prices, and shrinking demand forced the shutdown, erasing three hundred and twenty jobs and ending a manufacturing run of nearly two centuries.

But the story did not end there. The brick complex, some of the oldest industrial buildings in the state, was preserved and redeveloped into a mixed-use district with a brewery, apartments, and restaurants. The Tar River still runs alongside it. The falls that powered the first looms in eighteen sixteen still drop over the same granite ledge, indifferent to everything that has changed above them.