MANY YARNS LACE HISTORY OF INDUSTRY

By DAN NIELSON, Staff Writer

In the early 1850’s, Jasper Stowe had a problem.

His family’s new textile mill, Stowe’s Factory, was ready to start producing, but it had no experienced workers to run the machinery. The young women who worked the two Gaston County factories seemed satisfied.

So he organized a band of young beaus to visit the women where they worked at Woodlawn Mill, near what is now Lowell, and provide a little incentive to change employers. The young men courted the women while they spent their break time dangling fishing lines over the banks of the South Fork River. At the end of the lines were makeshift fish hooks made from bent pins.

“Let’s go up and see the Pinhook girls,” Jasper Stowe would say to his friends. From then on, Woodlawn Mill was better known as Pinhook Mill, even by the Gaston County post office.

Gaston County textile history is laced with stories like that one - events that shaped the county from the wooded banks of the Catawba and from the foothills of Spencer and Cramer mountains. Some happenings even helped define the entire textile industry.

A few years after Pinhook Mill got started, the Civil War ravaged the South. Before long a troop of Yankee soldiers headed toward the mill, planning to burn it to the ground.

They were met by the mill supervisor, a Pennsylvania German named Bill Sahams. One of the soldiers leaned forward in his saddle, “well, if it ain’t old Bill Sahams!” he said, then dismounted to greet his old neighbor.

Then the soldiers told Sahams what they were there for. Sahams argued that no good would come from such destruction and asked why they would want to unemploy a fellow Northerner. The soldiers agreed to spare the place.

With the soldiers’ clemency the fledgling Gaston County textile industry was allowed to weather the buffetings of post-war Reconstruction.

And that was enough to let the mills get back on their feet. So much so that by the turn of the century, Gaston County had made its mark on the textile business, and on American industry as a whole.

This was quite a step from the humble beginnings a century before, when in 1816, Michael Schenck and Absalom Warlick founded the first cotton factory one and a half miles east of Lincolnton. As the first cotton factory south of the Potomac River, it was an important beginning. Three years later, Schenck and other partners built a second factory, the Lincoln County Mill.

In 1848, a year before Gaston County was incorporated from the southern portion of what was Lincoln County, two entrepreneurs, Thomas R. Tate and Henry Humphreys, thought a particular bend in the Catawba River, near what is now Mount Holly, could effectively power spinning machinery. That year they founded the Mountain Island Mill.

Shortly after, two other groups, headed by Caleb Lineberger and Larkin Stowe, looked south at the South Fork River to power the plants they were planning. They founded Woodlawn Mill and Stowe’s Factory, respectively.

Though the three Gaston County factories prospered, no others entered the county’s textile market before the Civil War. During wartime, the existing factories produced coarse gray fabric for Confederate uniforms.

But as the war neared an end, the Confederate notes paid to the factories shrunk in value, and when fighting stopped, the mills foundered.

But a decade later, the industry rose from the dust after a key development – in 1873, railroads, which had previously stopped in Charlotte, laid rail through Gaston County, crossing at a station named Gastonia.

The new rails provided transportation for textile materials and products at greatly reduced cost to the factories, boosting the sagging mills.

It was then, after a quarter-century hiatus, that construction began in 1874 on the county’s fourth textile plant, the Mount Holly Cotton Mills. The oldest textile plant still standing in the county, it is now used for small-scale textile production, said Alan Waufle, director of the Gaston County Museum of Art and History.

After that, construction on new plants was almost constant through the turn of the century. By the 180s, textiles had become Gaston County’s chief industry.