This time and place

Mountain Island

Until the flood of 1916, mill community thrived where the dam stands and debate rages.

By Tom Bradbury
Associate Editor

We boys were always glad when hog-killing time came. It meant sausage, spareribs and livermush, but it also meant that we could get the butchers to give us the hog bladders which we fashioned into Christmas balloons. With a cane we would blow them up until they were about the size of a man’s head…let them dry, and then paint them with polkberry juice. So processed they made a pretty ornament to tie on the corner of the quilting frames.

-- Percy Roberts
Mountain Island Stories

Mountain Island Lake has been in the news lately for its present and future as a water source and natural retreat. It supplies water to Charlotte, Mount Holly, and (soon) Gastonia. Its isolated upper end is the location of the Cowans Ford Waterfowl Refuge the county is proposing to purchase with bonds to be voted on this fall. And its adjoining lands are the center of a debate over development and watershed protection.

Memories of an idyllic life

But stories typed out by the late Percy Roberts tell of a Mountain Island community far removed from today’s debates. He recalls a turn-of-the century textile village, centered on the Mountain Island mill where he began working as a child of about 10. Through his eyes, it was a community as idyllic as the pictures that used to illustrate children’s readers.

His papers, and others in the collection at the Gaston County Museum of Art and History in Dallas, explain that the Mountain Island mill was in fact the beginning of what became a massive Gaston County textile industry. The mill was built in the late 1840s several miles north of Mount Holly by the owner of the Mount Hecla steam-powered mill near Greensboro, seeking to take advantage of the less expensive water power from the Catawba.

The site at river’s edge featured a partially completed canal around the shoals that could be used for a mill race, and a steep island whose top now rises from the lake. Machinery was moved from the Mount Hecla mill by mule-drawn wagon and the Mountain Island mill had its equipment and its name.

Operations began in 1849. “The mill was run from sun up to sun down,” explains an old pamphlet about the early years. “The men’s wages were 25 to 45 cents per day. The women received from 25 to 40 cents per day for weaving. The small boys and girls received from 5 to 25 cents per day.”

Work was hard but living conditions there were “as good as anywhere and better than on the farms,” the pamphlet said. “Every family that could get work at mills left the farm.”

The village grew around the mill, whose fortunes rose and fell with the Civil War, the economy and various changes in name and ownership. The residents celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with a barbecue and dance “without a single drunk or fight.” The waters sometimes rose: Residents rode through the first floor of the mill in boats in June of 1877. The village’s first Sunday school and the first baseball team were both started the same year, followed by a church in 1880 and the “Nightingale Cornet Band” in 1892, whose businesslike minutes are preserved at the museum.

This is the backdrop for Percy Robert’s stories of village life. Winter ice cut from the river was stored in an ice pit dug into the hillside, providing a measure of cold storage for the summer months. Mountain Island had its own fire department, which practiced every work day at 2 p.m. Corn shuckings drew a crowd. A boy who found a red ear of corn got to kiss the girl of his choice. “Sometimes the wrong boy found the red ear, as far as the chosen girl was concerned, and he might get the kiss and with it a couple more red ears – not of corn,” Roberts writes.

The waters sweep down

The mill sat right by the river and had recovered from flooding before. But in July of 1916, North Carolina got rains first from a gulf hurricane and then from a storm that came ashore near Charleston. The already soaked land could not absorb any more. Streams rose and a devastating flood swept out of the mountains.

Roberts provides a ground-level view: “On Friday [July 14] the river overflowed its banks. On Saturday the water flowed freely into the mill. At 9 o’clock that morning Will Autry and Van Underwood took a boat and went into the mill with a chain-fall and closed the gates to the water-wheels in a last effort to save the mill.

“Their effort was in vain, for no human efforts could possibly have saved it from destruction. By this time the river was at the highest flood-stage ever known and was completely beyond control. All that could be done was to stay out of reach of the raging waters.

“On Saturday morning at 9 o’clock the boiler room was destroyed. At 11 o’clock the picker room collapsed. At 10:30 the baling room had already been washed away.

“About this time Pat Jenkins thought to close the main valve at the reservoir so as to keep a supply of water for use of the sad residents who had painfully watched the destruction of their mill property and the loss of their jobs. One might well ask why he should close the valve to assure water supply when there was already so much more water than anyone knew how to handle…

“One Sunday night, July 16, 1916, the old bell on top of the mill sounded there for its last time at 11:25…The old mill that had served so many people and provided them with a livelihood for so many years was gone.

“…old and tired, it gave way to a power greater than its own, bowing its head not in shame, but in glory. For its place on the mighty Catawba was to be taken by another plant that would serve even more people in a greater way. Today a great hydroelectric plant…stands exactly on the old mill site.”

Will Eden again be swept away?

That hydroelectric plant, of course, is Mountain Island dam, built by what is now Duke Power and formally coming into service in December, 1923. It, too, has a story, one hinted at in the pictures in the Duke Power archives that show the dam rising and the future lake bottom being cleared. Most telling is the careful listing on each picture around the lake site of the families whose land would soon be under water: Latta, Keistler, W.C. Cansler, C.L. King, Frank Sample, L.C. Lowe and many others.

The mill held the site for almost 70 years. The dam has been there almost another 70. Now the issue is the waters behind the dam, and the character of the lands to either side in Mecklenburg, Gaston and Lincoln counties. The lake really has several distinct sections, the issues are complex, and we’ll be coming back to them many times.

But a central question is whether carelessness today will do to the lake’s beauty now what the flood waters of 1916 did to the residents of Percy Robert’s little village, scattering them “from their Garden of Eden.”

The Charlotte Observer
Saturday, August 1, 1991
Page 10A