(This is the eighth installment of a history of the Royall Cotton Mill, later the Royal Mill, based on a thesis written by Don P. Johnston Jr. in 1945 for a degree from Princeton University. His father, Don P. Johnston, was the president of Royall Mill before and during the Depression.
(We also quote from “A Common Thread: Life at Royall Mill and its Village, 1899 to 1996” by R. James Cox Jr., then a planner with the Town of Wake Forest. It was printed in 1996 and reprinted in 2007 for the Town of Royall Mills Centennial Celebration.)
Keep in mind as you read this that Royall Mill and the later Royal Mill were family businesses. Don P. Johnston Sr. and Harvey Seward were brothers-in-law having married two daughters of William C. Powell, Johnston marrying Petrona and Seward marrying Annie. There were two other daughters, Jessie Powell Powers and Rosa Powell Larsen.
Until an incidental mention in a report by the May Company regarding the mill’s operations in 1939 did the reader learn that that fourth William C. Powell daughter, Rosa Larsen, was somewhat involved with the mill. Her husband, S.P.H. Larsen, was the assistant mill superintendent. There is no indication how long he was thus employed.
The Johnston family lived with Jessie Powell Powers in the gray Colonial Revival house that William C. Powell had built in 1895 during all the time they were in Wake Forest, and Jessie Powers was to become the assistant to Johnston when he was president and head of the board of directors for Royal Mill as well as a director herself. Petrona Johnston was a director of Royal Mill in the later years. Seward was usually a director in the 1930s until a rift developed between him and Johnson.
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The lean years for the Royal Cotton Mill – 1933 through 1939 – began to slowly improve as the grip of the Depression eased, as orders picked up for the cotton yarn the mill produced. It would be another two years, in 1942, when the American economy began to gear up rapidly for the wartime World War II production after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The mill was now equipped in 1940 with new machinery and the production had been streamlined for smoother performance. The diesel engines which had supplied the power for the old mill for a time were sold – Don Johnston Jr. never mentioned the sale amount but it was apparently substantial enough to help the mill’s finances – and power now came from a Carolina Power & Light substation near the mill.
Several changes had already been made in the mill village and the mill life, most in the early 1930s. The mill commissary or store as it was called was closed in 1934, meaning the mill workers and their families had to shop in downtown Wake Forest. Also about the same time the mill school was closed and the mill children went to school with all the Wake Forest children. Then in 1941, maybe a bit earlier, the mill management began selling the village homes to those who lived in them.
As James Cox describes the sales: “In 1941, Jack Horton bought the house that he and his sister had grown up in for $400.00. A weekly draft of $1.67 was taken out of his paycheck for seven years. Claire Wall remembers that while $400.000 may not sound like a lot of money for a house in today’s real estate market, to the people in the mill village in the early forties, it sounded like a fortune. ‘I remember people saying, How in the world will we ever get it paid for.'” In all, there were 160 lots, 88 of which had houses on them.
With the houses being sold there was no reason for a town, so in 1945 the mill management petitioned the North Carolina General Assembly to repeal the charter and the Town of Royall Mills became a memory.
Another change was that people who lived outside the mill village began to work at the mill and many residents began to take jobs outside the village. With the company store closed, some village residents began small shops in their homes or in small buildings next door, catering mostly to their neighbors. In either 1947 or 1948 Marlon Cole and his brother, John B, opened a store across the railroad tracks on North White Street. It flourished and continued to be a favorite store for many Wake Foresters – their sausage was a necessity for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals – until the mid-1990s.
Back with the mill management, in 1944 the outstanding bonds had been retired and a $50,000 preferred stock option had been issued. Johnston and Willis Smith, who resigned as mill attorney earlier that year, were disagreeing about that stock and other matters.
Johnston, who was the mill manager, had organized a sales company in 1943 to sell the products from Royal Mill and other mills. At that time he was selling the entire Royal Mill output. The sales office was in the Royal Mill building.
In July of 1944, after learning that Smith had criticized the makeup of the board of directors, Johnston, his wife and his sister-in-law – Don, Petrona and Jessie, the entire board of directors – resigned and, on a vote by the stockholders, elected a new board with Lewis D. Smart as president, I. Beverly Lake as attorney and H.H. Harris as treasurer. Harris was replaced by Smith in October 1944, who had heretofore refused to serve as a director. Smart continued as the mill superintendent.
Also in October Smith filed suit against Johnston, Smart and the Royal Mill, claiming that the men had been dissipating the mill’s assets. However, another mill owner, a mill very similar to Royal, said his mill and Royal “are the most modern cotton yarn manufacturing plants in the United States.” B. Everett Jordan with the Sellers Company in Saxapahaw said the Royal Mill, which was then producing 5,500,000 to 6,000,000 pounds of yarn, had new humidifying and air conditioning systems, new interior painting, new toilets, new air compressor and waste baling press and was well maintained and well run.
Other studies at the time showed that Johnston’s fees for selling the mill’s output were reasonable and among the lowest locally as well as that the salaries paid to the mill directors and managers were also very low.
On the day Smith’s suit was to be heard in Wake County Superior Court, his attorneys informed the other parties that the Smiths were prepared to negotiate. As a result, the Johnston family and all its related parties sold their interests in Royal Mill to the Smith family on May 31, 1945. The very last remnant of the original founders left Royall/Royal Mill.
Almost immediately the mill’s directors sold the mill to Jordan and Smith, who then consolidated their interests with the Sellers Company. The Saxapahaw operations included a dyeing mill, giving the Royal Mill a substantial market.
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