(This is the third 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.
(This week we will 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.)
We will cover the first days of the Royall Cotton Mill from 1902 to about 1913.
Although the mill branched out to other production, in this period it took raw cotton in bales off railroad cars, broke the bales apart, carded the cotton on the first floor and sent it up to the second floor where there was a winding and grading operation. The third floor was where the yarn was spun and rolled onto large spools. The three-floor addition was built in 1906-1908, and the company directors and its superintendent realized later that a multi-floor building was not the ideal although the total of 16,000 spindles made it one of the largest mills in the state.
As the mill opened and grew, so did the work force. Cox said many families came from the Harricane area west of town. One of those was Jack Horton, who was just a baby at the time. His father had just died, so his mother and his sister, Ethel, came to Royall Mill.
In 1908 another family moved to Royall from Pilot Mill in Raleigh. Cox wrote, “Mr. James Walter Cole and his wife, Christian Idella McLean Cole, had left a farm in Monroe for the Pilot Mill, and they thought the new mill near Wake Forest would provide a better opportunity for their young family. Their baby daughter, Lora Alice, moved with them into a little house on what is now Mill Street. By 1922 the family had grown with the births of Mary Magdalene, John B., James Marlon, Minnie Lee and Fannie Estelle. Having outgrown the house on Mill Street, the Coles swapped houses with Jack Horton’s mother by loading everything in their household into a mule-drawn cart and moving down the street toward the mill. Their new house was in an area they refer to as “The Bottom,” now the 800 block of Mill Street.” Cox said the habit of swapping houses, jumping from house to house as someone left, were typical as families grew.
Cox also explained those first houses built by Benjamin Thomas Hicks. They were in a hip-roof style that was typical of mill housing at the time. The one-story, four-room houses had two front doors and a porch, not typical. The ceilings were 10 feet high and there were four fireplaces placed diagonally in the central part of the houses so all could share a common chimney. Later the number of houses was increased until there were about 75, and some of the new ones were built in a cross-gable style. Some “shotgun” houses were built that were slightly bigger and were for one family, usually a foreman.
Families paid 25 cents a room monthly rent. They could also pay 10 cents a month either per family or per family members – it was not clear – for a doctor, and the doctor would pay a house call after they signed up at the company store, operated by the treasurer, Robert E. Royall, and overall boss of the normal mill operations, over the superintendent.
The mill owners also built a school for the mill children, even though Johnston Jr. pointed out a school for white children was close by.
If this all sounds paternalistic, it was, Johnston Jr. said, and that included making sure the families, who could buy food, clothing, candy and other essential goods for the households at the company store (now apartments), would not go into debt beyond the next week’s pay. The management made sure no worker ever “owed their soul to the company store,” as happened in some other mills.
The workers were paid at the company store, in cash or goods up through the early 1930s, for working 66 hours a week – five 12-hour shifts and a six-hour shift on Saturday – and the company had a rule to not hire anyone younger than 12. In 1912, however, the state changed the allowable work hours to 60 hours a week. Johnston Jr. says the Royall workers still made the same pay as they had for 66 hours, but they also got more because other cotton mills had raised wages and Royall was losing workers. He never says how much they were paid in either situation. Another pay raise in 1918 was accompanied by a state law raising the minimum age of workers to 14.
It was a part of that paternalism that moved the mill company in 1907 to incorporate their property as the Town of Royall Mill, but one in which the company’s directors were the only voters. The directors appointed the mayor, usually the superintendent, and one mill worker, usually a foreman, was made the constable, responsible for enforcing the rules.
Those rules banned the following: “Unruly games; the use of bean shooters, sling shots and air guns; live stock on the sidewalk; indecent exposure; boisterous, indecent, or profane language; fighting; wanton pulling up of vegetable; skulking; washing in horse troughs; cycling without a bell; Sunday vending; dwelling close to pigs; rapidly driving a horse or mule; and the public release of bitches.”
To explain the need for some of the rules, the mill workers and their families provided extra food by cultivating vegetable gardens and they had a collective pig sty or pen called “Hogpen Alley” about where the Church of God now stands.
In 1905, Johnston Jr. says “. . . in happy coincidence with an upturn in the cotton goods market,” George H. Greason was hired as the mill superintendent. He was to remain through the Royall Mill era, the receivership (bankruptcy), and the Royal Mill era in the 1930s. His name became synonymous with the mill. His salary was $3,000 a year, and his family moved into the house on Faculty Avenue that had been built for a former superintendent in 1902. His fuel for the house was paid by the mill and he had an allowance for the gas for his vehicle.
At that time, Robert E. Royall and W.L. Royall, Robert’s son, had a combined salary of $4,200 but William C. Powell was paid $600 a year after 1912.
This was still very much a family-run company with strong Wake Forest College ties. All were alumni of the college and Robert E. Royall was a trustee; Thomas E. Holding had been a star pitcher on the baseball team at a time when that was the premier sport. William C. Powell and Holding had each married two of Robert Royall’s sisters, and Powell and Royall had operated a small store in the town of Wake Forest as well as together purchasing the land the mill company later bought to build the mill. When they needed someone to buy the remainder of a stock issue in 1906 they turned to Simon Seward, father of Harvey Seward who was the husband of William Powell’s oldest daughter.
Powell and Royall also personally endorsed the notes to the Mutual Alliance Trust Company of New York for $20,000 for a business loan and continued doing so for 30 years. The directors as a whole also issued dividends to the stockholders in 1906, 1907, 1912, 1913 and 1915. At the same time there was also very rarely any accounting for depreciation of the buildings or equipment, and there was no fund – called at that time a sinking fund – to repay the loans.
Also, even if the work at time called for 66-hour and later 60-hour work weeks by the operators, Johnston Jr. said, “But during about a third to a half of the weeks in the period only one shift was run. And during one period just one shift of 55 hours was supported.” In short, the mill was often idle and so were the workers, who were only paid when the mill was active. No wonder the families raised vegetable gardens and hogs so they could eat.
The worker families were pretty content, Cox wrote. The Glen Royal Baptist Church was begun in 1901 as a Sunday School led by Dr. Charles Brewer, meeting first upstairs in the mill building and in other locations until 1908 when it moved to the intersection of Elizabeth Street and East Chestnut Avenue in the one-room school building given by Dr. William B. Royall.
Cox wrote, “Minnie Lee Cole Mabrey recalls the kindness of other area residents toward the mill villagers as expressed through the church. Mrs. Virginia Lake and Mrs. Gallamore served as missionaries of sorts for the village and “adopted” the neighborhood through their church circle.
India Crowder organized the Church of God after a series of tent revivals, and the granite church building with its Gothic-flavored architecture is a landmark in the village.
India Crowder was Claire Wall’s grandmother. Wall has fond memories of the village beginning when she was 9 months old and in a playpen on the front porch, “talking” to passers-by. Minnie Mabrey remembers the children always found ways to have fun. There was a pond near the mill building, and the children could swim there. Marlon Cole learned to swim in that pond, and others remember being baptized there. They could buy candy at the company store and a kind clerk would give them a “large” nickel’s worth. John Weaver, later John B. Cole’s father-in-law, brought his ice truck through the village sometime and shaved ice or cold drinks were treats. There were ball fields where The Border restaurant stands now and there was an official company team; Claire Wall’s uncle Dudley Dixon was a member.
#
