(This is the ninth 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. Since the thesis ended in 1945 when Johnston and his wife and sister-in-law lost control of the mill to B. Everett Jordan and Willis Smith, we have to rely on the Cox book and other materials for the mill’s final chapter.
(” 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 was printed in 1996 and reprinted in 2007 for the Town of Royall Mills Centennial Celebration.)
It appears that after 1945 when he sold all his interests in the Royal Mill, Don P. Johnston and his wife, Petrona Powell Johnston, continued to live with her sister, Jessie Powell Powers, in the gray Colonial Revival house that William C. Powell had built as a summer home in 1895. All three are buried in the Wake Forest Cemetery Section 1 along with the Johnston’s son.
We do know that after they were widowed Petrona and Jessie lived there and were part of the social life of Wake Forest.
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The partnership between Willis Smith, who had been the Royall Mill receivership’s attorney and a confidante of Don P. Johnston before the sudden rift, and B. Everett Jordan, part of the Sellers group which owned several cotton mills, did not last long because Smith, who became a U.S. senator, died in 1953. Jordan was named to the U.S. Senate to fill the term of Kerr Scott in 1957 and then won re-election in 1960 and 1966.
But the transfer of ownership to the Sellers group in 1945 meant one thing after the turmoil and troubles of the Depression. There was steady work at Royal Mill with only one brutal scary time, the strike.
The following is a handwritten account of the strike by Garland “Pete” Hendricks, who was a youngster at the time.
In March 1951, the Textile Workers Union of America, a part of the CIO, called for a general strike. The union wanted a 12 percent increase in wages for its members nationwide. About half the 270 employees at Royal Cotton Mill were union members. They worked three shifts, and the average wages were $1 to $1.06 per hour. The union wanted $1.21 an hour.
- Everett Jordan was the president of Royal Cotton Mill and chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party. U.S. Senator Willis Smith was an officer and stockholder in the mill.
Locally, contract negotiations broke down on March 16, and the next day about 60 union employees, who wanted Royal Cotton Mill to enter a binding contract with the union, rejected the ongoing national negotiations and set up a picket line.
That night someone cut the tires on the cars of the workers who crossed the line, and rocks and rotten eggs were thrown during the shift change.
On March 18, Wake Forest Police Chief Floyd Whitman Jr. reported about 300 workers from nearby mills where workers were not striking had come to town to join the picket line. He asked for calm.
For a time there was only shouting at the shift changes, but on the night of April 6 someone fired a shotgun into the home of a non-union worker. Also, someone threw a rock into another house, and the homeowner fired three shots at the rock thrower.
Events continue to escalate. On the night of April 25, three dynamite explosions shocked the mill community. There were five children asleep in Wesley Cooke’s home when one of the explosions blew a hole in their bedroom wall.
On April 28 there was a full-scale riot. Armed men holed up inside the mill, and the N.C. Highway Patrol was called in to restore order. Legend has it that when the troopers arrived the violence was so bad they were scared to go to the mill and spent the first day hanging around “Smiles” Lynam’s store on North Main Street, drinking Pepsi’s until things cooled off. It was national news.
The heavily armed troopers restored order on April 29. The courts ordered resumption of contract negotiations. Warrants were drawn, accusations were made and civil suits were filed.
After much political pressure, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled against the union on November 6, 1951, and ended a period of turmoil that had been front-page news in Raleigh and across the nation.
In the mill village, the union and non-union workers – sons and brothers, cousins and neighbors – found ways to make peace among themselves and even today are reluctant to speak of the strike.
Jack Horton remembered that time as scary, particularly when union members and non-members “started a riot that night. People shooting and yelling and running in the streets!” Claire Wall, who was a newly-wed at the time, said of one night, “I slept in the bathtub!” She told Cox that once the strike was over the village pulled together to heal the wounds.
The next few years were uneventful in the mill village with steady work at the mill all through the rest of the 1950s and 1960s. By 1971 there were 225 people employed at the mill and the annual payroll was just a bit more than one million dollars.
Cox talked to John Ellis Mitchell, who worked with the yard crew, unloading the train cars that came in loaded with cotton bales and loading others with the yarn spun by the mill. “His father, John Henry Mitchell, had worked in the mill since John Ellis was a small boy. John Ellis started to work at the mill in 1954 when he was 16. He and his brother, Horace, and his sister, Louise, all worked in the mill during this time.
“He remembers that there were rarely any off-hours or slow periods during the two decades he worked there. ‘I’m sure it went back and forth some, but it never shut its doors during those years. The work was hard, but it was a pretty good place to work.'”
Mitchell and many others were caught off-guard, therefore, in 1976 when the rumors began that the mill would close.
Jordan had just died and his sons, left in control of the mill operations, decided it was time to get rid of what assets they could. Polyester had become the fabric in demand, not cotton, and the mill was beginning to lose money.
“People were surprised. None of us expected it,” Mitchell said. “For a lot of folks, the mill was all they had ever known. It was a tough time; everyone had to fend for themselves after that.”
But it was not the end for the mill village.
In 1977 the Wake Forest town commissioners voted to annex the mill village along with Cardinal Hills, Pineview Estates and the Northeast neighborhoods, a move that almost doubled the size of the town and brought some hard feelings by the mill villagers, who thought they had been overlooked and disregarded in the past. There were substandard water and sewer lines in the mill village and the Northeast area along with substandard housing in places, and all of these problems began to be addressed along with paving of streets, adding street lights and fire hydrants. One mill village bathtub held water, but it drained into the ground under the house.
The progress seemed slow, but it was steady. The Royall Cotton Mill Company Store was renovated and became apartments. First one group would build two or three houses in the village. Then another group purchased the mill itself, tore down the accessory buildings and turned the mill into apartments for people with limited incomes. Individual homeowners began to repair and renovate, and the homes were increasingly sought after by young couples or older folks who liked the friendliness. Today finding a mill village house for sale is a real prize.
Glen Royall Mill Village was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. There was recognition it is the only surviving mill village in Wake County outside of Raleigh. There was a centennial celebration in 2007 which brought back old friends and important people. Most recently the Town of Wake Forest approved an overlay zoning and building guidelines that will assure all new building will be compatible with the old houses.
The mill may be gone, but the village which provided all the muscle to make it profitable for years survives and will continue to thrive.
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