One Mill, One Community: Economic effects of a Textile Mill closing
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This slide show presented research on the economic effects on a local community of a textile mill closing. Callaway Mills was the largest employer in Rockdale County at the time it closed in 1960. The loss of about 1,000 jobs caused wages to drop dramatically. The research shows how long it took the county to recover to where local wages were comparable to the state average.
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One Mill, One Community: Economic effects of a Textile Mill closing
- 1. One Mill, One Community: Economic effects of aTextile Mill Closing in Rockdale County.
- 2. Research Goals This research examines what effects the closing of a single textile mill had on a single community. Rockdale County was a rural community that over the years became dependent on the Milstead Mill as the largest employer. Community leaders began a concerted effort to attract new industry and diversify the local economy. Research will show: • The mark made by the Milstead mill on wages earned, the number of wage earners and on the added value by manufacturing in Rockdale County from 1950 to 1990. • Comparison to the state of Georgia for the same time period. • Local leaders were successful in bring new businesses and their efforts improved as the community became a part of suburban Atlanta in the 1970’s. Photo Source: Callaway Beacon, Milstead 50th anniversary, Sept. 20, 1954. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ga cmils/callaway_beacon.htm
- 3. The Milstead facility located on theYellow River and just north of Conyers was already a significant industrial complex when Fuller E. Callaway purchased it in 1905.The Milstead Division of Callaway Mills was a small but profitable unit of the company for 55 years manufacturing cotton duck. Milstead Plant, 1910, showing old paper mill and Milstead ManufacturingCompany from across the Yellow River.Courtesy of Milstead, Georgia history portal, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gacmils/milstead_plant_1910.htm However, competition from cheaper textile imports began to hurt the U.S. textile industry just after the KoreanWar. Callaway, as with other textile companies, began a spiral of cost reduction measures that eventually lead to consolidation of its operations and closing of several of its facilities, including Milstead in 1960. The Milstead Division of Callaway Mills
- 4. Rockdale County, Georgia In 1920, Rockdale County had a population 9,521 and just seven manufacturers. Per capita income was $809.56. The number of wage earners in Rockdale County remained relatively flat over 20 years (from 382 in 1920 to 364 in 1940). The community recovered by after WorldWar II and more than doubled the number of wage earners by 1950.
- 5. Population Growth Comparison Rockdale Georgia 1940 7,724 - 3,123,723 - 1950 8,464 8.74% 3,444,578 9.31% 1960 10,572 19.94% 3,943,116 12.64% 1970 18,152 41.76% 4,589,575 14.09% 1980 36,747 50.60% 5,463,105 15.99% 1990 54,091 32.06% 6,478,216 15.67% Population Growth of Rockdale County 1940-1990 Source: U.S. Census, general population, 1940-1990.
- 6. Factors Involved in the Decline of the U.S.Textile Industry The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in occupied Japan lifted the last economic restrictions at the onset of the KoreanWar. Japan had been a world leader in textiles before WorldWar II and had made significant progress in rebuilding the industry by 1951. Japanese low textile wages and encouragement from the U.S. worried American textile industrialists about competing against the Japanese. The American Cotton Manufacturers Institute feared that the EisenhowerAdministration was willing to sacrifice the U.S. textile industry in order to keep Japan as a strategic ally and out of the communist sphere. AgriculturalAct of 1954 authorized subsidizing cotton export pricing with the goal of creating demand for American cotton overseas.
- 7. Factors in the Decline of the U.S.Textile Industry The federal Agricultural Act of 1954 authorized subsidizing cotton export pricing.The subsidy began at six and a half cents per pound and later increased to eight and a half cents. U.S. textile industry leaders pointed out that the subsidy created a two-price cotton system where domestic textile manufacturers paid a higher price for U.S. cotton while foreign competitors paid a lower price for the same cotton. The textile industry was faced with foreign competitors who enjoyed the advantages of cheap labor and cheap U.S. cotton while the domestic prices remained higher. The Result: American textile exports reached a peak of $875 million in 1947 and dropped steadily over a decade.Textile imports surpassed exports in the U.S. in 1962 at $300 million.
- 8. Textile Imports and Exports affected by the Agricultural Act of 1954 Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, figures for Cotton Manufacturers, p. 898-890.
- 9. The manufacturing Census of 1963 shows wages divided by wage earners to average at $3,310.90 for Rockdale. Eleven years later the manufacturing Census shows wages bottomed out to an average of $640.00 in 1970. The 1980 census figures shows a slow recovery in wages in Rockdale County while the upward trend for the state continues.The line graph above demonstrates the trends for Rockdale County and the state of Georgia. Just how Bad was it? Sources: U.S. Census of Manufacturing for 1954, 1963, 1972, 1982 and 1987.
- 10. Callaway Mill Ruins in Milstead on theYellow River All that remains of the CallawayTextile Mill in Milstead are granite pillars where the mill sat above a water confluent that powered the mill equipment. Source: JamesTingley,YouTube channel, Milstead Division-Callaway Mills, Rockdale County, Georgia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBOH_qb Gids Atlanta Constitution, Apl. 9, 1960
- 11. Conclusions: The decline and eventual closure ofTextile mills in the 1950’s left a huge hole in local economies that some communities struggled to fill. Rockdale County is one of these communities and offers a unique perspective on the influence of the mills. County officials moved aggressively to recruit industries to replace the Milstead mill. Conclusions reached are the following: • New businesses were smaller and involved in light industrial assembly that paid less.This is evidence in the sharp drop in wages and value added by manufacturers in Rockdale during the decade following the mill closing. • Rockdale benefited greatly in the 1970’s and 1980’s by its proximity to Atlanta. Explosive population growth and completion of Interstate 20 allowed Rockdale to become a part of the metropolitan Atlanta. • Even with these advantages, Rockdale suffered from the sin of becoming too dependent for too long on a single textile mill on theYellow River to drive its economy.
- 12. Conclusions continued: There is also compelling questions to ask about Rockdale’s approach to attracting new industry. In comparing Rockdale with rural counties in North Carolina that also lost textile mills one must wonder if Rockdale could have completely left its rural roots behind and used its advantages of population growth, improved transportation and proximity to a major urban center to attract larger industry with better paying jobs. Also to be considered is Rockdale’s standing with other metro Atlanta counties that were competing with Rockdale to attract industry.
- 13. Bibliography • Barksdale, Margaret G., E.L. Cowen and Frances A. King. A History of Rockdale County. Conyers, GA. T.H.P. Publishing, 1987. • Brown, Martha, Deborah Manget, Jackie Smith and Chloe Rutledge. The Heritage of Rockdale County. Conyers, GA. Don Mills Publishing, 1998. • Coclanis, Peter A., and Louis M. Kyriakoudes. "Selling Which South? Economic Change in Rural and Small-Town North Carolina in an Era of Globalization, 1940-2007." Southern Cultures, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter 2007): 86-102. • English, Beth. A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry. Athens, GA. University of Georgia Press, 2006. • Flamming, Douglas. Creating the Modern South: Mill hands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984. Chapel Hill, NC. University of North Carolina Press, 1992. • Gaventa, John, Barbara Ellen Smith. “The Deindustrialization of the Textile South: A Case Study.” In Hanging by a Thread: Social Change in Southern Textiles, edited by Jeffrey Leiter, et al, 181-198. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Green, Hardy. The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy. New York. Perseus Books Group, 2010. • Parthasarathi, Prasannan. “Global Trade and Textile Workers.” Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000, ed. Lex Heerma Van Voss, et al (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010) • Vanderburg, Timothy W. Cannon Mills and Kannapolis: Persistent Paternalism in a Textile Town. Knoxville, TN. University of Tennessee Press, 2013. • “Mill Closing at Milstead Is Rumored,” Atlanta Constitution, 9 April 1960. • “Pattillo Plans Large Industrial Development in Rockdale County,” Rockdale Citizen, 10 November 1960. • Peter A. Coclanis, et al, “Selling Which South? Economic Change in Rural and Small-town North Carolina in an Era of Globalization, 19402007.” Southern Cultures, Vol. 13, no. 4 (Winter 2007). • U.S. Census, 1919 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1920). • U.S. Census, 1939 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1940). • U.S. Census, 1954 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1954). • U.S. Census, 1963 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1963). • U.S. Census, 1972 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1972). • U.S. Census, 1982 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1985). • U.S. Census, 1987 Census of Manufacturers of Georgia (U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1990).
- 14. Notable sources
Editor's Notes
- With a show of hands, how many people have family who worked in a textile mill? Or even worked there yourself? I had grandparents on both sides of my family work in a mill. Both my grandparents and great-grandparents on my Mom’s side worked in the Porterdale Mills. My Dad’s father worked at Dundee Mills in Griffin. So, textile mills have always interested me. That interest grew when I began working for the Rockdale Citizen. I sat in a lot of Porterdale city council meetings and met people like Frank Smith in Milstead, and I saw how much the mills or mill life meant to people. I also understood how easy it is to lose that part of history in a community. If people stop caring about it, and fail to preserve history they will lose it. Now, that’s a big part of the reason for my research. The other big reason was to get a good great in a history of U.S. economics class I took at Georgia Gwinnett College last fall. My instructor, Dr. Michael Gagnon, helped me immensely in developing my thesis and teaching me the tools of the trade in historiography. The result is One Mill, Once Community: Economic effects of a Textile Mill closing in Rockdale County.
- Comparison to the state of Georgia for the same time period that shows wages earned dropped in Rockdale County whereas the opposite occurred across the state.
- If a town had a good water source and a potential employee base, the textile companies established facilities there and created the mill villages around them. Rockdale County was no different. The Milstead Manufacturing Company was established in 1902 on the site of a closed paper mill along the “Long Shoals” of the Yellow River, approximately three miles north of Conyers. The company was described as an investment opportunity for A.J. Milstead from Virginia. The mill began producing yarn and in a short time moved to cotton duck. By 1904, the mill was running 10,000 spindles and the village surrounding the mill and grew to 1,000 residents. The community was named Milstead for the mill’s operator, Frank Milstead, son of A.J. Milstead. The Milsteads decided in 1905 to sell controlling interest of their facility to Fuller Earle Callaway of LaGrange, Georgia. The Callaway Mills made significant investments in the Milstead operations and added to the mill village by helping fund construction of churches, establishing a company store and expanding the mill itself. Milstead by 1920 was a classic example of a textile mill village.
- Rockdale County is the second smallest county geographically in Georgia and its economy was based on agriculture and the Milstead mill. According to Heritage of Rockdale, there were “few jobs of any consequence” with a handful of family-run merchant businesses in the city of Conyers. For the majority of people, the choices were to work on a farm, the mill or moved to Atlanta to find work. U.S. Census data bears this out and shows that one could count the number of manufacturing establishments in Rockdale County on your hands. In 1920, Rockdale County had a population 9,521 and just seven manufacturers. Per capita income was $809.56. Census data was incomplete in 1930 and 1940 for Rockdale County. The number of wage earners in Rockdale County remained relatively flat over 20 years (from 382 in 1920 to 364 in 1940). The number of manufacturing establishments during this period dropped to five indicating the effects of the Great Depression. The community recovered by after World War II and more than doubled the number of wage earners by 1950. The number of manufacturers in 1950 was eight in Rockdale County and indicates job growth came from the expansion of the Milstead mill.
- The decline for southern textile mills began in the 1950’s due primarily to cheap textile imports that several American textile industry owners blamed on U.S. government foreign policy. Vanderburg provides great insight into this decline in his research on Cannon Mills in North Carolina and centers on the rebuilding of Japan after World War II and the Agricultural Act of 1956. Japan had been a world leader in textiles before World War II and had made significant progress in rebuilding this industry in the 1950’s. That progress increased as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces lifted the last economic restrictions on Japan at the onset of the Korean War. In a few short years, Japan had become the second largest importer of textiles in the world, just behind the United States. Japanese low textile wages and encouragement from the United States government worried Charles Cannon and other American textile industrialists who feared of having to compete against the Japanese in the domestic and global textile markets. Cannon the American Cotton Manufacturers Institute had serious concerns that the Eisenhower Administration was willing to sacrifice the American textile industry in order to keep Japan as a strategic ally and out of the Communist sphere.
- Douglas Flamming presents a telling picture of U.S. textile trade during this time. American textile imports reached a peak of $875 million in 1947 and dropped steadily over a decade. Textile imports surpassed exports in the United States in 1962 at $300 million. The trouble that Cannon and others pointed out was the subsidy created a two-price cotton system: Domestic textile manufacturers paid a higher price for U.S. cotton while foreign competitors paid a lower price on the world markets for the same cotton The textile industry was faced with foreign competitors who enjoyed the advantages of cheap labor and cheap American cotton while the domestic prices remained higher. Cannon and industry groups lobbied Washington to reverse these policies. Japan benefited greatly from these trade policies and fulfilled the worries of 1951 by American textile manufacturers.
- I used U.S. Census counts of manufacturing for Georgia from 1950-1990 to look at wages, the number of wage earners and value added by manufacturers. It is a given that the Milstead mill was the largest private employer in Rockdale County. In 1940, the census recorded all of five manufacturing establishments in Rockdale County. In 1950, there were just eight manufacturers. Therefore, the county-level census data gives a fairly clear view of the influence the mill had on the local economy. The same data for the entire state of Georgia will allow us to compare Rockdale's enclosed, static economy with a larger and diverse economy that also had significant influences on the textile industry. I chose to divide the wages counted in the census with the number of wage earners. The target was 1960; the year Callaway closed the Milstead mill that resulted in about 895 employees suddenly looking for work. Starting in 1950, Rockdale County wages nearly matched wages for the state of Georgia. Then, in 1960 the bottom drops in Rockdale while the state experienced continued growth. The change in wages for Rockdale was dramatic. The manufacturing Census of 1963 showed wages divided by wage earners averaging to $3,310.90 for Rockdale. The manufacturing Census showed wages bottomed out to an average of $640.00 in 1970. The 1980 census figures showed a slow recovery in wages in Rockdale County while the upward trend for the state continues.
- The closing of the Milstead mill on October 3, 1960, was the biggest story in Rockdale County that year. It was certainly a shock to people at the time, but not completely surprising. The Atlanta Constitution reported on rumors of the mill closing on April 9, 1960. Conyers Mayor Lawrence Veal told the Constitution reports of the mill closing were “circulating freely” in the county and that “The school children have been joking about having to move to LaGrange.” Local officials and the chamber had to become big sellers of Rockdale County to industry which led to the second biggest story that year when Pattillo Construction announced it would build an industrial/business park about a month after the lights were shut off at the Milstead mill. Pattillo’s development involved 55 buildings on 130 acres located west of Conyers. Among the reasons the company gave for deciding on the project were the conservative tax structure and cooperation by local officials. A significant pool of available labor from the recently closed textile mill no doubt was also a factor in Pattillo’s decision.
- However, despite the good news of new development coming into the community so soon after the loss of the largest employer Pattillo's business park was marketed toward small, light industry that likely paid less than what mill workers were used to from Callaway. This trend is similar to what occurred in North Carolina where mostly rural counties sought to attract industry with the pitch of cheap labor, low taxes, and no unions. Was this the right track for Rockdale? I would say Rockdale had advantages that rural North Carolina counties did not have. The 1960 U.S. Census reported Rockdale’s population at 10,572, an increase of 20 percent from the 1950 Census. In 1970, Rockdale became part of the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and grew at incredible rates outpacing statewide population growth through the 1990's. Though any chamber of commerce in the land would say it is always working to attract good business and good paying jobs, Rockdale continually attracted small, light industry with lower wages which resulted in slower wage growth for the next 30 years.