Larkwood-Chadbourn Hosiery Mill Plant

Mecklenburg County’s first hosiery mills were in Charlotte, starting with Defiance Sock Mills in 1915. Between 1917 and 1926, Charlotte added three more large hosiery manufacturing firms. Larkwood Silk Hosiery Mills opened its North Charlotte plant in late 1929 with some 100 workers operating thirty-three knitting and twenty-three sewing machines to produce full-fashioned women’s hosiery products. By 1930, Charlotte’s five hosiery manufacturers enjoyed strong product demand, employed collectively nearly 1,000 workers, and benefitted from lower land prices, unfettered expansion opportunities, and railroad proximity. But the combination of the Great Depression and employee layoffs due to more efficient equipment and mechanization prompted the rise of labor unions in response to job loss, decreased pay, and poor working conditions. Aside from one brief but unsuccessful unionization strike by nearly half of its 155-member workforce in 1933, Larkwood weathered the storm. By 1935, Larkwood employees operated sixty-two knitting, twenty-one sewing, and fifteen looping machines but demand necessitated a significant plant expansion that doubled the mill’s size, increased production capacity dramatically, and required a near doubling of the workforce. By 1939 almost 26% of the nation’s hosiery was produced in the Tar Heel State.

In the mid-1940s, production at Burlington-based Chadbourn Hosiery Mills tripled, prompting a rapid expansion of the company through construction (new knitting mills in Shenandoah, Virginia, and Siler City, North Carolina) and acquisitions, including its 1945 purchase of Larkwood. Chadbourn also moved its headquarters to Charlotte, where expansions and modernizations at the mill in 1946 included a  new boiler house and the addition of such amenities as a cafeteria, locker rooms, and air conditioning; later additions were made in 1949 (including the distinctive “Chadbourn” emblazoned smokestack) and 1962. By 1953, Chadbourn owned seven manufacturing sites in three states. Two years later, it initiated a merger with New York-based Gotham Hosiery Company, a forty-old firm. The resulting entity, Chadbourn Gotham, Inc., remained headquartered in Charlotte. The new firm continued to grow, adding new sales offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, and San Francisco to market products manufactured in its eleven U.S. and Canadian plants. Additional acquisitions allowed the traditionally women’s hosiery company to expand into lingerie, leisure and sleep ware, and even men’s and boys’ clothing. Although the company’s Mecklenburg County workforce exceeded 2,500 by 1965, changing fashion trends in the late 1960s quickly diminished demand for Chadbourn’s core hosiery products, prompting the company’s purchase by Alabama-based W. B. Davis Hosiery Sales in 1973. Ultimately, as the U.S. textile industry suffered further declines due to foreign competition, changing technology, and globalization, the Charlotte plant was shuttered in 1978.