Nebel Knitting Mill Annex

The company managed to flourish during the Great Depression, with its newly expanded Worthington Avenue building, placing Nebel’s company in a prime position at the end of WWII to meet the tremendous demand for women’s full-fashioned nylon hosiery. In the postwar era, the Nebel Knitting Company became the largest and most productive hosiery concern in Mecklenburg County, and an internationally known name in hosiery. The 1946 annex was the centerpiece of a large expansion program designed to modernize the company completely. 

The Nebel Knitting Mill Annex is significant architecturally as one of the region’s few buildings designed in the Art Moderne style. Most local textile mills – including the adjacent 1927 and 1929 Nebel Knitting Mill, designed by Richard C. Biberstein (1859-1931) – were revivalistic structures reflecting the conservative political, social, and economic thinking of Charlotte’s business elite. The Nebel Mill Annex broke with that trend. Designed by Biberstein’s son, the noted Charlotte engineer and architect Herman V. Biberstein (1893-1966), the innovative Annex used only understated details, clean lines, and symmetry as decorative elements, all indicative of the Art Moderne style, to house the most up-to-date knitting machinery then available. The new building afforded the company a total of 125,000 square feet of working space.  

To draw attention to both the company’s newly outfitted and modernized facilities and the innovative styles of women’s hosiery produced in that complex, Nebel launched an extensive and aggressive national advertising campaign in the late 1940s. Ads in such prestigious women’s magazines as Vogue, Charm, Bazaar, Seventeen, and Glamour, featuring movie star Jane Russell helped make Nebel a top name in hosiery throughout the country. The company soon became one of the largest and most productive hosiery manufacturers in the Southeast. The company even maintained an office in New York City’s Empire State Building.  

The Annex enabled the Nebel Knitting Company to lead the Charlotte hosiery industry into a new era of modern manufacturing during the post-WWII boom period. William Nebel, the region’s most successful hosiery manufacturer and a pioneer in the hosiery industry, not only brought the hosiery industry to Charlotte, but continued to push for modernization and innovation within the industry. The Nebel Knitting Mill continued to produce women’s hosiery and pantyhose until 1968, when the complex (including the original structure and the annex) was sold to Chadbourn, Inc.