Hoskins Mill
(ca. 1904)
The Hoskins Mill was one of the earliest cotton mills owned by Edward A. Smith who, by 1908, was the principal shareholder in North Carolina’s largest textile mill business.
201 South Hoskins Road, Charlotte, NC 28208
The Hoskins Mill was the second cotton mill launched by Baltimore native Edward Arthur Smith (1862-1933) who moved to Charlotte in the 1880s as a sales representative of Thomas K. Carey and Son, a Baltimore-based industrial supply firm. Recognizing the rapid growth of the textile industry within Mecklenburg County, Smith first joined with fellow Carey employee Daniel Augustus Tompkins (1852-1914) and Robert M. Miller, Jr. (1856-1925) to launch the Charlotte Supply Company in 1889 as a local supplier for the machinery and equipment needed to open and maintain the city’s new mills. The three men sold their interest in the Charlotte Supply Company in 1901, and Smith used his share of the proceeds to begin building and operating his own cotton mills.
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Smith’s first mill was the Chadwick Mill, located on Rozelles Ferry Road and the Seaboard Air Line Railway tracks. Named for Captain Hubert S. Chadwick (1856-1899), founder of the Louise Cotton Mill – Charlotte’s largest textile mill when completed in 1897 – Smith’s new three-story plant and adjacent forty-house mill village was built and started operations in 1901. In April 1903, Smith and a group of investors founded Hoskins Mills, Inc., and purchased some 140 acres adjacent to the Chadwick Mill. Bearing the family name of Smith’s mother, the Hoskins Mill began operations in the spring of 1904, boasting a mill village of eighty homes. The combination of Smith’s Chadwick and Hoskins mills boosted Mecklenburg County’s industrial capacity by thirty percent.
By 1907, in addition to the Chadwick and Hoskins mills, Smith also headed the Calvine (formerly Tompkins’ Alpha Mill), Dover, and Louise mills, and soon thereafter built new mills in Rhodhiss and King’s Mountain, North Carolina. Smith started consolidating his holdings under one corporate umbrella in 1908 by forming the Chadwick-Hoskins Company, with principals William F. Draper (U. S. Congressman from Massachusetts, 1892-1897, and U. S. Ambassador to Italy, 1897-1900), Arthur J. Draper (who served as president of Chadwick-Hoskins, and also became an officer of the American Trust Company, later known as NCNB and Bank of America, and a principal in the Stephens Company, developer of Myers Park), and E. C. Dwelle. That consolidation made the Chadwick-Hoskins Company the largest textile mill business in North Carolina.
In the early 1920s, the family-owned Gossett Mills company purchased controlling interest in the Chadwick-Hoskins Company, creating a textile firm that by 1939 owned and operated twelve mills across the Carolinas and Virginia. As the result of subsequent corporate mergers, the Hoskins Mill buildings were sold in 1948 to Spatex Corporation. The factory changed hands several times in the following decades when, in August 1985, a fire prompted then-owner Hydro Prints to cease operations at the mill.