Thrift Mill

The Thayer Manufacturing Company of Massachusetts purchased the land for the mill in 1912 for $15,000. In less than a year, unable to pay its debts, the company was forced to sell the property at public sale. The only bidder was the Thrift Manufacturing Company. With the property, the company acquired a two-story factory building, a weave shed, a cotton warehouse and opening room, a boiler room and pump room, and ten cottages for workers. But the Thrift Manufacturing Company continued operations for only twelve years. Henry P. Kendall, of Walpole, Massachusetts – who already owned two South Carolina mills and two mills in New England – purchased the Thrift Mill in 1924. His purchase of the Thrift Mill was one in a series of acquisitions that built his Kendall Company into a giant. By the mid-1920s, the Thrift Mill operated 30,240 spindles, 676 looms and 60 cards, consuming some 1.5 million pounds of raw cotton to produce medical gauze. By 1948, the Kendall Company employed more than 7,000 employees in eighteen plants across the U.S. and in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Buenos Aires. In total, the company operated some 300,000 spindles and 6,400 looms. 

The Thrift Mill became the headquarters for the Kendall Company’s Grey Division that produced woven but unbleached and unfinished cotton cloth (i.e., “grey” cloth) from raw baled cotton. That cotton cloth to make a wide range of textile products including surgical dressings, diapers, gauze, cotton balls, tea bags, mosquito netting, and casket linings. The Kendall Company sold the Thrift Mill in 1958, starting a series of sales transaction that found the mill changing hands several times over the next thirty years. Mill operations at the property finally ended in the early 1980s when the property transitioned to warehousing operations. 

The Thrift Mill is unique in Mecklenburg County as it was the only mill built in a rural setting, miles away from an urban workforce. The county’s other mills were erected in more densely populated areas near a ready supply of mill workers. Even those mills built outside the immediate Charlotte vicinity were all located in towns of some size, including Davidson, Cornelius, Huntersville, and Pineville. The Thrift Mill is also unique in that it likely was the last of the big cotton mills built during the proliferation of mill construction across the county, a period that lasted from 1881 to the early 1910s.