The Vanderbilt Shirt Company, Part II

The slightly fuzzy girl in the photo is me, circa 1974.  It was taken by my boyfriend (now husband!)  at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.  I chose this particular photo not to show off how short I was wearing my skirts in 1974, but because I made the top from fabric I bought at the Vanderbilt factory outlet.  At the outlet one could buy the finished products of the factory, and they also had a big bin of fabric pieces that were left over from their products.

I remember this fabric well because it was such a bear to sew.  It was a two way stretch knit that had a mind of its own.  The top is actually a bodysuit, and there is a zipper down the front.   And you can’t tell, but what looks like dots are actually ladybugs.  I loved that outfit.

Today my plea on my last post about Vanderbilt paid off.  My post was seen by Pat Purvis whose mother Helen Watts had worked for the company.  I was able to talk with Helen on the phone and got some great information about the company.

The Vanderbilt Shirt Company was started in 1946, and had no connection to the Vanderbilt family who built the Biltmore House.  As Mrs. Watts put it, people in Asheville just like to name things for Biltmore and the Vanderbilts.  The factory was located in downtown Asheville, on the corner of Walnut and Lexington in the building I showed last week.    In the late 1960s there was a fire, started by a homeless man who had gone into the building to stay warm.  Because of that, the owners built a new factory  where they relocated in 1969.

My biggest question was how was Vanderbilt shirt connected to Langtry, Ltd.  As it turns out, Langtry was a label that was actually started by the Vanderbilt Shirt Company.   Previous to this label they did contract sewing for other companies like Levis and they made shirts and jackets for the US military.  Most of the output of Langtry was women’s blouses, but they also made other women’s garments like dresses and jackets.  Mrs. Watts was not sure about where the name Langtry came from, but thinks that it probably was named for actress Lillie Langtry.

As American companies began to outsource part of the manufacturing process, Vanderbilt Shirt Company turned to Haiti.  For a while much of  their product was made in Haiti, and this led to the ultimate undoing of the company.  During the political unrest of the late 1980s following the ouster of the Duvalier dictators, the Vanderbilt factory in Port-au-Prince was destroyed along with all the machinery, the fabric and inventory.  It was a hard blow from which the company never truly recovered.

The company limped along in a smaller facility on French Broad Avenue, until the early 1990s when they finally declared bankruptcy.  

Before talking to Mrs, Watts, I just assumed that Langtry was just another victim of the flood of cheaper imported goods that was making it harder and harder for American manufacturers to compete.  How much more interesting the story turned out to be.

Many thanks to Pat and Helen.

Cottons for Spring 1952 from South Carolina Mills

I was interested in this little catalog because I’d never heard of the company, South Carolina Mills, located in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Spartanburg is a quick trip down the mountain, in the SC Upstate, or piedmont.  It was at the beginning of cotton country, and a lot of cotton is still grown in the region today.

Unfortunately the generic name of the company brought up every mill that ever existed in South Carolina in a google search.  But after a careful consideration of the contents of the catalog, I’ve pretty much decided that there was not a “South Carolina Mill,”  but that the company was a sales outlet for many of the region’s textile and garment factories.

In the catalog there is a wide variety of cotton-based products – clothing for the entire family, towels, carpets, blankets, curtains, and fabrics.   All of these are products that were made throughout the Carolinas.

One of the few brand names mentioned in the catalog was Startex.  Startex was located just west of Spartanburg, and made printed cotton towels and tablecloths.   Today the factory is gone, but there is still a village remaining by the name of Startex.

The catalog does not give us the brand name, but these sure look like Beacon blankets to me.  It could be that because that mill is in North Carolina, they did not want to mention it.  Or it could be that they were made by another company.  There were lots of small blanket makers in the area.

There were several pages of fabrics for the home sewer.  A few of them are labeled as being from Springs, which was a large mill in Lancaster, South Carolina.  They are the makers of Springmaid.

The catalog clearly shows the diversity of products that were being produced from cotton.  And here is a look at some of the clothing:

Probably my favorite page from the catalog was this one showing clothes for boys.  Is that argyle shirt nifty or what?

I did a Google maps search for the address given in the catalog of where to send the order.  Today it is an empty lot.

Henry River Mill Village

Some time ago I posted about the Henry River Mill Village and the fact that the entire village was for sale.  The village was used in the filming of the Hunger Games as the poor District 12 home of the heroine, Katniss.  I was traveling through the area last week, and took the short detour off the Interstate to see Henry River for myself.

The entire tract is privately owned (and still for sale) and due to on-going problems with sightseers, trespassing is forbidden, but the state road runs through the village so it is possible to get a good look from one’s car.  There are about twenty houses still standing, with more outhouses than I’ve seen in a very long time.

Henry River Mill was opened in 1905 as a producer of cotton yarn.  Originally it was water powered, and a dam that was built to concentrate the falling water is still standing.  The mill closed in the 1960s, and the mill building burned in 1977.  Like many mill villages, Henry River was fairly self-sufficient, with a company store, a school and a church.  The mill was even able to produce electricity for the village.

The setting is quite beautiful.  The site starts on the top of a hill and the village winds down the hill to the river.  I just hope that any buyers of the site plan to preserve the village as mill villages are now few and far between.

This building is the old company store.  In the Hunger Games it was a bakery, and you can see the word “cakes” painted beneath the windows.  Note the very white board to the left of the door, under the windows.  The word “Pastries” was painted there, but one day the owner arrived to find that someone had ripped out the boards and taken them as a souvenir.  He replaced the boards and placed the site off limits to the public.  Can’t say that I blame him.

An Old Cotton Mill and Village, Reused

One of the aspects of textile history that many people (especially if you are not from the textile producing areas of the US) don’t know about, is the mill village.  Mill villages were constructed by the mill owner as housing for the workers.  Because the mills were often constructed miles from the nearest town, or on the outskirts of a city where there was no pool of workers nearby, the mill owners often provided modest, low cost housing to attract workers.  They sometimes even provided a church and a company store.

As our textile industry began its decline in the 1970s, many textile mills were closed, and in many cases, the mill village connected with a closed mill would be abandoned or even demolished.  The South was in danger of losing this part of our historical record.  Fortunately, preservationists and former residents of the villages began seeing the possibilities in these old structures.

The video at the top shows how the  Edenton Cotton Mill has been converted to condos and the surrounding village has been revitalized as a viable community.  The mill closed in 1995, and the owner gave the entire complex to Preservation North Carolina.  The houses were sold and renovated for modern living.  As one woman points out, this is not a museum.  There is however, a small museum in the former cotton mill office building.

To contrast with the community in Edenton, the next video shows an unrestored village, Henry River Mill Village.  You may have seen this village, as it was used in The Hunger Games as the setting of the coal mining region, District 12.  If you are interested in restoring this  little ghost village, it is for sale for $1.4 million.

I have a few villages and village museums on my radar, and will be paying them visits in the not too distant future, so stay tuned for more textile history.

On a bit of a personal note, I grew up in Canton, NC, which was home to Champion Pulp and Paper.  Before the mill was built in 1906, Canton was a small settlement of 230 people.  The building of the mill brought more jobs than there were workers, and soon the influx of new residents led to a housing shortage.  The owners of Champion began construction of a village, modeled on the textile mill villages of the region.  In all, about 60 mill houses were built in a new area of town which was named Fiberville.  On the hill above the company built thirteen larger houses which were to be provided to the mill’s management.

In 1949 many of the smaller houses were destroyed when the Pigeon River flooded.  The company sold the remaining houses, some of which were moved to higher ground.  What was left of the original village was destroyed in 2004 when Hurricanes Frances and Ivan caused more flooding.  Interestingly, all the management houses are still high and dry on the hill above.

The Start of an Obsession

Even though I’ve been buying and sort of collecting vintage clothing since the 1970s, it was not until about ten years ago that I really became interested in learning more about the American textile and garment making industries.   The first topic that really captured my imagination was the Swirl wrap dress.  The Swirl dress was not high fashion, but rather, it was a garment that was commonly worn by women at home or for casual occasions.

What piqued my interest was a post on a vintage chat board showing the hang tag on a never worn Swirl.  I was surprised to learn that the factory had been located in the up-state of South Carolina, not far from my home.

Over the years I’d run into my fair share of Swirls, but I had no idea they were a local product.  An online search turned up almost nothing, so I decided to travel to the source in search of information.  The factory had been closed for years, so the first place I went was to the public library in Easley.  There I found the local newspaper on micro-film, and with the help of a worker who remembered a basic timeline of the firm’s operation, was successful in locating articles about how the company moved to Easley in the 1950s.  Unfortunately, I also found articles that detailed the decline and eventual closing of the plant in 1999.

While a Swirl dress is not high fashion, it is fun fashion.  The dresses were made from cheerfully colored cottons and were often appliqued with fun designs.  A good example of a 1960s Swirl is this dress which my friend Monica Murgia has for sale on her site.   It reminded me of that very first hang tag that I saw so many years ago, and how it led me down this path of collecting and blogging.

An important feature of the Swirl dress is the button on the back neck that holds the dress together.  I love how the I is dotted with a button on the Swirl label.

All photos courtesy of and copyright of Monica Murgia.

Ad Campaign – Lorraine Worsteds, 1946

A big difference in advertising now and in the past is that 60 years ago consumers seemed to have a much greater knowledge about fabrics and fibers.  Today it would be really strange to see an ad for a fabric, but up through the 1970s these ads were commonly found in fashion magazines.  I’m betting that most people these days don’t even know what worsted is.

If you need to brush up on your fabric and fiber terminology, you are in luck.  As I announced earlier, the Vintage Fashion Guild now has a Fabric Resource, and you can learn quite a bit by just reading through it.  For example, worsted happens to be “Fabric made from high-twist, worsted yarns that have long, smooth fibers.”  And don’t forget to click on the fabric samples to see the enlarged fabric.

Labor Day Special -

When I was a kid I was really confused about Labor Day.  Why have a holiday where nobody goes to work and then call it “Labor” Day?  It wasn’t until I learned about the Labor Movement that I began to see the connection.

In honor of Labor Day, today’s post is a greatly simplified history of the Labor Movement and how it influenced the textile industry, especially in the South.  I’ll go ahead and state straight out that I was reared by a man who was a strong supporter of Labor, and that while I try to keep an open mind and realize there are always at least two sides to any story, I am strongly sympathetic to the cause of organized labor.

I hope all of you (in the US anyway) learned in school that after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 the growth of cotton fairly exploded across the South.  What might seem a bit odd today is that even though the cotton was grown in the South, it was shipped to textile factories in the North and in England where it was spun into thread which was woven into cloth.  There were very few textile factories in the South until the 1880s.

There was a  good geographical reason for there being few factories in the South.  It had to do with power, or the lack of it.  Until the steam engine came along, factories depended on water power, so factories had to be located along a stream or river where water was falling.  In the South, there is a wide coastal plain where there are no water falls, but in the North the fall line is close to the coast, where most of the people were living.   The fall line in the South was located far inland, away from the centers of population and the source of workers.  It makes sense that the factories were located where there was a close supply of workers.

There were other factors, of course.  The machinery was being manufactured in the North, and the industrial leaders were not eager to sell the machinery to a region that could use slave labor to compete with them.

After the end of the Civil War the development of the railroad and of the steam engine led to factories being built in the South.  The war had greatly disrupted the infrastructure of the region, so this development was slow.  But by the turn of the 20th century, there were textile factories being built all over the piedmont South.  Many of the early textile companies were formed by local men, like Franklin Mebane, who started what became Fieldcrest, and James Cannon, the founder of Cannon Mills.

As time went on, many textile and sewing companies in the North decided to relocate to the South.  A good example of this is the Beacon Blanket Company, which began its move south in 1923.  The reason often given for the relocation was that they wanted the factories to be closer to the source of the raw material, cotton.  And while this was true, there was also the fact that labor costs were cheaper in the South.

The long established textile mills in the North had begun to be regulated by the state governments.  More and more there were laws that limited child labor, and that set limits on the work day of adult workers.  In the South, which traditionally had few factories, these laws were slow in coming.  This pushed the cost of labor in the South below what it was in the North.

The lack of manufacturing in the South meant that jobs were hard to come by and highly prized.  When a factory was being built, the owners often build a surrounding town from scratch.  This would include a church, a company store and low cost housing for the workers.  Pretty soon the workers’ lives were firmly intertwined with that of the mill.

Add to this the fact there was a growing suspicion of labor unions in the South.  In the 1920s there was a series of doomed attempts to unionize textile mills which led to the deaths of workers.  The promises of the unions to support striking workers fell through, and the strikes were unsuccessful.  It all left a bad taste in workers’ mouths.  And it did not help that most of the union organizers were from outside the region.  It was easy for the factory management to characterize them as outside agitators.

Throughout the mid 20th century, most Southern textile and sewing factories remained non-union.  But big changes were occurring in the way the mills were being run.  Many of the original founding families were selling the textile companies and ownership became absentee, with many of the owners living in other areas, leaving the day to day running of the mills to management teams.

Still, old loyalties to the company and the families that “took care of” the workers remained.   I grew up in a paper mill town that had been established and owned by the same family for 60 years.  When there was an attempt to unionize the factory, many workers refused to vote for the union out of a sense of loyalty to the Robertson family, even though they had sold the majority of the company to a New York firm.   It was the same in many textile companies across the South.

But there was another concern, and that was of job security.  Workers feared that voting for and joining a union would jeopardize their jobs.   And this was a valid concern.  In 1956, when the workers at the Deering Milliken plant in Darlington, SC voted to join the Textile Workers Union of America,  the company promptly closed the factory, putting 500 people out of work.  Even though the move was illegal, it took 24 years before the fired workers were compensated with back pay.

But there were successes.  After years of having their products boycotted by union workers across the country, JP Stevens finally was unionized in the mid 1970s.  In 1974 JP Stevens worker Crystal Lee Sutton was fired for her involvement with union organization, but as she was being escorted from the factory, she took action:

 “I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word UNION on it in big letters, got up on my work table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet…”  

If Sutton’s story sounds familiar it is because the film Norma Rae, starring Sally Field was a fictionalized version of the story.   I’ll have more to say about the movie later this week.

I’d like to say that this story has a happy ending, but we all know what happened to the textile jobs across the South.  As soon as people started making a living wage, the importation of cheaper foreign-made goods began the downfall of the Southern textile industry.  Some companies, like Hanes, took a “if you can’t beat them, join them,” attitude and began producing elsewhere.  Some companies, like Milliken, have survived by switching from home textiles to industrial textiles and chemicals.  Others, like Cannon, simply went out of business.

There are of course those who blame the unions for the inability of American textile companies to compete in the global marketplace.   If insisting that workers be paid a living wage, have safe working conditions and humane conditions and hours is what caused the American industry to fail, then I say sure, blame the union.  Unfortunately, all that has really happened is the the poor conditions are still with us, but half a world away.