If any one thing made Maiden, it was the textile mills.  The town was built around the mills from the very beginning.  Without them, without that history, Maiden wouldn’t be what it is today.

Mayor Bob Smyre came to Maiden for the first time in 1960 at the age of 25. “When I came here (the town) was all mills and furniture,” he said.  “It was a furniture and cotton mill town.”

It was thriving, too.

The mills like Providence Mill, Union Mill and Carolina Mills were all humming along.  People had jobs and Main Street was busy with people walking up and down the sidewalks.

“Downtown was hustle and bustle, go, go go,” Smyre said. “…It was something out of the memory of how good small-town life can be.”

The mill community was also a tight-knit community, he said.  Part of that came from the mill establishing 99-foot lots around the entire town, but it also brought the people together. “(Neighbors) used to sit on the front porch and talk to each other,” Smyre said. He got to know a lot of the mill and furniture workers as they would come to his barbershop in East Maiden and share a piece of their life story with him as he cut their hair.

“They all seemed like family,” Smyre said.  “We all grew on each other.”

He watched from the windows of his barbershop as Maiden changed and growth came to a halt.

It wasn’t until the mills started closing down about 20 years ago, that people realized the true nature of being a mill town. Suddenly, people were out of work, many with families to support, and many were at an age where it was hard to find work. “Seeing someone lose their job, it’s a traumatic time,” Smyre said.

Watching the struggles of his friends, his “family” cut right to his heart.

“That hurts very much,” he said.

And the closing of the mills has left a permanent mark on Maiden. All it takes is a stroll down Main Street to see the damage it’s done.  Smyre said the “big box” stores just put everyone out of business. “I’ve seen mills close — Carolina and Union. I’ve seen furniture factories go out of business,” Smyre said.  “No little town has built back what’s it’s lost.”

MAIDEN’S ROOTS

There wouldn’t be a Maiden without Henry Franklin Carpenter, who is often credited with founding the town.  Maiden was open farmland until Carpenter built a series of cotton mills in the area, which drew people from all around looking for work.

Maiden just happened to have the four key ingredients a mill town needed, Melinda Herzog, director of the Catawba County Museum of History, said. It had water, cotton farms, the railroad and labor.

Carpenter’s parents, Joseph and Elizabeth, were German immigrants who moved to Lincoln County.

When the Chester and Lenoir railroads came through the area and established a depot in what would later become Maiden, Carpenter moved his wife and eight children closer to it.  They bought a house in 1880 and built a farm.

His 21-year-old son David Martin went to South Carolina the same year to work in the Clifton and Converse cotton mills in South Carolina. When he returned, he convinced his father and brothers to go into the cotton industry.

His father formed H.F. Carpenter & Sons and deeded 565 acres of his farm to the company in return for stocks and built Maiden Cotton Mill.

They started with 1,000 spindles and increased it to 2,240 spindles a couple years later.

In 1889, pleased with the success of Maiden Cotton Mill, Henry Carpenter built Providence Mill with 1,000 spindles.  He followed that with Union Mill in 1907.

The town was growing steadily as more jobs became available and merchants opened shops along Main Street.

David Martin Carpenter decided it was time to structure the town.  He went around with a 33-foot chain and measured off 99-foot lots from one edge of town to the other.  The roads were straight and the lots were equal.  East Boyd Street is a good example of his handiwork in the mill village.

Carpenter and the other two landholders in the area, the Boyd family and the Schrums debated what to name the town.  After rejecting “Carpenter,” “Boyd” and “Schrum” as names for the community, the families agreed to name it Maiden, after the Maiden Creek Post Office that was already established.  The town was formally incorporated on March 7, 1883.

The Carpenter family not only started Providence Mill and Union Mill, and started Memorial Reformed Church, as well as the first school in Maiden.

RISKY BUSINESS

In the mid-1800s, there was very little of anything in that area that later became Maiden.  There weren’t shops, there weren’t churches or schools, and industry was just about non-existent.  What the town did have, was cotton farms, and several of them.

Farmers rushed to get their crop of cotton harvested first, so they could claim a prize from the mills for the first bale — 250 pounds —of cotton brought in, Herzog said.

She said the farmers would pulled their wagon full of cotton under the over hang of the cotton gin.  The wagon would go over a large scale and the mill workers would pay them for their load by weight.

The cotton was combed out to remove all the debris and reveal the pure cotton product that was taken to the cotton mills to be spun into thread. “It was very labor intensive,” Herzog said.  “You had to have a lot of field labor working it.”

If the price of cotton dropped, it wasn’t like other crops, like corn or wheat, where at least it could be used to feed the family or the livestock.  If the cotton crop or the market wasn’t favorable, a man risked losing his farm altogether, Herzog said.

A MILLER’S LIFE

Life in a mill town wasn’t an easy one, Herzog said.

The days started early and the mill workers worked late.  It was a sunrise to sunset profession where the workers worked in little light, usually whatever came through the windows.

“They started at the age of 6,” said Herzog. “If they were old enough to stand on a box and thread a spindle, they were old enough to work.”

Workers were on their feet all day working on machines without safety devices, Herzog said. People lost fingers, hands and arms working the textile machinery. All it took was a moment of carelessness that would allow hair or clothes to get caught up in the machine.

The speed of the thread feeding from the spindle could easily slice a finger off, she said. She said as young as they started working, most of them didn’t get an education, but they worked to support their families.

After work, they went home to a mill house, a home owned by the mill. “It gave them a means of control,” Herzog said.  “If a person lost their job, they lost their home.”

She said in that respect, it provided people an incentive to work hard. “It that time, a mill job was one of the best jobs you could get,” Herzog said.

Herzog said mill jobs were highly sought after, because the mill took care of its workers.

There weren’t many jobs for the average worker that provided good pay and housing like a mill job did.

Despite the risk and hours, men, women and children flocked to the mills for work.

Mill jobs were also among the few jobs considered acceptable for them to have, and often if a woman was widowed young, she sought work at one of the busy mills.

MILL INFLUENCE CONTINUES

The mills continued to help Maiden grow well into the 20th century.

Even well into the mid-1960s and beyond, he said the mills continued to take a strong interest in the community, Smyre said.

He said there wasn’t much the town could ask for that the mills wouldn’t provide.

When someone noted the need for a sidewalk from U.S. 321 Business to then Maiden High School, Carolina Mills paid for it.

As the mills closed, a chapter of Maiden’s history book closed.  Most of the mill workers have died, but the evidence of their work remains rooted in the town itself.