From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Towel Town No More

Towel Town No More In 1906, James W. Cannon built a mill on his 600-acre cotton plantation . He also built a village beside the mill for the workers. At first, the village was called Cannon City, but the name was soon changed to Kannapolis. Some say the name is Greek for “city of looms.” Others say that J. W. wasn’t that fancy. He didn’t know any Greek and most likely just changed the spelling to avoid confusion with his other business enterprises. In time, Cannon’s mill town, located some thirty miles from Charlotte, grew to become the largest towel and sheet manufacturer in the world. When J. W. died, Kannapolis consisted of twelve mills with more than 600,000 spindles and 10,000 looms, and employed over 15,000 employees, who turned out 300,000 towels daily. And the Cannon enterprises were still growing. By end of the 1930s, over 25,000 people worked at the Cannon mills in Kannapolis, producing over half of all towels and twenty percent of the sheets purchased in the United States. The Cannons took advantage of a large pool of uneducated workers willing to work for low wages in the mills. Area agricultural workers migrated to mill work. Even though it was hard, dirty work, working for the Cannon interests was better than barely subsisting as a sharecropper. Mr. Daniels describes Kannapolis on his Journey as follows: 67 Kannapolis [is] where the Cannons have a private town in which they make a good part of the towels that wipe the face of the world. As members of it, Cannons understood the Carolina race…and spent no time planting trees for a people who too often have considered them only as things to be cut down. The Cannons did their planting in one pretty little park about the mill offices and left the village itself an ugly community of dirty clapboard and asphalt shingle. One house there, I remember sat so close beside and below the unpaved lane that its whole side—even its windows—was painted with splashed yellow mud….By no material standard could Kannapolis be called a pitiful town; but by any aesthetic standards it is a hideous one. Kannapolis was completely private. There was no mayor or city council. The streets weren’t public. The Cannon Company hired the policemen. The fire department, the water company, and sewage plant were all owned and operated by the Cannon interests. Workers rented one of the 2,000 Cannon-owned houses and shopped at the Cannonowned business district. By 1960, Kannapolis had the distinction of being America’s largest unincorporated town, with some 35,000 residents . It was only after the Cannon family sold the mills that Kannapolis incorporated as a city. Big changes started in 1971 when J. W.’s son died, fifty years after succeeding his father as president. At that time, Cannon Mills was North Carolina’s largest employer. With 24,000 employees and seventeen mills, Cannon was the country’s largest producer of sheets, pillowcases, and towels. Cannon Mills was doing relatively well, but the textile industry, which had come to the Carolina Piedmont from New England because labor was cheap, was on the move again seeking cheaper labor overseas. In 1982, the Cannon family sold out lock, stock, and employee housing to a firm headed by David Murdock, a California entrepreneur, for a reported sum of $413 million. Murdock’s firm moved to modernize the Cannon operations, laying off workers and selling mill houses to those workers remaining. They also began a $200 million capital improvement program to update the facilities. Within four years, the Murdock interests resold the mills and the Cannon name to Fieldcrest for $250 million. Like the Murdock interests before it, Fieldcrest owned the Cannon mill complex only a short time before selling out to Pillowtex for $700 68 million. But in the post-NAFTA world, an American textile business wasn’t a good investment. Pillowtex had borrowed most of the money it used to buy Cannon. By November 2000, Pillowtex tried to re-organize in bankruptcy by closing plants and shedding debt. It didn’t make it. Pillowtex emerged from bankruptcy in May 2002, but liquidated fifteen months later. Barely more than two decades after the Cannon family sold the huge complex where at one time some 30,000 people labored, the mills at Kannapolis closed for good...