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[40], chapter three “A Model Manufacturing Town” Moving to Alabama City “No nation ever became wealthy by raising the raw material and then exchanging it for the manufactured article,” wrote William Gregg of South Carolina in 1844. “The manufacturing people always have the advantage.”1 Three years after the Dwight Manufacturing Company began producing cotton textiles in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Gregg was one of a small number of southerners calling for broad, regional industrialization of the South. Throughout the antebellum South, however, industrialization occurred only to the extent that it served the interests of the region’s slavebased agricultural economy. Railroads, iron works, and cotton, grist, and saw mills served as offshoots of the southern plantation, and most investments in antebellum southern industry were directly related to fluctuations in the cotton market. When cotton prices were high, land and slaves were the outlets for surplus capital. Some manufactories operated in southern cities and were scattered throughout the countryside by the 1820s and 1830s. However, the downward spiral of cotton prices in the 1840s caused many white southerners to reconsider regional industrialization, especially the development of an indigenous cotton textile industry, within the context of overall southern economic diversification . Low crop prices made investments in and potential profits earned from manufactories increasingly attractive. Industrial boosters like William Gregg, moreover, argued that expanding the South’s manufacturing capacity would help break the region’s dependence on the North for basic manufactured goods. Proponents of southern industrialization received a great deal of press during the 1840s and early 1850s. Nevertheless, according to historian Randall Miller, the commitment made by wealthy planters and merchants to the development of southern industry during these years remained limited, because economic boosterism was, Randall observed, only “a child of the agricultural depression.” Since planters and wealthy merchants tied to King Cotton were the ones who held the capital resources necessary to underwrite any meaningful manufacturing pursuits, southern industry remained small and localized. Once cotton prices rebounded in the 1850s, investments returned to land and slaves.2 40 Moving to Alabama City • 41 1 [41], The first fully integrated cotton textile mill in the state of Alabama began operations in 1832. During the antebellum “cotton mill boom” of the 1840s, entrepreneurs constructed two more mills in the state. By 1860, cotton manufacturing was the second largest industrial employer in Alabama. When the Civil War began, Alabama had fourteen cotton mills, over half of which were spinning mills with few or no looms. Only six of Alabama’s mills carried out the entire process of textile production from raw cotton to unfinished cloth. During the antebellum period, neither Alabama’s textile industry nor that of any other southern state equaled the size or reached the levels of managerial and technical maturity achieved in the New England and Mid-Atlantic industries. In 1860, when the Massachusetts Dwight Manufacturing Company by itself was capitalized at $1.2 million and employed 1,600 workers, cotton mills in the entire state of Alabama represented $1.3 million in invested capital and had a textile workforce numbering just slightly over 1,300. Through the 1870s and into the first decades of the early twentieth century, however, Alabama experienced a “mini-industrial revolution,” and the Dwight Manufacturing Company’s mobile capital played an important part in it.3 “Be it known I am no enthusiast, nor am I a citizen of Gadsden or even Alabama ,” a “traveling man” informed the readers of the Manufacturers’ Record in 1887. “Accident located some towns, but nature located Gadsden,” he continued . “I . . . can state within the bounds of absolute truth that I have visited more than twenty States and at least 1,200 incorporated towns; yet I have never seen iron, coal, timber, . . . river transportation, health, food, water and topographical beauty combined in one range of landscape before I came here.”4 Beginning in the 1880s, sentiments similar to those of the “traveling man” could be read in myriad forms in hundreds of newspapers and pamphlets about scores of towns and localities throughout Alabama. Like other states of the Piedmont South during the 1880s and 1890s, through published materials and in the halls of the state legislature, Alabama embarked on an increasingly aggressive booster campaign meant to facilitate industrialization within its borders. Eager to attract investments in textiles, mining, and metals manufacturing that had the potential to jumpstart a statewide economic reconstruction, state legislators and local civic groups worked in tandem to create an image of Alabama as...

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