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Prattville's Historic Cotton Mill Reduced To Flames Local Firefighters story of the fire.
Photos Click to enlarge Photos by Tommy Brown Continental Eagle Corporation for public information no copyright enforced. Scanned from Prints
Electronic Photos
9/12/2002 Electronic Photos 2mp 9/14/2002 Electronic Photos 2mp
Photos by Tommy Brown Continental Eagle Corporation for public information no copyright enforced.
With the Historic American Engineering Record survey, of 1997, Prattville has a record of these historic buildings, online and in the Library of Congress. Without the survey, we would only have bricks, charred wood, and memories. Thank You Richard O'Conner and the Historic American Engineering Record team for all your hard work. Complete Floor By Floor Drawings, History and Photographs by the U.S. Parks System's Historic American Engineering Record Survey Click Button
Alabama Firefighters Battle Historic Prattville Mill Fire Photos &
Story by Prattville Fire Department Captain Neal Mixon
(Cemetery View) Starry Starry Prattville, by Tommy Brown 2002 after Vincent Van Gogh Excerpt From Daniel Pratt Ante-bellum Southern Industrialist by Dr. M. C. McMillan Prattville Manufacturing Company Daniel Pratt's most important factory, with the exception of the Gin Manufactory, was Prattville Manufacturing Company No. 1, organized by Pratt and incorporated by the Alabama Legislature in 1846. The company sold $110,000 worth of stock (in units of $1,000 per share) before it began operations. Pratt bought a controlling share of the stock. Other purchasers, all of whom were local, were agents or mechanics of the gin factory and planters in the area. The corporation was controlled by a Board of Directors which elected Pratt president of the company and continued to re-elect him annually. Under Pratt’s leadership the Prattville Manufacturing Company became one of the most successful and well known of the cotton and woolen mills. Pratt’s factory was designed to make coarse grades of cloth but made some finer grades in the late eighteen-fifties. The year the Prattville Manufacturing Company was organized Pratt wrote that the mill was "expressly for the purpose of making heavy cotton osnaburgs for plantation use.... I flatter myself that by the first of October next, I will be able not only to furnish the cotton planters with gin stands, but cotton osnaburgs of as good a quality, and as cheap as they can be produced elsewhere. Our machinery is entirely new, and made expressly for heavy goods. When in complete operation I expect to turn out 6,000 yards per day, weighing half a pound to the yard." The first textile mill was wooden structure with 2800 cotton spindles and 100 looms, to which was later added 585 woolen spindles. In the eighteen-fifties the mill consumed annually about 1500 bales of cotton and 120,000 pounds of wool. Both the cotton and the wool were purchased locally; the latter encouraging the production of wool in the area. According to the industrial census of 1850, the mill in 1849 made 540,000 yards of osnaburgs and 344,000 yards of sheeting, both of which sold for near ten cents a yard. The Prattville Manufacturing Company worked 141 people in 1850, 62 males and 79 females. A few of these from New England but most labor for the factory came from the small farmer class in the surrounding area. Albert J. Pickett, who later wrote the well known history of Alabama, and who visited the factory less than six months after it opened in order to write an account for DeBow’s Review declared: The persons employed are taken from the country around-- men, women and children-families being preferred-who are furnished with homes at small rent and obtain their provisions at the shops and neighboring farms. Average wages are eight dollars per month. There is no difficulty in getting operatives. Slaves have not been employed because of the abundance of other labor. Laborers in the factory lived in neat newly built company houses pictured in DeBows’ Review for August, 1851. Each house had its garden plot. Their standard of living was much improved in their new environment. Pratt considered his textile mill not only an economic venture but a sociological experiment. He built schools and churches for them with his own money. A very religious man himself, he taught them in Prattville’s Sunday Schools. Many contemporary accounts tell of his unbounded paternalism toward his workers. He wrote his sister in New England in 1847 that his aim was to "build a respectable village such as will compare with your northern towns in point of good morals and good society. In fact I am not afraid now of a comparison with any village in New England of the same population."The crucial test for the textile mill came in the first two years of its existence. Two superintendents of the mill failed because of the inability to manage the mill. Some of the weavers quit because the mill ran only part-time. Untrained labor was plentiful but trained labor non-existent locally. However, Pratt like most successful cotton mill operations in the ante-bellum South had New England contacts by which he could secure managerial labor. In September, 1848, he made a trip to Boston in order to secure a superintendent, Gardner Hale, who also brought his son to become manager of the carding room. Soon after Hale’s arrival, all spindles and looms, some of which had never started up, began operations. According to the report of the Board of Directors the business made a clear profit of $14,244.68 during the first fiscal year that Hale was superintendent. By 1854 the company had accumulated a profit of $60,565.04, which was used to buy new machinery and build a new brick factory building. In 1860 the Prattville Manufacturing Company manufactured the following articles. A cloth made from cotton, designed for sheeting. A heavy osnaburg, 30 inched wide, weighing 10 ounces to the yard, and a lighter osnaburg, 30 inched wide, weighing 8 ounces to the yard, both made of cotton for wearing apparel. They also manufactured goods of mixed cotton and wool. These included a 9 ounce linsey (5 ounces of wool and four of cotton) which they advertised as designed for Negro women and Negro children, and a heavier 12 ounce linsey (8 ounces of wool and 4 ounces of cotton) sometimes called Alabama plains, for Negro men. They advertised a cloth described as "4 treadle, colored, and of select wool" as designed for white men and boys. The Prattville Manufacturing Company also carried on a large business of manufacturing wool on shares. The planter furnished the wool, the factory, the machinery, labor, and cotton, and it was made into linseys of a heavy durable nature for slave wear, or a finer grade, twilled and colored, for white wear, at about two thirds the market price. In 1855, the committee on textiles at the Alabama State Fair in Montgomery in awarding the prize to the Prattville Manufacturing Company for the best ball of osnaburgs called it "superior to anything of its class either American or European." Pratt's New Orleans Commission House Photo Since Pratt was his own commission merchant at the great New Orleans center of trade, his facilities for marketing his cloth were superior to those of most southern textile mill operators. This is important because one of the reasons often given for the failure of southern mills was the refusal of commission merchants to buy southern cloth when they could make greater profits on the cheaper and less durable but more attractive northern cloth. And under the factorage system the cloth could be marketed only through commission merchants. In one six month period ending with October 1, 1854, Pratt’s commission house in New Orleans H. Kendall Carter & Company, sold $24,328.39 worth of Prattville textiles. But he still had to depend on other commission houses to sell much of his cloth. When the firm of Hazard and Green failed in New Orleans on July 23, 1854, it owed the Prattville Manufacturing Company $20,007.74, of which the company collected $10,003.87. Pratt found it necessary on occasion to ship his cloth direct to New York in order to sell for cash. In all southern markets he had to sell on a credit of from six to eight months and wait until his paper matured before he could realize anything from it. The difficulties of manufacturing and marketing southern textiles is clearly shown in the following letter written by Pratt on April 13, 1849: Experience has proven that we cannot at present manufacture cotton goods as they can in the eastern states. The raw material at our doors does not compensate for the experience and advantages which they have over us. We have to get our machinery from them, and pay the mechanist as high as their own mills pay. We then have to pay freight and expense on it out. We also employ machinist and superintendents from them at high prices. Our operatives are generally inexperienced, causing two of them to do the labor of one experienced hand. We make better goods because we work better stock. If our merchants would patronize our home manufactories it would benefit our state, give new life to our manufacturing business, without injuring their own interest. But they say we shall sell them at ten percent less than New York prices, which we cannot do. I was compelled to ship some goods to New York last winter, or to make a peddling business out of them, which certainly operates against their merchants.
The Original Cotton Mill of 1846 Click To Enlarge
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