Location: NC 59 at junction of Main, Trade, and Lakeview Streets in Hope Mills
County: Cumberland
Original Date Cast: 2015
Chartered in 1836 by Charles Peter Mallett and opened in 1839, Rockfish Manufacturing Company was the nineteenth cotton mill in North Carolina and, up until the Civil War, the largest in the state. Mallett built another textile mill, Phoenix, in Fayetteville in 1836. Colin McRae sold 147 acres to Mallett and fellow incorporators, attorney Charles Haigh; Warren Winslow, governor (1854-55); Edward Hall, Fayetteville Observer editor; and John Owen, governor (1828-30). They spared no expense, purchasing the very best Northern-made equipment. A Hillsborough newspaper in 1838 listed the eleven cotton mills in North Carolina then in operation and eight under construction including “one at Rockfish, near Fayetteville, a fine water power, owned by a Company.”
Rockfish Factory, outfitted with 4,400 spindles and 118 looms, had capital investment of $131,000. In 1850, it used 1,300 bales of cotton and produced a million yards of sheeting with a value of $70,000. The boom in cotton manufacturing between 1830 and 1860 pales beside that which took place between 1880 and 1900 when 200 cotton miles were built in North Carolina, but the antebellum growth set the model. In March 1865 troops under the overall command of Gen. William T. Sherman burned eight of the nine cotton mills in Cumberland County, with only Beaver Creek, operated by a transplanted Connecticut native, surviving.
By 1865 Mallett, then ninety-three, had turned over operation of Rockfish Factory to his son, Charles Beatty Mallett. Living in Chapel Hill, three months before his death, he received news of the destruction and wrote that “I have concluded that for this year it will be better for us all just to try and live.” Rockfish stockholders sold the property in 1871 to a Northern investor, Thomas Oakman of New Jersey, who then sold it to a local man, William C. Houston, who built on the site what became known as Hope Mills Number One. That plant thrived and was focal point of a new town until it burned in 1954. Today Hope Mills is without its textile base.
References:
National Register of Historic Places nomination (1985)—historical significance statement by Michael Hill, online at http://www.hpo.ncdcr.gov/nr/CD0141.pdf
Diffee W. Standard and Richard W. Griffin, “The Cotton Textile Industry in Antebellum North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review (January-April 1957): 15-35, 131-164
John A. Oates, The Story of Fayetteville and the Upper Cape Fear (1950)
John G. Barrett, Sherman’s March through the Carolinas (1956)