Metro Pulse/Cover/Textile industry

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Global Threads
East Tennessee textiles and apparel manufacturing feels the squeeze of international competition

When Knoxville was the 'Underwear Capital of the World'

by Jack Neely

For the first century or so, Knoxville was not a major textile center. And the textile industry is not a major part of the city's economy today. So it might be hard to guess that, for several decades in the middle, the manufacture of fabric was the biggest thing going here. In several categories, our textile business was the biggest thing going anywhere.

One of the reasons Knoxville seems surprising as a textile center is that this isn't cotton country. According to some confident late-19th century reports, cotton was once a staple crop in the Knoxville area; at least, until 1820, when something seemed to go wrong. By 1830, there was no more cotton in Knox County at all. But agriculture seems to have spawned a minor industry: a couple of private cotton gins, at least, and toward the end of that era, a couple of "spinning factories." Those were along Second Creek, perhaps in the area later to be known as the World's Fair site.

This early experiment in textiles seems to have ended abruptly, in the fatal year 1838. Some sources say a flood that year destroyed the mill dams, but contemporary sources indicate that city officials destroyed the dams deliberately. A plague that summer and fall killed as much as 10 percent of Knoxville's population, and without understanding why stagnant water might cause disease, the residents nonetheless noticed the association. Some of the fledgling mills moved out to the countryside. A few small concerns survived.

Before 1885, though, Knoxville didn't have any more of a textile industry than most Southern towns. Postwar Knoxville was a city built mostly on the iron and railroad industries.

But in 1884, one R.P. Gettys of McMinn County moved his wool-carding concern to Knoxville, to a spot not far from the iron foundry and Mechanicsville, less than half a mile north of the Union fort that still stood on the hill. The address would later be the corner of Dale and 17th. For the next 25 years, Knoxville Woolen Mills would be one of the city's biggest employers, churning out "cassimeres and jeans," thousands of yards of them a day.

Just months after the opening of KWM, another large textile factory opened next to a brook in North Knoxville. Its impact on the city would be much deeper. Brookside Cotton Mills, on Baxter Avenue near Central, took raw cotton and transformed it into thread, then fabric, on state-of-the-art machinery equipped with 6,000 spindles. That sounds like plenty of spindles for anybody. But by the turn of the century, Brookside's factory expanded to have cotton thread reeling off 26,000 spindles. It also passed Knoxville Woolen Mills to become the city's biggest employer. Brookside employed 1,200, more people than were studying at the university at the time. Brookside produced a variety of cotton products, but it eventually became the biggest producer of corduroy in the United States.

It was a progressive sort of industry. The original Brookside factory was built to look at, featuring a large central park, with shade trees, walkways, flower beds and manicured hedges; Brookside hired full-time gardeners. Later, Brookside had a kindergarten and an "opportunity school" for the children of its laborers, many of whom were women.

And it kept expanding, eventually employing 3,500. Much of North Knoxville developed to meet the needs of this working-class population; a community once known as Brookside Village was in effect a city suburb passing for a mill town.

Brookside also drew some influential individuals. In the 1890s, Brookside recruited a Massachusetts man named Larkin Brown to be superintendent. The young businessman was apparently a nice enough fellow himself, but we remember him mainly because he brought with him a small, and unusually bright child: Clarence, who surprised his peers by graduating from Knoxville High School at 15, before speeding through UT in engineering. He would end up in a career unlikely for UT engineering grads, as a major film director at MGM. Brown made multi-million-dollar gifts to his alma mater, and as a result, today we have the Clarence Brown Theatre, perhaps the best-endowed non-athletic institution at UT. It's hard to deny that, if not for Brookside Mills, it wouldn't be there.

Meanwhile, perhaps inspired by the expanding Brookside's success, perhaps capitalizing on the city's growing working-class population and textile-loading railroad facilities, several other textile mills opened: Cumberland Knitting Mills, Knoxville Knitting Mills, Knoxville Cotton Mills, Riverside Woolen Mills, later Appalachian Knitting Mills—all separate concerns. But the one with the most staying power would be Standard Knitting Mills. Founded in 1900 on Washington Avenue in the northeast corner of downtown, with only 50 employees, SKM knitted union suits and kept up with every underwear trend for over 80 years. Eventually employing almost 4,000, and churning out almost a million garments per week, it would inspire some to say that Knoxville could claim the title of Underwear Capital of the World.

Moreover, the growth of Brookside and the rest of Knoxville's sudden textile industry may have saved the city's economy as the iron industry began to fade and the wholesale business leveled off.

Textiles were booming so much in the early 20th century, it might have seemed an aberration when Knoxville Woolen Mills, the factory that started large-scale textile industry here, seemed to stumble. When capitalist William Cary Ross bought the company in 1908, he was surprised to discover it wasn't making a living; he recommended closing it. Though cotton mills continued to expand, KWM was the first casualty of what would be a long century for Knoxville textiles. Meanwhile, the other woolen mill, South Knoxville's Riverside, which morphed into Jefferson Woolen Mills in the 1920s, remained.

Through the first half of the century, the cotton side continued to grow. By 1930, Knoxville was home to 20 textile and clothing factories. Textiles had long since become the city's largest industry, bigger than marble, bigger than lumber, and much bigger than the university. Entire neighborhoods, especially in North Knoxville, were made up of textile-factory workers.

In some ways, though, the heights were also the depths. By the 1930s, most textile plants weren't the idyllic working environments some early developers envisioned. Several mills maximized profits by crowding large numbers of low-paid workers, desperate for any sort of employment during the Depression, into inadequate facilities.

Lucille Thornburgh, a young woman from an educated family in Strawberry Plains, worked the night shift at Cherokee Spinning Mills, a yarn-producing factory on Concord Street. The conditions were hellish: 50 hours a week, stifling heat, no paid vacations or holidays; hundreds of female workers shared one small bathroom. Thornburgh joined the United Textile Workers which, in September, 1934, called a general strike. Thornburgh and 600 fellow employees walked off the job.

The three-week strike apparently resulted in the heart-attack death of Hal Mebane, president of Cherokee, and resulted in no gains for the workers. The Textile Strike of 1934 is remembered as a tragic failure, but it founded one career. Blacklisted by Knoxville's mills, Thornburgh made a career for herself as a union organizer, and by the '40s was prominent in the American Federation of Labor.

Herman "Breezy" Wynn was a UT football star, a Neyland-era fullback and sometime kicker permanently sidelined by a broken ankle. Already owner of campus-area businesses as a student, and well acquainted with the needs of the modern athlete, in the old Emporium Building on Gay Street he started a company to manufacture and sell protective sportswear and athletic accessories, especially football pants. He eventually bought the old Appalachian Mills factory on 17th Street, and what was once the "Southern Athletic Co. and Recreation Parlor" on the fringe of Fort Sanders evolved into one of Knoxville's biggest industries of the postwar years, eventually surviving as Bike, a major national manufacturer of jockstraps and a wide variety of other athletic gear, from uniforms to football helmets.

The war treated Knoxville's textile industries well. Knoxville plants from Brookside in North Knoxville to Jefferson Woolen in South Knoxville produced millions of uniform garments. Southern Athletic Co. manufactured 9 million barrack bags for the armed forces.

In 1948, more than 11,000 workers in the Knoxville metropolitan area—about 8,000 of them in Knoxville proper—were employed in the apparel and textiles industries. Collectively, the textile industry was Knoxville's biggest employer. But around that time, the Victorian-era textile industries began to shrivel.

Folks remember the 1950s nostal-gically, but the city was in critical condition. In 1954, two mills, Cherokee and Venus Hosiery Mills, announced they were leaving town; another, Appalachian, closed down soon afterward. It must have seemed apocalyptic when, after a few years of decline, mainstay Brookside Mills called it quits in 1956, dismissing 1,000 workers. Old Jefferson Woolen Mills finished soon afterward. There were various explanations: outdated equipment, new comp-etition from overseas, the higher cost of labor, the postwar popularity of synthetics. To make things worse, corp-orations siting new factories used the sprawling, postwar model for textile plants and were said to be discouraged by the city's irregular topography.

The loss of so much of its textile industry was devastating; the city had an unemployment rate in 1958 of 9.7 percent, making for something of an isolated depression. Between 1950 and 1960, for the first time in history, Knoxville's population declined, by a dangerous 10 percent. A 1962 report suggested that it was one of the biggest one-decade population losses in American urban history, and much of it was attributable to the decline of the textile industry.

However, several more expressly apparel-related industries, like Southern Athletic and Standard Knitting Mills continued to grow. SKM, for years Knoxville's biggest employer, claimed to be the second-largest knitting mill in the United States. In 1953, Knoxville became the site of the first Levi's plant east of the Mississippi, utilizing one of Breezy Wynn's old factories; it later moved to East Knoxville, where for about 30 years it was the nation's most prolific manufacturer of Levi's jeans.

Standard enjoyed a period of trendiness, ca. 1970, for its silk-screen T-shirts, but by the 1980s was experiencing hard times, blaming foreign competition and the inefficiencies of its overlarge antique building. After a period of layoffs, the factory finally shut down in 1989. The huge Levi's plant, which once employed almost 3,000, closed nine years later.

Some interesting textile-related companies remain, but the era of large-scale textile manufacturing is probably behind us. What remains are some very large buildings, most of them still empty, and thousands of people, the retired millworkers, and their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who still make up a very big part of the city of Knoxville, this old conglomeration of mill towns.