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Industrial Expansion (1.6.2)The importance of lumbering in Elizabeth City's economy increased during the early decades of the twentieth century, but then declined rapidly during the lean 1930s. Eighteen lumber companies or wood manufacturing industries were incorporated in Elizabeth City from the 1890s to the early 1920s. The Blades and Kramer mills continued to expand. In 1902 the Blades company produced an aggregate total of 60,000,000 feet of lumber in all their mills, with the Elizabeth City plants finishing a large percentage of the output (American Lumberman (Chicago), October 11, 1902). With the closing of the various Blades mills in other towns (primarily New Bern) and the incorporation of the Foreman-Blades Lumber Company in 1906, the holdings of the Blades and Foreman families were consolidated into one of Elizabeth City's largest and most successful lumber operations (Incorporation Book 1, 185). In 1920 the Kramers acquired the property of the Richmond Cedar Works at the north end of Pennsylvania Avenue, now North Poindexter Street, adjacent to Knobbs Creek. A new planing and sawmill was erected to consolidate operations and the other three sites were sold; the old Poindexter Hill site became part of newly created Elizabeth Street in 1925. The Kramer company occupied the Knobbs Creek site until 1961, when the entire Kramer lumber business was sold to L. R. Foreman and Sons, another local lumber mill (Kramer 1967, 58-59, 70; Incorporation Book 1, p. 85; Sanborn maps 1902, 1908, 1914, 1923, 1931). In 1915 it was reported that the city's numerous lumber and wood-working mills gave employment to more than 1,000 men. These establishments supplied either raw lumber, finished building materials, or finished products primarily for shipment to northern markets. The manufactured products included barrels, boxes, staves, baskets, trays, buckets, tubs, shingles, crates, and traps (Weaver 1915, 1). Large lumber mills--Foreman-Blades Lumber Company, National Box Company, Buffalo City Company (shingle mill), Dare Lumber Company, North Carolina Tray and Basket Company, Richmond Cedar Works (shingle mill), Foreman-Derrickson Veneer Company, and Chesson Manufacturing Company--operated along Knobbs Creek north of town. Here the mills had the advantages of both water and rail transportation, the latter from numerous sidings to the nearby main line of the Norfolk and Southern Railway. Kramer Brothers kept its primary saw mill at the Poindexter Hill location along Poindexter Creek and their planing mill along Charles Creek until sometime between 1914 and 1923, when both mills moved to a new facility along the river at the mouth of Knobbs Creek; the second saw mill along Charles Creek at Dog Comer closed by 1931 (Sanborn maps, 1914, 1923, 1931). |
Elizabeth City's industrial base, while largely dependent on lumbering, included a large variety of other products. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the industrial output included farm implements, brooms, carriages, hosiery, buggies, bricks, caskets, cigars, candy, ice, fertilizers, and tombstones (North Carolina Year Book 1905, 451-454; 1910, 365-367). An airplane factory, the Taft Airplane Corporation, operated briefly at the end of the 1920s, financed largely by members of the Foreman and Blades families (Incorporation Book 3, p. 323, 349). The Elizabeth City Cotton Mill, begun in 1895, flourished and expanded at the location along the railroad on North Hughes Boulevard. Two hosiery mills, the Elizabeth City and the Pasquotank mills, were organized in 1902 and 1914, respectively, the former being the successor of the Elizabeth City Knitting Mill formed in 1899. Each occupied a brick building along the railroad northwest of the city; only the building of the Pasquotank Hosiery Mill (108 East Ward Street) remains recognizable as an industrial building (Incorporation Book 1, p. 154, 244,259; Incorporation Book 2, p. 248; Sanborn maps 1902, 1908, 1914, 1923, 1931; Butchko 1989, 311). Elizabeth City Milling Company, Zimmerman and Company, and Pailin Milling Company each operated grist mills during portions of the early twentieth century along Water Street; all were demolished before the end of the 1940s (Sanborn maps 1908, 1914). The Elizabeth City Oil and Fertilizer Company opened a mill along Knobbs Creek about 1912, and, on December 13, I915, became the first processor of domestic soybeans in the United States. However, the company went out of business in 1917, ending the city's brief, but pioneer, role in the soybean processing industry (Incorporation Book 2, 6; Sanborn map 1914; Butchko 1989, 335 n. 86). The Elizabeth City Brick Company expanded their plant along the railroad, where they remain in business today; the earlier brickworks of F. G. Thompson closed between 1914 and 1923 (Sanborn, 1902, 1908, 1914). All Elizabeth City industries suffered during the Depression, none more than the saw and cotton mills and wood manufacturing plants. In addition to the economic upheavals of the 1930s, the fact that much of the region's vast and most readily-cut forests had been cut during fifty years of unprecedented logging meant that lumbering was no longer the lucrative industry it had been. During the early 1930s, hundreds of sawmill employees were thrown out of work in Elizabeth City. Of the large lumber-related industries of the prosperous 1910s, only the Chesson, Foreman-Blades, and Kramer firms were still in operation in 1942 (Miller, 1942, 289). The Kramer mills, the city's largest, had a reduction in wages and salaries for all, even the management and officers. Things were so bleak in 1933 that the liquidating agent for one of the local banks reminded the directors not only of the company's obligation to the bank, but to advise them that much of the Kramer Brothers Company's stock held by the bank had been pledged by certain stockholders as collateral to loans; the implication was that a default by Kramer would be felt throughout the city (Kramer 1967, 61). Conditions were even worse at the cotton and hosiery mills. Throughout the decade of the 1930s, the Elizabeth City Cotton Mill and the Elizabeth City Hosiery Mill, both operated by the sons of Charles H. Robinson, Sr., closed when demand for cotton yarn was low. These shutdowns lasted a minimum of several months, and often longer, as was the case when the cotton mill was closed for the entire year of 1938. During good times the cotton and hosiery mills employed about 225 and 325 workers, respectively, so their shutdowns resulted in serious economic hardship for several hundred families. Full recovery did not occur until the war work began about 1940 (Robinson interview). | ||
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