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GLENCOE MILLS: THE IDEAL AND THE REAL
Appreciation is extended to Glenn DiNella for granting permission to use this paper. As you will see, Glenn had a vision for Glencoe long before the current work began. An appendix to this paper has been omitted because it contains detailed site drawings that would be too difficult to view here. The paper also includes photographs that have been omitted because most of them are already available in other areas of this site. Where applicable, a link has been provided below so that you may view the picture. Use your browser's "back" button to return to this page.
Glenn Robert DiNella May, 1992
Submitted to the Department of Landscape Architecture, North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Landscape Architecture.
Committee Chairman: Denis Wood
Committee Members: Robert Stipe and Richard Wilkinson
For my parents, who were my first teachers, and who continue to support me even when they don't really understand what I'm doing.
My best hope was that, between theory and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out; and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedals Romance (p. 76)
Table of Contents
This paper is in fact two papers trying to be one. One paper is about preserving a specific place--Glencoe Mills. In it, I hope I have provided some information which will prove useful for making actual changes at Glencoe so that others will be able to go there and appreciate it as I do.
Preserving for future generations is fine. But for me, I must confess, this is not my sole motivation. If the whole truth be known, I must confess that I was originally motivated more by the fear of lost opportunity than anything so noble as providing an opportunity for my posterity. To stand idly by while a place with so much to offer--so rich in character, a place with such strong connections to our past as to be almost sacred--slowly slips away would be just short of sacrilegious.
Somewhere along the line, when I stopped collecting information and began typing, Glencoe and I came to an understanding. We both agreed that even if no one ever reads a word of this entire paper, it has served its purpose. The second paper (which actually appears first) within this larger paper, is about what Glencoe has taught me. It has allowed me to put out of my mind how things are and let me see how things can be. And I know there will always be a little bit of Glencoe in everything I design from this day forward.
Still, there is an even more abstract motive behind this project. Just as I believe that learning for the sake of knowledge is a better motive than learning to pass a test to get a degree to get a job, so do I maintain that preserving our history must be intrinsically rewarding. So it is for me.
A man's work is his best judge. By their fruits ye shall know them. Not what he would do, but what he does, is what actually exalts him. The strenuous efforts of one brave man made Alamance county rank first, in the whole South, perhaps, in cotton manufacturing. The sagacity and energy of Mr. E. M. Holt had a crystallizing influence on the natural resources of Alamance, bringing civilization out of chaos. His sons were at work while others were galloping up and down the road with a shotgun on their shoulders. His life is a simple story of industry, thrift and forethought, of brawn and brain combined. Good for him who concentrates the forces around him and does it long enough.
Sallie W. Stockard, The History of Alamance (1900)
Traveling up Highway 62, just north of the city of Burlington, North Carolina, long before you reach the bridge which crosses the swift, muddy Haw River, you will realize you are not in the city anymore. It is difficult to say just when this happens--but it shouldn't be. One minute you are lulled into admiring the fresh white parking stripes on the new blacktop parking lots of the crisp new strip malls and (seemingly) the next moment you are admiring honeysuckle-covered log cabins and roadside vegetable patches of small country houses and trailers. Even though you will probably not notice the small green sign which tells you that you are outside the city limits, by the time the road begins its steady decent into the Haw's floodplain, you will feel it--country. Just past the bridge, there is a narrow road to the left--sometimes called River Road, sometimes Public Road--which leads to the old Glencoe Mill Village. The village was originally a project of William E. and James H. Holt, two of the five sons of cotton mill pioneer Edwin M. Holt. Most motorists only catch a glimpse of what remains of a remarkably well-preserved example of the nineteenth century industrial villages that once flourished from Maine to Mississippi--which is a shame--because for anyone who takes time to go and listen, it has a story to tell.
As a young man, Edwin M. Holt noticed the great economic inconsistency in shipping Southern cotton thousands of miles north to be made into cloth which was then sold back to those who grew it in the first place. In 1837, he took advantage of this readily available staple by persuading his father to provide the money to build the first cotton mill in Alamance County near their home on Alamance Creek. This mill was only the fifth in the state of North Carolina and considered by some to be the country's first major cotton mill (Bluestone, 1975).
Holt’s "Alamance Plaids" soon became famous and as his operation grew to include his five sons, fifteen grandsons, and a chain of mills, it became E. M. Holt and Sons. On January 26,1878, Edwin's son James Henry Holt purchased land which had been the site of a tobacco processing factory as well as an earlier grist and saw mill. The property was just up the Haw River from their Carolina Mill, which James Holt had helped establish (Bolden, 1991). On this 38.9 acre property, he and his brother, William, established Glencoe Mills between 1880 and 1882. William was a successful planter and was more involved with supplying the short staple cotton and financial capital needed to operate Glencoe (McHugh, 1988). The name, 'Glencoe," was apparently derived from a site in Scotland where a massacre involving the MacDonald clan took place during the seventeenth century (National Register, 1978).
Using 186 looms and 3,120 spindles, Glencoe began converting locally grown cotton into napped cotton cloth, flannels, and the already popular Alamance Plaids. The mill seemed to run quietly until the turn of the century brought a great deal of change to the little village, just as it did the rest of the country. In 1899, another of Edwin Holt's sons, Robert, took over the operation and upgraded the mill equipment, increasing the number of spindles to 4,000 in 1900 and then to 5,000 in 1907. Also in 1900, the mill began making use of imported cotton. I cannot say whether this decision was made because local growers could not keep up with the voracious demands of the expanding operations of the Holts or if the Holts simply found cheaper cotton elsewhere.
From the 1890s through the 1930s, Glencoe employed between 110 and 150 workers, "most" of whom lived in the mill houses provided (Glass, 1975). In 1889, records indicate the average Glencoe mill hand (overseers excluded) worked eleven-hour days, six days a week. Depending on their skill level, men earned between one and two dollars per day, women earned fifty cents to a dollar, and children forty cents per day. Of course, over the years the wages increased and the hours dropped, but things at the mill changed slowly if they ever changed at all. Being the shrewd businessman he was, Robert Holt joined forty other North Carolina cotton mill owners in a 1900 resolution which persuaded workers to pledge to oppose union labor. By 1905, the work day had dropped to 10.5 hours and men were earning 75 cents to $2.75, women now took in 60 cents to one dollar, and children still earned 40 cents per day (National Register, 1978).
Robert Holt died in July, 1923, leaving Glencoe to his brother-in-law, Walter G. Green (in addition to his five sons, Edwin Holt also had a daughter, Laura). Mr. Green ran the mill with the help of his son, Holt Green, who had some training in mill operations. Although the mill ran smoothly for a number of years, the Greens had also inherited a host of insidious labor problems--even before the stock market crash brought the really hard times. Although Glencoe apparently escaped the labor strikes which plagued the nearby town of Haw River, it was not without its share of unrest. Mr. A. W. Litton, a Glencoe worker turned amateur detective wrote to the National Recovery Administration (NRA), (an organization which looked out for industrial workers interests) about Mr. Green:
I know if I had the chanch I could Bring some things to the light. If Mr green finds out that i rote you this he will fire me and run me off this [place] but if you cant find out that Mr. W G. Green is [violating] the N.R.A. law in every way call for me and i will show what is going on here.
A. W. Litton to Hugh S. Johnson, Aug. 20,1934, cited in Hall et al., 1987.
The fact that Glencoe was one of the last mills built to harness water power is significant in itself, but it also had a significant impact on the management of the mill operation. By the 1880s, when construction began at Glencoe, steam was fast becoming the preferred mode of operation for mill engineers. Choosing water over steam meant more than simply how the looms were powered. The early water-powered mills were built in isolated locations along creeks and rivers reliable enough to be exploited for their power on a daily basis. In Alamance County, this usually meant the Haw River or its tributaries, which boasts a drainage area of 1,675 square miles. The Haw, with an average fall of six feet per mile, was ideally suited for water-powered milling; however, it was insufficient to support a group of mills at any one site. Thus the small mill villages which sprang up along the Haw were isolated from each other as well as the growing towns of Graham and Company Shops (later Burlington). Not only did this benefit mill owners (for Alamance this meant primarily the Holts, who owned twenty-three of twenty-seven mills in the county) in the form of significantly lower, rural, property taxes, but it also made their employees almost solely dependent on the mill for all of their needs--opening the door for exploitation. Transportation was still sparse, further isolating the workers. Owners had to provide an entire self-sustaining village to house, feed, clothe, educate, and entertain their workers.
Because they controlled all aspects of the village life, the mill owners in the earliest days (E. M. Holt included) often engaged in an industrialized form of sharecropping by paying their employees in tokens which could only be redeemed at the company store. Like all of these isolated mills, Glencoe was well out of range of the city of Burlington and because it was a village, not an incorporated town, there was no governing body save the management, and its residents were apparently not always afforded the luxury of due processes or equal representation (as evidenced by Mr. Litton's letter to the NRA).
In 1890, a three room house at Glencoe rented for $1.40 a month and a five room house was $2.00 a month--reasonable rates even by the standards of the day. But of course, there was a reason for this. Not only did this insure a grateful, stable labor force, it also permitted flexible hours to meet the sporadic demands of production schedules and availability of water power for the isolated mill. Of course it also fostered a degree of control for the owners. An employee who stood to lose not only his job, but the jobs of his wife and children and their home, would have to think twice before becoming too unruly. The overseers home was placed at the strategic bend in Public Road just across from the mill and the company store. From this node, he could observe all of the goings on at the village--including who was drinking in public and staying up too late. But I do not want to give the impression that life at Glencoe was nothing but long toiling hours, low wages, and constant abuse. After all, what would be the point in preserving character such as that? (other than to remind us how it should not be).
The Haw River itself was (and is) an essential component of the village's character. Besides the functional purposes of powering the looms and providing humidity to aid in spinning the cotton threads (Glass, 1978), the river served as the hub of social activity. The mill normally employed between 125 and 150 workers and as summer drought began to slow the machinery, the workers must have smiled at the thought of an impending break. Although they received no pay for the time the mill was down, most workers welcomed the time spent waiting for the water level to build up, either because it allowed them to catch up on the chores they could not find time for during their eleven-hour work day or, more likely, because it allowed time for swimming, fishing, singing, or just socializing and playing. An interview with Ethel Faucette, one of the early Glencoe workers, captures this link between the river and the workers.
We run by water then, and when the water’d get low they'd stop off for an hour or two. That was summertime. There's a big old rock out there they call Lily and--I forget the other one's name, but there's two of them. When you began ' O see them two rocks, you'd know we was going to get a rest. There was a crowd of 'em that picked guitar and banjo and different instruments. Well, this gang of boys would get their instruments and get out there in front of the mill, and they would sing and pick the guitar and banjo, and different kinds of string music. Get out in front of the mill under two big trees, get out there in the shade and sing. And maybe they'd stand an hour or two and the water’d gain up, and they'd start back up.
Hall et al., Like a Family (p. 88)
According to the January 25, 1991 issue of the Burlington, N. C. Times-News, about 14,000 people in Alamance County currently owe their livelihood to textiles of some form or another. This is more than one-fourth of the work force in the county. The industry ranges from the vast holdings of the international firm of Burlington Industries to the family run operation of Castillo Fabrics, whose entire shop and sales outlet are now located in the basement of the old Glencoe Mill. These textile operations, as well as all of those who lie in between, I dare say, owe their livelihood to Mr. E. M. Holt, the founding father of North Carolina textiles.
Sallie W. Stockard, author of The History of Alamance, estimated that in 1900, the Holt family alone provided employment of some sort, directly or indirectly, to at least one-fourth of the county. This estimate prompted Ms. Stockard to declare that "What the Flemish have been to England, what the Venetians have been to Southern Europe, that are the Holts to Alamance and to North Carolina' (Stockard, 1900). Although our historic sites are objects of character and personality in themselves, they are also important in their associations--as a part of the history of the society which built them and used in them (Sharp, 1968).
We live in an age of increasing cultural homogeneity. Our historic structures are all that physically link us to the past. They help define how we are different from other human beings and we let them go only when they have lost their meaning. I maintain that Glencoe still has meaning, and if we let it go, it will be much more than the loss of a real historic community. It will, worst of all, be the loss of a future ideal community. It will be a lost opportunity.
People cannot maintain their spiritual roots and their connections to the past if the physical world they live in does not also sustain these roots.
Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language (p. 132)
Before we can talk about preserving the physical structure of Glencoe, I believe the first step is necessarily defining the character which exists (or did exist) there. Glencoe is more than the collection of structures and machinery described in its National Register Nomination (1978) and Historic American Engineering Record (1975). To borrow the Gestaltists' old cliché: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. To preserve the whole, each unit and each part of each unit must be maintained (Jacobs, 1961).
Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events which are inseparable from its physical makeup. People are acted on by a place just as they act upon it. This is not to say that the people and the place are the same, but rather one is the shadow of the other. I also do not mean to imply that these "events" are limited to human events such as interactions between residents. A place is also defined by physical events as transitory as a breeze gusting through silver poplars or as perennial as the smell of the river and the deterioration of the mortar between the bricks. So it is only in this vicarious way that the physical makeup of a place, e. g. mortar, has an impact on the people in the place and gives character to both. Its not the being, it's the becoming.
I truly believe that you must be in Glencoe to experience it--to see its history of events and be affected by them. Some places you look at, some you walk into. Although I may speak of going "to" Glencoe or being "at" Glencoe, these are actually misnomers. When I am in Glencoe, I am in Glencoe, and nowhere else on earth. So many places seem to be a place on the edge of something else. Glencoe is a place unto itself.
Above all, if the environment is visibly organized and sharply identified, then the citizen can inform with his own meanings and connections. Then it will become a true place, remarkable and unmistakable.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (p. 92)
Although it is this blatant order which is the quintessence of Glencoe, this is not to say that there is no variety there. It is simply not the variety between extremes which is too often found in our towns today. It is not the "wild and undisciplined variety" which Thomas Sharp (1968) claims makes the center of most American towns such a nightmare of disorder. It is a variety which reflects the adaptive nature of the site. It shows the settled, self-disciplined society which developed over a period of one hundred years. When it was new, Glencoe was not all that different from today's developments, with one crucial difference--it had potential--the potential to grow, to allow interaction between residents, to allow privacy for residents, but most importantly, it had the capacity to improve with age. Although the village was certainly more lively in its younger days, it is only suffering today because the closing of the milling operation had a devastating effect on the sheer number of residents. If new incentives can be found to bring the people back while simultaneously improving the surface appearance of the site (the interdependency of these two will be explored later), this village can once again thrive as a people place.
And there is besides [variety of contrast], and more common than it, the variety in the buildings within the streets and places themselves, variety that is not so much of contrast but variety within the same kind, variety within an established rhythm, variety (one might say) within similarly, within a broad unity of character.
Thomas Sharp, Town and Townscape (p.13)
Glencoe is defined by many things which it is not. Not only is it not "wild and undisciplined variety,' it is also not the surface arrangement of pavement and plywood which can so often be used to describe the modern counterpart of Glencoe--a low to middle income housing development. On the surface, such places would have you believe they are perfectly orderly. In fact, this is exactly what they are, and no more--a surface order. Even middle to upper income developments are more often than not, true marvels of dullness and regimentation--incapable of sustaining any form of human life. The day construction on them is completed, they will never look any better, they will never work any better. They are the best they will ever be. This condition is caused by one basic, insidious problem--apathy. It appears that most of us (and I am speaking of everyone who lives in a dwelling of some form or other, not just the planners, landscape architects, and developers) no longer care about how, or even if, a neighborhood works. We can only see as far as our own dwelling and its surrounding shrubbery. And it is this attitude which eventually will end in historical bankruptcy.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
A successful social neighborhood is a rare thing. They are fantastically dynamic places composed of diverse elements which give each other constant mutual support. Although there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these late nineteenth century mill villages in the country, all laid out similarly, according to standard mill development plans, they were well thought-out, purposeful designs which worked. That is to say, they fostered interaction between residents and, on the whole, provided them with a quality of living better than they would have had otherwise. At the same time, they "worked' on another level. They provided mill owners with sufficient (some will argue overly so) control and efficiency for carrying out their operation and turning a profit.
These villages are rather like poetry. Poets cannot lay down a sonnet any old way--they must adhere to fairly regimented guidelines as to the rhyme and rhythm and number of lines. But within these guidelines they are allowed an infinite number of ways of expressing themselves. Although I will maintain that the look of things and the way they work are inextricably bound together, we cannot simply study the physical appearance as our primary objective. The diversity we strive for lies in the interaction between the place and its people.
If we value that character we can keep it in being. We can keep it in being sometimes by the actual preservation of buildings that play an important part in it, but more generally by seeing that new buildings subscribe to the disciplines within which it is constituted. It is a choice of one or the other. And it is ours to decide which it shall be.
Thomas Sharp, Town and Townscape (p. 17)
Glencoe has a lot to teach us. Very few of us, landscape architects, architects, or otherwise, will know what it is to truly create something. It has all been done before. We can only borrow bits and pieces and rearrange them. By studying its present structure as well as historical accounts of its better days, certain patterns will become evident. It is these patterns which made Glencoe a working, thriving, successful place for sixty years and it is these patterns which must be maintained or brought back if Glencoe is to ever be a success story again.
All of the individual structures subscribe to a single overriding design. The parts hold together as a whole. Any striking change in one of the parts will detract from the total effect. Anything which calls attention to itself is out of place here. Although actual preservation of structures is one of the objectives of this study, it is maintenance of character which is the underlying objective. This maintenance will not only be achieved by controlling what will be allowed at Glencoe in the future but there are elements already existing which are out of character and must be dealt with accordingly. As I believe that the character of the total composition can only be maintained by maintaining the form as a whole, I have (after exploring several options) come to believe that comprehensive measures are necessary for restoring Glencoe to its former glory. If the property is sectioned off and various parts are managed by different entities, and individual homes are sold off and maintained by property owners accustomed to doing (or not doing) anything they want within the bounds of their property line, the village will be lost. There is a rhythm to the roads in this village which must be maintained in the public interest. Residents must be committed to the whole--individual ownership is secondary.
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (p. 1)
It was the networking of public and private ownership, urban and rural life, fostered by the physical layout of the village which created the special character which is Glencoe. Historically as well as morphologically, the mill village is where the city and the country coexist. These villages were created by enticing people in rural areas to give up the difficult, unstable life of farmers and to come reap the rewards of stable, relatively easy (relative to farming perhaps) life where they would have all of the benefits of the city yet still be surrounded by the country. Within these villages, millhands created a new way of life by adapting their rural heritage to deal with the unfamiliar realities of the industrial age. I suspect it was not only necessity, but tradition which dictated the practice of common ownership, a practice which is little used today, but could be. The mill village demonstrated that it is possible for residents to be committed to a community as a whole first and the individual second. In doing so, it was actually in the best interest of the resident. It was not an unconditional assistance. Everyone was expected to pull his or her own weight. Villagers helped one another without the expectation of an immediate return, but simply the expectation that you would be there for them whenever called on.
We live in common like, us six families here. Each one's got a little patch. Wages being what they is, we couldn't get along without. One raises beans and peas, another, yams and potatoes. And me, I raise corn. When meal time comes, we just go and help ourselves.
Hall et al., Like a Family (p. 151)
An interview with Paul and Don Faucette by Hall and her colleagues revealed that things went similarly at Glencoe:
We'd kill our hogs this time, and a month later we'd kill yours. Well, you can give us some and we can give you some. They'd have a quilting bee and they'd go down and they'd all quilt. One of them would have a good crop of cabbage, [and] they'd get together and all make kraut. And up there at the [mill company's] barn they'd have a cornshucking. They'd just visit around and work voluntarily. They all done it, and nobody owed nobody nothing.
Hall et al., Like a Family (p. 151)
To preserve the whole, we must maintain the individual parts. Cooperation insured survival of the individuals at a time when employers did not. The "safety net" for most cotton mill workers was the village community itself (Hall et al., 1987). These communal values made sickness and poverty survivable, particularly during the Great Depression. If a millhand missed work due to illness or injury (even in the line of duty), they simply had no income. Don Faucette remembered when families at Glencoe pooled their resources when times were lean:
You take during the Depression years, everybody had a few beans. Well, they had a great big old pot, five or six of the neighbors had a big old pot out there. Put all the beans in one pot and made a big pot which would go around to all the families instead of just feeding one. If you need it, [and] we got it, it's yours.
Hall at al., Like a Family (p. 152)
The Holts acknowledged the rural lifestyles to which their workers were accustomed in the design of the housing. Although the mill buildings were cut outs of their English and New English predecessors, the mill housing demonstrates an obvious reliance on vernacular forms. All of the dwellings are built of clapboard and set on brick piers to improve ventilation. Roughly half were two-story, four room l-houses with detached kitchens (most of which were later replaced by a rear ell). The remaining structures are one story and a jump version of the traditional hall-and-parlor style. Both styles were firmly established in the Piedmont countryside, and gave more of an impression of a rural hamlet than an industrialized tenement.
Apart from seeing individual buildings and the individual set scenes of a town, there is another kind of visual experience, and a very enriching one, to be gained by looking at the town in this quite different way: by seeing it, or at least extensive parts of it in movement, as it were, as one moves about it. By seeing it not with the static but with the kinetic eye.
Thomas Sharp, Town and Townscape (p. 42)
Even today, with shotgun development scattering out from Burlington in every direction, Glencoe has retained this character. It is the melding of landscape and townscape. It is difficult to imagine Glencoe as a series of static, postcard scenes. It is more scenery than it is scenes. At least once you have experienced it, you recall it as a movie camera would, or as a dream where you can move through a place without your feet touching the ground and without tiring--the homes along Public Road melting into the mill buildings which take you along the mill race which leads to the Haw River and the awesome sight of the dam. From there you are lead up the slope, away from the river, across the high grassy fields edged by pines awaiting lumbering. Or maybe you continued past where the road ends and ventured down the trail into the thick woods along the river. Or maybe you managed to break away from the strong attraction drawing you along the water and took a detour up Hodges Road to pass through some of the precarious-looking abandoned homes which seem to be held together by kudzu. There are a number of different routes you could take (mentally as well as physically) and when you think you have exhausted the possibilities you can stop and claim that you know this place backwards and forwards--but of course you do not. There is always more.
Glencoe seems to be of the perfect size to be experienced as a whole and in parts, by those who live there as well as those who are just lucky enough to take a wrong turn where Highway 62, Carolina Road, Union Ridge Road, Greenwood Drive, and Glencoe Street all intersect just north of the village in what can only be described as a double triangular intersection, the likes of which I have never seen before. But once you find it, you know you are there. This is what makes Glencoe such a fascinating place--so easy to read on the surface--so simple it is impossible to get lost there even though there are nearly 100 acres providing the opportunity to do so. And yet, its simple form is infinitely varied--never allowing you to get bored with it. It is easy to explore as a child when you are in Glencoe--getting into the place instead of just looking at it.
Esse Guam Videri (To Be Rather Than to Seem)
State Motto of North Carolina
The character of Glencoe is established in its patterns. It is the patterns which provide a comfortable, friendly quality often known as vernacular. It provides peace of mind. It is easy on the eyes. Such places do not pretend to stylistic ornament and sophistication. Their forms are slow to change and continue for generations uninterrupted by the latest architectural fashions from Philadelphia and thus seem to be little influenced by history in its wider sense. That is why the term "timeless" is often used in descriptions of vernacular places like Glencoe. While it stands, this mill is a kind of monument celebrating a different history--not the one which I learned at L. E. Wilson Middle School--but a vernacular past, a golden age where names and dates are not all that important. It is simply a sense of the way it used to be--history as the chronicle of everyday existence. That is to say, it is not great because George Washington slept there or because it was designed by Andrea Palladio, or even because it was established by the great magnates of the North Carolina textile industry. In no small way, it is admirable solely because it has survived.
Glencoe should be celebrated because it has survived floods, fire, The Great Depression, and even the North Carolina DOT. To me, it is sacred because it reflects the unpretentious self-sufficient character of the land. I am not one to say that "things were just built better in the old days," because this is not the case at all. It is simply that the shoddy works of the good old days are no longer around to criticize. This theory is supported at Glencoe where the original 1880 homes, constructed with brick nogging, have outlasted the later frame houses of the 1920s-1930s expansion. By the standards of U.S. history, anything which reaches the century mark deserves some credit.
What I am trying to say with all of this "Esse Quam Videri" talk is that Glencoe does not project from the land as something trying to call attention to itself. Rather, it seems to command respect quietly, by the way the land and the buildings complement each other--suggesting a time when architecture and landscape architecture (or more simply, when buildings and the land) were not so disconnected as seems to be the case today.
Time has changed things of course. Can you imagine a miller today applying for a permit to build in the middle of nowhere and practically in a river bed? The mills of today can be located anywhere with little thought to their relationship with the land. Their only need for water is for processing--there is no real relationship with it. Instead, they pay their CP&L bill every month just like I do. Their designs are concerned with how to provide easy access for the eighteen-wheelers. Perhaps we need this old mill around just to remind us that the way we think about things today is not the only way--and maybe not even the best way.
Anyway, I have come to realize that history is not always the perfect continuity our teachers would have us believe. It is also a dramatic discontinuity--a cosmic drama in which sites such as Glencoe play a vital role. In act one, there is that Golden Age, the time of harmonious beginnings. Then comes act two when the old days are forgotten and things fall into a state of neglect. The third and final act can go one of two ways.
In the tragic version, the hero is lost to some villain--perhaps a developer, perhaps fire or some other natural disaster, or perhaps saddest of all, simply neglect. Or maybe the drama ends another way. If the hero is a preservationist, the final act is a time when we rediscover and attempt to restore the environment to something like its former beauty. But there has to be that interval of neglect--there has to be discontinuity. This is what J. S. Jackson (1980) refers to as "the necessity for ruins." Ruins provide the incentive for restoration and for a return to our origins. I must acknowledge the fact that Glencoe is well into act two--loitering on death's doorstep. Thus I will talk about "reviving" this southern mill hill. If it were truly dead, it could not be revived--only mourned.
Just what it is about death and dry rot that fundamentally appeals to a Romantic such as myself, is beyond my conjecturing. Anyway, I have concluded that this is unimportant. Interpreting Glencoe as a sentimentalizing over an obscure part of the past is as shallow as viewing it as a means of promoting tourism. It should be much more. It has so much more to offer. The challenge will be to interpret and revive Glencoe while preserving the sleepy, awkward grace which comes from being perfectly at ease with itself.
If old environments are superior to new ones (sometimes they are, sometimes not), then we must study them to see what these superior qualities are, so that we can achieve them in a new way. In regulating the replacement of older areas, the focus should be on identifying it present values in existing buildings and on insisting that new development equal or better those qualities before it is permitted to occur.
Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place (P. 56)
Glencoe is easily accessed by traveling north on Highway 62 just three miles from downtown Burlington, North Carolina, in the county of Alamance--Faucette Township. Alamance County began relying on the textile industry when Edwin M. Holt first began his venture into the business in 1837 and continues to rely heavily on the textile industry today. About 14,000 out of 66,000 people employed in the county are linked to the textile industry in some way. Burlington Industries is the largest employer in the area with Glen Raven Mills and Rosche Biomedical Laboratories battling neck and neck for second and third. The importance of textiles to the area is also evident in the vast expanse of outlet malls which attract shoppers searching for everything from coats to underwear. Fortunately for Glencoe, most of the expansion has followed along Interstate-40, which lies just outside the city limits south of Burlington.
Glencoe was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. As a national register district, improvements to the community would be eligible for a twenty percent tax credit if the work is in compliance with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. The properties would have to be income producing (leased) for five or more years to receive the full twenty percent credit. If leased for three, investors would receive sixty percent of the possible twenty percent (twelve percent). The 94.93 acre tract, with an appraised value of $292,426 consist of thirty or better acres of open space at the northwest end of property, about thirty modest company houses, and a chain of brick mill buildings along the banks of the Haw River. Virtually all of the commercial buildings are currently leased, either for milling operations or storage. The appraised value of these various individual structures and tracts for 1977 and 1985 can be found in the appendix. [omitted, ed.]
As with any potential development project, the first practical step is acquiring site control. The two rightful owners of Glencoe Inc. today are Mrs. Walter G. Green Jr. and Mr. Myron A. Rhyne. Mrs. Green recently became part owner as her husband passed away. Walter G. Green Sr. was the brother-in-law of Robert Holt--the last Holt to own Glencoe. Green ran the operation with his son Holt Green, until the latter was lost in action in Europe during World War II. It was then that Holt Green's brother, Walter G. Green Jr., a lawyer with little interest in running a cotton mill, took over Glencoe. He brought in Mr. Myron A. Rhyne to help liquidate most of the mill's assets.
With Mr. Green now dead and Mrs. Green in a nursing home and unconcerned with occurrences at Glencoe, her interests are handled by Mr. and Mrs. Rhyne and Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hanford. Mr. Hanford is the primary caretaker of the property and descended from a long line of Glencoe workers. He does not live on the property but, as near as I can tell, can be found around Glencoe any and every day of the week and is always prepared to answer questions or offer an anecdote about the mill.
Mr. and Mrs. Rhyne reside in the nearby county seat of Graham, and seem quite amiable to the idea of restoring Glencoe but simply do not have the resources to carry it out. They are preservation-minded people and have expressed their belief that the dwellings would make fine first homes for young couples and small families. I would also caution potential developers that the Rhynes have been approached so often by so many different groups with ideas on Glencoe, that they are now somewhat skeptical that anything can actually be done with it. Anyone with an interest in the property will be met politely, but if someone with a genuine interest in the property made a serious and reasonable offer, I am sure they would be welcomed wholeheartedly.
A pleasantly ruinous environment demands some inefficiency, a relaxed acceptance of time, the esthetic ability to take dramatic advantage of destruction. A landscape acquires emotional depth as it accumulates these scars. Certain materials and forms age well. They develop an interesting patina, a rich texture, an attractive outline. Others are at their best only when clean and new; as they grow old, they turn spotted and imperfect.
Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place (p. 44)
In the Spring of 1991, a cursory inspection of Glencoe was done by Dean Ruedrich (then Director of the Revolving Fund for Preservation/North Carolina), Mitch Wilds (Senior Restoration Specialist with the North Carolina Division of Archives and History--Department of Cultural Resources) and Tim Simmons (Tax Act Coordinator also with Cultural Resources). In abstract, they liked it. They determined that about thirty-three of the original forty-eight mill houses are still salvageable, nine of these being in very good shape. Ironically, these nine were built in the 1880-1882 establishment of the village. The use of brick nogging in their construction, a method even more antiquated by the 1880s than the use of water-power for driving turbines, is given a great deal of credit for their survival. Clearly, the Holts had a fondness for sticking with the old ways which worked.
Many of the later frame dwellings of the expansion construction did not accept time so graciously. Sadly, a few of the homes on Hodges Road were sacrificed for the sake of training for the fire department. It seems to me that this is an indication that Glencoe is in danger of losing its meaning to the community. Only when a place has lost its meaning can we eliminate it without an ounce of remorse. Although I maintain that these "sacrifices" were the act of an irrational individual, I believe this should be taken as a warning sign. Maybe this individual is not alone in his thinking.
Many of the homes are losing their porches, sills, and roofs, and becoming overgrown with vegetation. Today, only the eight or nine in best shape remain livable and occupied at any given time. Mr. Hanford receives constant inquiries from people interested in renting the houses. Even with no indoor plumbing, they are a bargain at $50 per month--more or less--depending on the floor plan and the physical condition of the dwelling. The overseers home is the one exception which can boast about the amenity of plumbing but it remains unoccupied as it serves as the overflow office for the Glencoe Carpet Mill. Even with such reasonable rates, there seems to be a fairly high turnover as homes are quickly abandoned when rents become long overdue. Without residents to help with the upkeep and protect Glencoe from vandals, these dwellings would deteriorate even more quickly. Sometimes, however, things go the opposite way. One home on Hodges Road (Back Street) burned during the winter of 1991 as renters trying to stay warm accidentally sparked a fire.
Informal experiments in our communities have led us to believe that people agree, to an astonishing extent, about the sites which do embody the people's relation to the land and to the past. It seems, in other words, as though "the" sacred sites for an area exist as objective communal realities. If this is so, it is then of course essential that these specific sites be preserved and made important. Destruction of sites which have become part of the communal consciousness, in an agreed and widespread sense, must inevitably create gaping wounds in the communal body.
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
The various brick structures, with the possible exception of the dye house, are generally in good shape. The chemicals used in the dyeing process were particularly harsh on the mortar and extensive repainting would be necessary.
Mr. Ruedrich suggested the removal of the 1950s mill addition be required in the option to purchase to the property. Although this addition is the most structurally sound part on the entire site, I agreed with this assessment and I will explain why. The three-story, 18 bays wide brick mill building is the focal point of the entire village. Architecturally, it is an excellent example of the commercial Italianate style popularized during the Victorian period. Although I went on about how Glencoe does not try to call attention to itself (Esse Quam Videri), I can now admit this is not wholly true. There is one slight exception which proves the rule.
The mill at Glencoe, North Carolina, still stands as a representative type. The main building of three stories was fifty feet wide and extended 200 feet along the millrace. The mill was simplicity itself, but the ornamental features of the facade spoke of grander aspirations. The stair tower, corbeled cornice, and stuccoed quoins and lintels stood in sharp contrast to the plain form of the Glencoe village and heralded the prosperous world mill owners hoped to create.
Hall et al., Like a Family (p. 49)
Although the addition to the main mill does pretend to some stylistic ornamentation with its keystone-accented windows and corbeled cornices, it still hides more than it displays and in the end, only detracts from mill more than it can justify by its existence. The tower no longer projects out from the building as it should (see 1887 Glencoe letterhead and photo of 1919 depicting the mill prior to the addition--next page). [letterhead, mill]
The main entrance has been covered up and in fact, there is no longer a main entrance, only a door on the loading dock where you enter the windowless, concrete crypt which serves as the showroom and outlet for Glencoe Carpet Mills. Much of the old mill equipment remained stored here until the carpet mill began leasing the space in 1961. At that time, the machines were sold for scrap metal. The fact that you must now enter the mill from a loading dock is evidence of the conversion from a pedestrian oriented place to one where the delivery truck takes priority. The World War II corrugated aluminum quonset hut which dominates the land across from the main mill makes no effort whatsoever to integrate with the nineteenth century mill village. Similarly, it should be removed and the site cleared of all evidence of its existence. The focus of this revitalization is bringing back people. To bring back people it is necessary to focus on their needs and the needs of the land--making the automobile as unobtrusive as possible. The mill should welcome people, not trucks. Beneath the carpet outlet is the tomb which is leased by the mom and pop operation, Castillo Fabrics Incorporated. Juan and Renata Espinosa, are the husband and wife team who opened shop at Glencoe five years ago. They maintain their enthusiasm for their work although they are clearly struggling after recently losing their lucrative contract producing the trademark stripes for Adidas clothing. Three years ago, Adidas switched their contract to a company in the Orient and Castillo switched to Mr. Espinosa's first love--manufacturing lace. From Glencoe, the roles of lace travel to Rhode Island to be separated and then come back to Rocky Mount to become part of socks and--Mr. Espinosa's eyes positively sparkle and a grin appears beneath a thick mustache as the words form--"women's undergarments."
It is a great irony that Sallie W. Stockard, in her History of Alamance predicted, in 1900, that the demand for Holt's plaids would increase greatly as soon as "the Philippine ladies begin to dress as they ought and the Chinese learn to reach forward and not backward. It is easy to see what China and the Philippines mean to employer and employees of the cotton-raising and manufacturing world." Obviously, it was not so easy to see, or perhaps Ms. Stockard was just not farsighted enough to catch a glimpse of just how great an effect these countries would have on American industry, Alamance textiles, and Glencoe in particular.
The main difficulty I have with eliminating the 1954 addition is that it would displace the Castillo operation. But with several other large structures on the property either empty or simply rented for storage, it is my hope that the Espinosas could move their operation to one of the other buildings strung along the millrace northwest of the main mill. These include the picker house, three warehouses, a waste house, a storage and shipping building, the finish and napper room, or the dye house. The latter two are the best choices as they are closest in size to the mill addition basement which Castillo currently leases.
Although the mill eventually ended production in 1954 due to growing competition and the rapid consolidation of small cotton mills into large textile corporations, the wheel is once again spinning at Glencoe. The Thomas Miller Company of Woods Hole, Massachusetts began operating a hydroelectric plant by restoring much of the old machinery which was still in place in the generator house attached to the main mill building. The operation seems to make a reasonable profit selling the generated electricity to Duke Power Company. The Thomas Miller Company entered into an agreement with Glencoe Inc. whereby they would pay $3,600 annually or 10% of the gross income from the sale of generated power--whichever is greater. The company's gross income for 1988 was $60,445.50, making the rent $6,044.55, of course.
At the strategic junction of River Road and Front Street stands the building which served as the village store and office. It remains in excellent condition. The office, at the southwestern most part of the structure, is identified by the later addition of an octagonal bay projecting from the front. The 65' by 17' office remains packed with records dating back to the 1800s which should be sifted through and removed to a safer location, such as the Alamance County Historical Society, at least until the building is restored and secure from vandals and the elements. Most of the building is devoted to the central store portion of the building. The 55' by 45' store is fronted by an inviting porch which is today sagging heavily from the years of constant use. The store not only provided essential goods to the somewhat isolated villagers, it was the hub of activity at the mill. The counter at the front end of the store served as an ice cream and soda fountain until the mill's closing in 1954. The small stone room on the northeast side served as the meager quarters for the superintendent's cook.
Unfortunately, not everything at Glencoe has faired so well. In addition to the fifteen mill houses, the old school house and church have been lost. The church simply developed a leaky roof and eventually collapsed in the winter of 1976 (note photo on following page from early 1970s depicting the church with makeshift roofing repairs). [photo] After its collapse, people looted it for the pews and other woodwork and the shell was later burned. The only remaining evidence of its existence is a hole in the ground between the third and fourth homes on the west side of Front Street. A similar fate may await the community lodge, which is set well back from Front Street and is being overtaken by vegetation and the elements. A barn which stood nearby has also fallen since the National Register Nomination was completed in 1978. The lodge is approached from a side road lined with rusted out cars, refrigerators, washers, and nearly every other useless old appliance imaginable. Although this is the most blighted area, there are several other specific places people have selected for dumping trash which would require minor cleanups.
Probably most pathetic of all of the losses at Glencoe, the wild goats which roamed the western part of the property on and around the dam were shot in the early 1980s--simply for target practice.
There is an employee at the Alamance County Planning Department I have contacted several times in my attempt to ferret out information on Glencoe. I have even spoken to him in person on one occasion, but he never remembers me from one occasion to the next. Every time I explain that I am working on a project on Glencoe Mills and every time, without fail, he immediately returns with the same response, "You know, the best use of that place would be as a state textile museum." I always avoid a response to his declaration by pressing on with my business because, in fact, I do not know that. I might even go so far to say that that would be the worst use for it and this is for a very simple reason--it is not what Glencoe wants to be. The village has lost a great deal of self esteem and until that is restored, it will not be the place it ought to be.
It would be easy to see Glencoe as tourist-attraction quaint, and preserve it accordingly--filling the buildings with bales of cotton and whatever old milling equipment could be scraped up and dressing a few local people in period costumes to provide tours. The gentleman at the Alamance Planning Department claims the U. S. Department of the Interior has promised to locate some old looms and so forth if they could acquire the property (the old equipment was sold for scrap in 1961). There is no doubt that Glencoe is worthy of such lavish attention and should always remain at least partially open to the public. But Glencoe was a living, working place and it will not regain its self esteem until it is living and working again.
There are also practical problems with the museum option. Where a tourist attraction is concerned, it is a long three miles from the city of Burlington and nearly an infinity from Interstate-40. I have my doubts that tourists would actively seek out Glencoe. A similar venture was undertaken in South Carolina's "Textile Place." This working textile museum spent some forty years in the planning before being abandoned altogether.
Although the administrator of North Carolina's State Historic Sites Program has expressed interest in Glencoe and there is little doubt that it meets the criteria for a state historic site, he personally assured me their understaffed hands are full at this time. And knowing the turtlish pace they are taking with the few sites they are concentrating on, I fear that Glencoe would be an archaeological dig by the time the project got underway.
Finally, we must ask the basic question, "Does the world really need another museum?" According to figures produced by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, historic properties have been turned into museums on the average of one every three-and-a-half days since 1960 (George, 1989). Sometimes, this is in response to interstate highway expansion, urban redevelopment, or rapid suburban sprawl. All to often, this turns out to be the wrong response. Such museums are heavily dependent on revenue from visitors and long-term management often cannot be maintained.
Personally, such working museums make me feel awkward and I cannot say I ever toured one (including the grandaddy of them all, Williamsburg) where I had a genuinely great time. I am not recommending that all such treasures should be sealed off from public viewing. I am simply saying there are better, and more appropriate ways of handling many of these attractions. The thought of going to Glencoe and feeling the same as I did at Williamsburg (outside looking in rather than inside looking deeper inside) makes me ill. It is doubtful that the mill will ever again operate at full capacity but this will not be necessary to the functioning of the place.
What is necessary is people--people sitting on their porch offering advice to their neighbor out back digging weeds from their garden, children playing on the back streets, older people walking to the store for a Coke or a pack of cigarettes, and young couples walking down River Road to watch the deep, slow, brown water foam white as it spills over the dam and churns past the shoals below. Glencoe needs a lot of things, but mostly what it needs is people.
A textile museum, even if it is successful, will not really bring people--not people with a commitment to the place. And for this reason, I am recommending the three story mill be converted to housing, which will bring in sheer numbers without disturbing the character of Glencoe by adding new structures. At least thirty-three of the mill houses could provide affordable housing for people worthy of them and fifteen duplicates could be built to infill where others burned or collapsed (according to insurance records for 1907, there were forty-one workers' houses, representing the majority of the forty-eight houses eventually built (National Register,1978). Affordable housing is generally defined as rent that is less than one-third a households income.
Recent budget cuts dropped federal spending for affordable housing programs from 27.9 billion in 1981 to 10.5 billion in 1988. The diminished federal resources combined with rising construction costs have combined to create a crisis situation for families with low incomes, particularly in North Carolina where one in seven households were already living in sub-standard housing as of 1980 (Traub, 1992). This preservation effort at Glencoe is an opportunity to preserve a place rich in history, while providing sound, quality housing for the growing number of low-income families who are competing for the dwindling supply of low-cost housing. Reviving the inherent character of Glencoe will prove much easier than instilling character on an antiseptic and impersonal public housing project which will only get worse with age.
Converting the mill building to apartments and restoring the mill houses could not only provide much needed affordable housing for the area, it will also provide the unique opportunity to create a diverse population for the neighborhood. The mill houses will mainly attract first time home buyers such as young couples and small families, or perhaps retired people with moderate income. The converted mill building would appeal more to those who are either not interested in or physically incapable of caring for an entire house and yard--young single people, the physically handicapped, or the elderly. The mill building, with its still operational elevator would appeal to these latter two groups and the elevators spacious proportions could easily accommodate maneuvering wheelchairs. The possibility of devoting the mill entirely to elderly housing is an attractive option and one which has worked with similar structures in North Carolina such as old school buildings and tobacco warehouses. With three stories of 10,000 square feet of floor space each in Glencoe's main mill building, and with 500 square feet considered "too large" for an efficient single, elderly apartment (Traub, 1992), there is the possibility of sixty or more individual units (and this not including the 1954 mill addition). From the standpoint of funding, tax credits, and minimal resistance from surrounding neighbors, elderly housing is an option too attractive to be ignored.
Even if converted to spacious studio apartments for families with larger incomes, although perhaps not as noble an effort as affordable or elderly housing, it could still serve a purpose. It would still serve a different population than the mill houses, bringing in people of different ages, economic backgrounds, and races. With 30,000 square feet available, perhaps the highest and best use would be to combine the various options within the structure rather than trying to segregate the residents by age and economic status. There needs to be more proof that the benefits of preservation can be shared by everyone.
An environment which cannot be changed invites its own destruction. We prefer a world that can be modified progressively, against a background of valued remains, a world in which one can leave a personal mark alongside the marks of history.
Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place (p. 39)
A community is defined by its future as much as its past. Although future residents of Glencoe cannot change its past, they can, and should have a say in its future. Glencoe is a place that can provide connections between people and their past as well as connections between one neighbor and another. One of the purposes of this project is to suggest ways which will improve on the patterns which existed there or even create new patterns. The most obvious way is to build a community which is not completely and helplessly dependent on the whims and capabilities of a single employer.
Glencoe will never truly be self-sufficient again. In times of crisis, self-sufficiency brings trouble. We must adapt it to make it work again. Adaptability keeps the future open. But we cannot afford to keep it wide open--able to change into God knows what. We must accept that changes will come to Glencoe and we must recognize the possibility of some very disturbing shifts ahead. In the present tense, we carry out historical Preservation which requires the disposal of the irrelevant past (such as the WW II quonset hut at Glencoe). But we must also practice future preservation, which requires the elimination of the irrelevant future. Preserving Glencoe must include plans for preserving the parts (the bricks and clapboards) as well as the whole (the community). And there are various ways of doing that.
In 1879, an economist and philosopher named Henry George proposed a method for mitigating industrial booms and busts and generally stabilizing a community. Several of these utopian experiments, termed single tax communities, were created and met with varying degrees of success. George and his followers maintain that we have no moral right to own that which must be used by those who come after us; therefore, we should have legal right to ownership of land. Under the auspices of various and sundry names--collaborative communities, condominiums, cooperatives, communes, and probably half a dozen others--many communities have tried to overcome the near-sighted notions of land ownership man has developed in the last seven or eight generations, all of which are essentially aimed at encouraging relative permanence and socialization among residents of a community. Although the entire theory of the single tax community is too complex to cover in this introduction, its proponents maintain that it encourages the highest and best use of the land by taking away the incentives of land speculators.
In the single tax community, all greens, gardens, roadsides, waters, and even the trees are owned in common. Residents typically hold ninety-nine year leases on their lots rather than deeds. The land is actually owned by a board of trustees who are in turn governed by the voting members of the community (Pastore, 1983). Of course, in order for such a direct democracy to work , the community must necessarily be of a workable size--approximately the size of Glencoe in its hey day.
Taking responsibility for a community implies some experience of the place. Glencoe can only be revived and maintained by those willing to invest time and effort in its well-being. We cannot care for that which we do not understand. Glencoe is as helpless as an infant at the mercy of its caretakers. We must interpret the needs of that which cannot care for itself or even speak out to us in our supposedly mature language. But Glencoe does have a language. It is in its patterns. It is in the crumbling mortar and the smell of the river and the crackling sound of the wind rattling through the dried autumn kudzu, revealing a long-abandoned tree house. Glencoe does have a language. And it has a different story to tell every day. And for those who take the time to go and listen, it will reveal itself without reserve.
The Burlington Times-News learned of the State's notions of creating a textile museum at Glencoe and in August of 1988 they interviewed one of the last surviving mill worker still residing at Glencoe, Mrs. Wannie Caulder, age 72. Mrs. Caulder moved to Glencoe with her family in 1918 and began working at the mill when she was 14 and continued until the mill's closing in 1954. When asked what she thought about the possibilities of preserving the mill as a museum she was obviously unimpressed:
Most of the ones that made Glencoe what it used to be are dead. It won’t never be Glencoe again on that account. I say let the old houses go down.
Mrs. Wannie Caulder
Mrs. Caulder has moved from Glencoe in the last two years. I have never met her and am not even sure if she is still among the living. But for some reason--I cannot explain why--I believe the main goal of this preservation plan should be something of which Mrs. Caulder might have approved. If this can be done, I am confident that Glencoe itself would approve.
If we leave Glencoe to the elements--if we sit back and allow time to select what is to be preserved--what we will have left is an extremely skewed representation of our past. Although I already confessed that I am not particularly concerned about future generations, if all that remains for them are the Biltmores and capitol buildings, what will we have preserved?--certainly not the real history of the people. I hope Glencoe can be saved for the same reason we save a rare plant or an endangered animal--to promote variety in our culture. Because no matter how homely or simple it is, it has something to offer. And no matter how small and insignificant it is to the big picture, if lost, it will leave a gaping hole. Because we are made up of the bits and pieces of all the people and places that have touched our lives, and because we would be less if we had not known them. We cannot allow our preservation efforts to be limited to the climactic moments in our history. A place can also warrant preservation because it is a typical symbol of a brief moment of a different time. And I suppose that is all that old mill really is.
Ashmore, L. D. (1991). "Textile Industries Prominent across Alamance County.' Burlington, N.C. Times-News. Jan. 25, 1991. (p. 4).
Bluestone, Dan (1975). "Historic American Engineering Record Report Documenting Industrial Processes at Glencoe Mills." North Carolina Division of Archives and History Department of Cultural Resources. Raleigh, North Carolina.
Bolden, Don (1991). 'Glencoe: From Tobacco Processing to Textiles," Burlington, N. C. Times-News Alamance Magazine. May 1,1991. (p. D3).
George, Gerald (1989). "Historic Property Museums: What Are They Preserving?" Forum. Summer (pp. 2-5).
Glass, Brent (1978). "Southern Mill Hills: Design in a Public Place," Carolina Dwelling. Student Publication, NCSU. Raleigh, North Carolina. Doug Swaim (ed.), (pp. 138-149).
Hall, J. D., Leloudis, J., Korstad, R., Murphy, M., Jones, L. A., Daly, C. S. (1987). Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. UNC Press. Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Jackson, J. B. (1980). The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. University of Mass Press. Amherst, Mass.
Jacobs, Jane (1 961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House. New York.
Lynch, Kevin (1972). What Time is this Place. MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass.
Lynch, Kevin (1960). The Image of the City. M.I.T. Press. Cambridge, Mass.
McHugh, Cathy L. (1988) Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1880-1915. Oxford University Press. New York.
"National Register of Historic Places Inventory--Nomination Form" (1978). Division of Archives and History. Raleigh, North Carolina.
Pastore, M. B. (1983). In and On the Green; Arden, Delaware. Unpublished masters thesis. North Carolina State University.
"Saving Glencoe" (1988). Burlington, N. C. Times-News. Aug. 31, 1988. p. 3D.
Sharp, Thomas (1968). Town and Townscape. Jarrold & Sons Ltd. Norwich, England.
Stockard, Sallie W. (1900). The History of Alamance. Capital Printing Co. Raleigh, North Carolina.
Traub, Gerald P. (1992). "Three Rs for Schools: Rescue, Renovate, Reuse." Volume 6. The Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc. Raleigh, North Carolina.
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