Mill House News
|
|
To Open in 2005 Cooleemee is a former mill town on the banks of the S. Yadkin River in North Carolina’s northwest Piedmont. It was born in 1898 as a company-owned village, capitalized by the Duke tobacco fortunes. To attract laborers from the surrounding countryside, the town was planned with 360 mill houses. To accommodate a rural life-style, lots were large enough for family gardens and a smoke house, the company provided a community pasture for the family cow and it built hog lots for resident’s pigs in the nearby woods. Cooleemee families were large, with an average of 5 children. It was not uncommon for a grandparent to live in the home or for an occasional cousin to be fostered within its walls. While the cotton mill dominated the town’s economy, the family was its most important unit. The most treasured article in most mill houses was the family Bible and nearly all attended one of Cooleemee’s six churches. The town’s pioneers constructed a neighborhood which elders say was like living in "one big family." Even after telephones, the "grapevine" carried both the good and bad news from one front porch or backyard to another. The Mill Family Life Museum, housed in a restored Cooleemee mill house, will take its visitors back to 1934, just after running water was put in homes and when a single electric light bulb in each room was still a big novelty. Its iron bedsteads, usually slept in by more than one individual, will have straw and feather "ticks." There will be a wood-burning cook stove producing biscuits and corn bread. Come springtime, a working garden will be ploughed, planted and its harvest canned the old-fashioned way. It will be located near the Zachary House at old #14 Cross Street. Museum guides will utilize this setting to tell the story of a hard-working people, with strong faith and strong families---the cotton mill people who contributed so much to our region’s prosperity. Along with Cooleemee’s Mill Village Museum and RiverPark, the Family Life Museum will be part of an entire Textile Heritage Historic Site educating future generations of area youngsters and bringing heritage tourism to Davie County. A project of the Cooleemee Historical Association, Box 667, Cooleemee, NC 27014 |