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Textile Heritage Initiative
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| MISSION: To preserve the history and heritage of the Southern cotton mill people and tell their story to future generations. |
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| GOALS: To save the stories, the places and the historical record of the region’s textile industry, teaching it to our children and the visiting public. |
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Background:
In 1996 representatives from
twenty-eight mill hills, mill villages and mill towns met in Cooleemee, NC.
They had a common concern: that the history and heritage of the Southern
cotton mill people be preserved and recounted to future generations. The "Growing Up On a Mill Hill" conference drew over 125 people, most who shared the experience of growing up "mill-hill style." Also attending were a dozen scholars who had been writing on this subject. |
  Those gathered agreed that the mill people themselves must
have a major hand in interpreting their own historical experience. They
hoped that preservation efforts would not end with a single
conference and that the dialogue would continue.. Since that time, new local
projects have emerged and more scholarly works have been published. |
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| We did not realize just how rapidly the industry and its people would vanish. Today we are faced with a preservation crisis, both human and material. With the clock ticking, Cooleemee’s Textile Heritage Center hosted a planning meeting in October 2003 to create a new regional effort. Since then an impressive coalition of lay historians, mill village representatives museums and others have outlined a plan. A regional Initiative was launched in Kannapolis in July, 2004. | |
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