April 25. 2005 12:00AM

By WILLIAM KEESLER

The Dispatch

KANNAPOLIS | If current and former cotton mill village residents get their way,

Lexington will be part of a 464-mile "Southern Textile Mill Village Corridor" extending

down Interstate 85 from Durham to Valley, Ala.

And pupils in Davidson County's three school systems might study the history and

impact of the Southern textile industry during the first week of October, which would

be designated Southwide Textile Heritage Week.

Those are two concrete actions that could result from the first Cotton Mill Reunion &

Convention, held Friday and Saturday in Kannapolis.

Mill village residents from the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia and Alabama spent the

weekend sharing memories and talking about ways to prevent the fast-disappearing

industry and its way of life from being forgotten entirely.

"We have to make sure this group is written about in the history books when we're

gone," said Paul Sams, a retired U.S. Postal Service executive raised in Cone Mills'

Revolution village in Greensboro.

Reunion participants attended workshop sessions on writing down the life stories of

textile mill workers, saving mill village neighborhoods and reusing vacant mill

buildings.

A public-private partnership in Forest City has a $25 million plan to turn the 108-

year-old Florence Mill structure into the town hall, residential and office condominiums,

a museum, a restaurant, an eight-screen movie theater and an urban park and events

pavilion.

John Schelp, president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, which is

trying to preserve a mill neighborhood, said his group's Web site has received 45,000

hits in five years.

Convention participants also perused displays of photographs of old mills, from

Petersburg, Va., to Lando, S.C. They saw a "dope wagon" used to sell soft drinks,

snacks and sandwiches to mill workers in China Grove. They heard the sound of a mill

whistle signal the beginning and end of each reunion session. And as videotape

recorders whirred, they stepped up to microphones in the aisles of A.L. Brown High

School auditorium to share memories.

Ann Ridenhour Cranford, who grew up in the Cooleemee mill village, said she burst

into tears when she walked into the auditorium Saturday morning and saw a quilt her

mother had made displayed on the stage. Her father, a master weaver who went to

work in the company store, would bring home samples of woolen cloth for men's suits;

Cranford and her sister, about 6 or 7, would tear the backing off the samples; and their

mother would tack the pieces together as a quilt.

Ken Dettmar said his mill neighborhood in Cramerton had a drug problem different

from the kind you find in many communities now. "You see, I was drug to church on

Sunday," Dettmar said. "... I was drug to family reunions and community socials, no

matter what the weather. I was drug by my ears when I was disrespectful to adults. ...

Those drugs are still in my veins, and they affect my behavior in everything I do, say

and think."

One of the reunion's featured speakers, Wingate University President Jerry McGee, who

grew up in Rockingham's Roberdel mill village, recalled grandparents and parents who

sacrificed and patiently prepared the next generation for life and who grew an extra

row of tomatoes for the neighbors.

Reunion participants attended workshops Saturday afternoon on mill work, mill village

education and home and spiritual life, and baseball and recreation. In 1936, Lexington

had a squad, the Colonials, in a confederation of mill town teams (Concord, Kannapolis,

Mooresville, Shelby, Valdese, Hickory and Charlotte) that the National Association of

Professional Baseball Leagues branded as "outlaw" baseball because they permitted

unlimited salaries and persuaded major league players to violate contracts and come

and play. The next year, Lexington and Thomasville both fielded teams in a Class D

league (with Cooleemee, Landis, Mooresville, Newton-Conover, Salisbury and Shelby)

that the professional leagues formed to take business away from the outlaw league.

After the 1938 season, the outlaw league died.

Convention participants gave a standing ovation to "Mill Village: A Piedmont

Rhapsody," a powerful multimedia musical work by Charlotte composer David Crowe

based on interviews with former Piedmont mill workers and performed by a 12-piece

Charlotte Symphony Orchestra ensemble. The piece included readings from a 1920

edition of Mill News, in which a mill owner proudly described the amenities of his

village for workers and their families, but also from a 1913 edition of the National

Child Labor Bulletin, in which a worker protested that everything in a village was the

property of the mill owner.

Lynn Rumley, director of the Textile Heritage Center at Cooleemee and coordinator of

the regional reunion, said mill village residents must now tell their own version.

They will form a regional consortium to approach the federal government about

establishing the "Southern Textile Mill Village Corridor," which would pass through four

states, Rumley said. They also will approach their respective state legislatures about

establishing textile heritage weeks beginning next year.

Convention participants also passed a third resolution calling for preservation of the

closed Cannon Mills Plant 1 complex in Kannapolis as a textile museum and

educational center. Rick Hudson, a Rowan County Planning Board member and former

employee of Tubular Textile Machinery at Lexington, said there are fears that the

entire complex could be torn down for development.

William Keesler can be reached at 249-3981, ext. 221, or at bill.keesler@the