Old West Durham Neighborhood Association








| Settlement of Pinhook |
| Ninth Street |
| 1920 Street Map |
| McDonald's Drug Store |
| E.K. Powe School |
| Southside School |
| Old Neighborhood|
|Photos & Memories|
| Grocery Stores |
| Erwin Auditorium |
| 8 mills of Erwin Mills |
| Roads to West Durham |
| Life in the Mill Village |
| Working on "Mill Hill" |
| Faces of "Mill Hill" |
| Child of Erwin Mill Village |
| Erwin Mills No. 1 |
| Erwin Mill No. 2 |
| Erwin Mill Cemetary |
| Cooleemee Mill No. 3 |
| Pilgrim Holiness Church |
| WD Church of God |
| OWD's Faith Community |
| Broad Street |
| Duke in History |
| Duke Stonecutters |
| WPA Interviews |
|Oral Histories of OWD|
| Brookstown & Hickstown |
| Bull Durham |
| Growing up on Hillsboro Road |
|The Depression in West Durham|
| The Erwin Chatter |
| West Durham Memory-Mary Coles |
| Interview with Mill Worker |
| Ellerbe Watershed History |
| Historic Walking Tours |
| Walking Tour in the News |
| Historic Durham |
| Bull City Timeline |
| Other Durham cotton mills |
| Southern Cotton Mills |
|Tommy Hunt: Memories...|
| Wallace's Auto Article |
| Historic Postcards of Durham |
| Main history page |




    Other Durham cotton mills

    Bull City cotton mills (ca. 1910): by this period, more Durhamites were working in cotton mills than in tobacco factories.

    Pearl Cotton Mill (ca. 1900): became Erwin Mill No. 6 in 1932. Mill has been converted into an apartment building on Trinity Avenue, near North Duke Street.

    Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company at East Main & Angier (1910)

    Golden Belt Manufacturing Company (ca. 1910): East Main Street factory manufactured cloth bags to sell tobacco, flour, cornmeal, salt, etc.

    Yarbrough Mills (ca. 1925): Holloway Street, near Calvin.

    Durham Hosiery Mills in Edgemont, East Durham: Once the world's largest hosiery mill complex and the nation's largest producer of silk stockings. It eventually became the only mill in the country staffed entirely by African-American employees. Today the main mill building provides affordable housing for seniors and is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Photo ca. 1910)

    The history of Smoky Hollow goes back to the 1830s´ notorious Prattsburg saloon, which stood just about at the present corner of Lyon Street and Angier Avenue. As Durham developed later, the bottomland along present Alston Avenue became the town´s red-light district.

    When tycoon Julian Carr proposed building the Durham Hosiery Mill there in 1900, the Durham Daily Sun rejoiced: "In place of this dark hole of iniquity and infamy, there will be a busy, bustling manufacturing community."

    A village, which Carr dubbed "Edgemont," grew up to serve several textile mills. With changing tastes and fashions in the 1920s, however, the East Durham textile business began unraveling. By 1940, only one mill remained in operation. Neighborhood businesses shut down; mill housing was sold to rental investors; poverty settled in and crime went up. (source: Herald-Sun)

    Durham Hosiery Mill (ca. 1910): Company's brass band.

    Durham Hosiery Mill Baseball Team (ca. 1910): City Baseball League Champions.

    Photographs courtesy of the Durham County Library's North Carolina Collection