Cooleemee's Textile Heritage Center
This historic center was built so that the people of the Carolina mill industry would not be forgotten. The center celebrates and strives to preserve their values and their way of life to share with future generations.
The Bobbin & Shuttle
This article is reprinted, with permission, from The Bobbin & Shuttle magazine. Issue #1, 2004.
Learn more
- Lesson plan: Learn about your county This activity will allow fourth grade students in North Carolina to learn more about the counties that surround their home county. Using online images, students will create a multimedia presentation to share with others.
- Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World Explore Southern textile mills from their beginnings to the 1930s, drawing largely on the perspectives of mill workers themselves.
Related pages
- Brevard Station Museum: This museum provides a collection of interesting stories, facts, recollections, pictures and tidbits relating to the history of Stanley, Gaston County, North Carolina.
- John C. Campbell Folk School: The Folk School offers visitors a chance to experience a special blend of history, art, and natural beauty in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
- Smith-McDowell House Museum: Discover Asheville's first mansion and oldest surviving structure, now restored as a history museum.
Related topics
- Learn more about Davie County, North Carolina, history, history museums, industrialization, textile mills, unions, and weaving.
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Located in the historic Zachary House, the Textile Heritage Center opened to the public in October, 1993. Its purpose is two-fold: to anchor an entire historic mill village district here and to fill the urgent need for a regional center to study North Carolina’s cotton mill culture. Initiated by the Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA), the Textile Heritage Center now houses North Carolina’s first museum dedicated to documenting and interpreting life in a Carolina cotton mill town. The Center’s archives contain over 105 hours of video interviews, a photo collection of more than 600 images, and its files hold more than 400 documents — all pertaining to mill village history. In the spring of 2005, Cooleemee will open its second museum — the Mill Family Life Museum.
Cooleemee’s Textile Heritage Center works very closely with schools in their community. See a summary of the Discovering Our Heritage lessons they do with each elementary school grade every year and the students thoughts on connecting with their local history.
For information about visiting the Cooleemee Textile Heritage Center call (336) 284-6040 or send email to initiative@textileheritage.org
The Christmas poke and other lessons
In this former mill town of less than a thousand souls, we take our history seriously. The fifteen year-old Cooleemee Historical Association boasts of 1,200 members—and we start teaching our children history in kindergarten.
We use paper ornaments only on the Christmas tree, which these five year-olds decorate early every December. Upstairs there’s a big hands- on display of old toys—not one with a battery. Then elder Hazel Miller Winfree sets them down to hear how Christmas in Old Cooleemee was celebrated with hardly any cash money.
In the old days, Winfree tells of wonder and anticipation, “we children could not wait for Christmas to come.” Every kid had a role in the Church nativity play. Afterwards each received his or her “Christmas Poke”—that brown paper sack holding that treasured orange, a piece of stick candy, maybe also an apple, some nuts and raisins on the stem. Children can hardly believe that oranges were available only at that time of year.
Hazel amazes the children with tales of tramping through the winter woods with her father, a weaver at the mill, to chop down their “cedar.” Contrasts abound.
And Christmas morning. A little toy or gift was important but memories also linger on a big breakfast—with sausage, country ham cured by her “Aunt Ada,” and eggs from local chickens.
Christmas in Old Cooleemee—as close to how it should be celebrated as it ever gets.
The children are led in some bona fide Christmas carols, banned from school these days. Then they get their “pokes.” Keeping a few of these words alive is important to us—language is part of what makes any people unique. So, the “young’uns” get their treat sacks. Before they leave, Ann Ridenhour Cranford shows them how, with their parents’ help, a hole can be cut into the orange and the juice sucked out with the peppermint stick (she says that a stick of “cream penny” is even better.)
The young scholars return to school with a misty impression of a people that lived here long ago, a time when people were certainly poorer in money but perhaps richer in spirit.
In the course of their elementary school years, Cooleemee students learn a great deal of history—dates, great events, heroes and heroines—from the Discovering Our Heritage program. The curriculum was created by a partnership between Cooleemee’s Textile Heritage Center and the school teaching staff. It is age appropriate, meshing with the North Carolina Standard social studies objectives.
Exploring the concept of family, the 1st grade lesson is “Kid’s Chores from Old Cooleemee”—from slopping hogs to helping Mama do the washing. It’s all hands-on work in the yard outside the museum.
In second grade focus moves to “neighborhood” and the vital role it played in surviving. Elder Dolly Spry Swain recounts the horrible night when their family’s mill house burned to the ground, leaving them with nothing. Because of their neighbors’ generosity, by the next day at noon the Sprys had more clothes, food, furniture and money than they ever had before the fire.
Geography is the focus of the third grade lesson, which begins with their first visit to the Mill Village Museum. They learn from Thurman Miller that the mill didn’t produce cotton but cloth and see artifacts from the time before “power” was put in the mill houses. And, they actually learn “north, south, east & west” by taking a giant walking tour all over town.
An activity bus takes fourth graders to the river where they learn economics—Native American, backcountry, and mill village. They scrape a deer hide, barter peanuts and apples, and get a tiny sack of cornmeal from the grist mill operator in exchange for their cob of corn.
In the mill village they become little doffer boys and girl spinners. We hand each a replica pay envelope for 1902—boys earning $2.20 and girls 55¢ for a 66-hour week. The girls are furious but are told “that’s history.” Things are equalized when “Mama” asks for all their money except a quarter. With that in hand children visit the Company Store where it buys a pickle from the barrel, hoop cheese and crackers and a stick of candy.
Cotton mill people came from somewhere and in fifth grade students learn that their history goes back past the Civil War to the American Revolution. The setting is Captain Pearson’s graveyard deep in the woods. The blast of a black powder musket, which begins the lesson, gets their attention.
“Our children now have a deep sense of place” says long-time teacher Jennifer Godbey.
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