History of McComb Page 2

In 1900 McComb, a railroad town in the piney woods region of southern Mississippi, built a large cotton mill to augment its Illinois Central Railroad shops and its thriving lumber industry. Powered by two steam engines, the mill initially employed up to 200 workers in the operation of 220 looms and 6,000 spindles. It enjoyed modest success for two decades and then sold at auction in 1921 to Standard Textile Products Company of New York for $270,000.

The new owners, with Alvin Hunsicker, as president, and Charles K. Taylor, as superintendent and manager, announced that their ambition was to make McComb a textile center as large as any in the South. The mill, renamed McComb Textile Mill, was expanded to operate 20,000 spindles, 424 looms, and employed five hundred and forty mill workers day and night, and began to manufacture a fabric used in the production of imitation leather for tops and upholstery of automobiles. After the expansion, the mill was indeed one of the state's largest cotton mills.

By the early 1930s, like a host of other mills throughout the country, the mill was operating in bankruptcy, and at the time of the 1934 nation-wide textile strike, the directors were faced with the prospect of losing its major account with the Ford Motor Company which they felt would force the mill to close completely or, at the very least, operate on a part-time basis. The mill had survived a six-week strike earlier in the year, and Ford was threatening to take its business elsewhere should the mill be struck a second time within five months. Fortunately, the nation-wide strike was short-lived, and the mill survived to continue operations until closing its doors in 1942.

In 1925 a second cotton mill was constructed in McComb by A. K. Landau and his brother W. Lober. A. K. Landau had operated a mill at Magnolia, seven miles south of McComb, but fearing the threat of unionism at that mill, he decided to sell out and relocate. The new mill and its village, consisting of approximately fifty houses, was named "Berthadale" in honor of the mother of the Landau brothers. It was a small mill in comparison to the McComb Cotton Mill but it employed approximately two hundred workers in the production of draperies.

With the approach of the Depression in the late 1920s, the Berthadale mill began to suffer financial problems, and after struggling through the onslaught of the most difficult years of the Depression, the Landaus gave up in 1938 and ceased operations. The brothers moved the machinery, along with several employees, to Valdese, North Carolina where, for the third time, they organized and began the operation of a new cotton mill. The Berthadale mill never reopened.

Workers at both McComb mills lived in adjoining villages, typical small town villages such as those at Kosciusko, Magnolia, West Point, and Winona. All of the small frame houses were white, on small lots, and had very few amenities--no city water or sewage system, no paved streets or sidewalks, and no electricity until the mid-thirties. Sites for churches and play grounds were provided at both villages, but, unlike many mill villages, neither provided a school.

In July 1922, the TriState Builder, describing the McComb Cotton Mill, said: "We understand that it is the ambition of this company to make South McComb a large textile center, perhaps as large as any in the South. They believe that to get one hundred percent efficiency from their operators is to give them pleasant surroundings and good homes, so the company has laid out a fine park adjoining the mills and fenced it using over two thousand feet of wire fencing. This park which is well shaded is for the use of the children of the employees of the mills and the grown ups to for that matter. It has been fitted up with swings and all such amusements, making a connection with this company means the ideal life to the operators."

The owner's ambition to make South McComb a large textile center was realized, at least for the next twenty years before the mill closed in 1942. The McComb Cotton Mill brick buildings and several of the o ld village houses still survived at the time of this writing. Most of the houses, however, were in desperate need of paint and repair. While at Berthadale, there were no signs of the mill buildings, but several of its former village houses still dot the neighborhood.

A History of Cotton Mills and the Industrial Revolution by Narvell Strickland