![]() ![]() The “Upper Company Store” was rebuilt in 1884 in the popular “Carpenter Gothic” style. Superintendent George Russell noted in 1923 “The old red store was burned Apjust thirty-three years after the old cotton mill was burned.” His second-in-command in the store and counting room at Franklinville was William Henry Ragan (at Cedar Falls it was John M. From 1853 the rebuilt Randolph factory was managed together with the Cedar Falls factory under the supervision of George Makepeace, who lived on the hill high about the mill and store. Little else is known about this institution, except that it was a wood frame structure, painted red. That placed it 15 feet above the north entrance of the factory, and about fifteen feet below the line of worker tenements known as the “Cotton Row” – perfectly placed for workers walking to and from the mill. That first company store was built by the Randolph Manufacturing Company across the road and facing the main entrance of the mill, before 1840. The granite foundation, 20×20 feet in plan at the northeast corner of the intersection of Buie Lane and Andrew Hunter Road is almost certainly its original location. “Resolved, that we proceed to build a Store house 32 feet by 42 feet immediately to be used as a work Shop while building the factory.” The original Franklinsville Store was about the size of this shop at Old Sturbridge Village. When the Island Ford factory was proposed a mile downstream, construction of the “Store house” was one of the first orders of business. There is no exact date that the Company Store opened for business, but it probably was ready by the time the factory began cotton spinning operations in March 1840. And the company have now resolved to establish another one on part of their corporate funds.”. A retail store of goods has just been opened here on private capital. The local newspaper reported that “a little village has sprung up at the place which has assumed the name of Franklinsville, embracing some eight or ten respectable families. Work on those began in April 1838, but a corporate store was just getting underway eleven months later. When the Randolph Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1838, the stockholders were first concerned with building the mill, and then houses for the workers. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, one of the most vital parts of any textile mill village was a shop selling a variety of goods not otherwise locally available. ![]()
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