Cone Mills Corporation - The Cone Mill Villages

The Cone Mill Villages

Mill villages were company-owned towns, built from scratch by textile mills to house their factory workers and their families. In the early 1900s, Cone Mills Inc. built five self-sufficient villages to serve its Greensboro factories. These villages included churches, schools, ballfields, community centers, and company stores in addition to houses that were leased to mill workers. At their peak, the Cone mill villages covered 450 acres (1.8 km2) and housed 2,675 workers in about 1,500 houses. A separate mill village, East White Oak, housed African-American workers. Thousands of workers and their families made their lives in these “towns within a town” until the company began selling the houses (sometimes to workers) in the late 1940s.