The Cotton Mill
The mill was started in the 1820s by Amos Williams and his three brothers. They named it and the town in which it still stands after John Savage, who lent them the money to start the business. The main product was cotton duck, used for sailcloth and a wide variety of other uses. Power was originally obtained by damming the Little Patuxent River, which runs adjacent to the mill property. In later years steam engines were used. The mill was served by a spur off the Patuxent branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and in the 1870s a Bollman Truss Bridge was moved to the spur. This bridge survives and is the only one of its kind left.
The oldest remaining mill structure is the stone carding and spinning building, probably built between 1816 and 1823. The mill was expanded before 1881, and that expansion included the brick tower with Romanesque overtones. Other buildings include the weaving shed, preparation area, paymaster's office, and several early-20th century warehouses and power plants.
After World War II the demand for canvas dropped considerably, and the mill shut down in 1947. By this time the complex consisted of twelve buildings.
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Famous quotes containing the words cotton and/or mill:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)