Moses H. Cone - Career

Career

Moses and Ceasar dealt much with textile mill owners in their travels as salesmen. They not only sold normal dry goods, but introduced into their wares ready-made clothing as well as certain fabrics like denim. This gave them experience then in textile products and the textile industry. The Cone brothers soon invested in Southern textile mills which generally had over a 20% return on average. One of these companies the Cones invested into was C. E. Graham Manufacturing Company of Asheville, North Carolina, an up and coming newly formed textile mill. Moses became its president in 1882. The company's original builder Charles Edward Graham continued with its on-site management while Moses pursued other investments and ventures.

In 1880 Moses moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. Soon thereafter he joined Simon Lowman and Charles Burger to form Cone Brothers, Lowman, and Burger Clothing Manufactureres based out of Baltimore. Moses discovered the need for durable clothing for the blue-collar people of the High Country and fulfilled this need with denim and plain fabric based clothing.

In 1890 Moses and Ceasar were contemplating even grander ventures and formed the Cone Export & Commission Company in New York City along with Anderson Price and Jay C. Guggenheimer as the other major stockholders. They developed what was called the "Plaid Trust" which was a commission clearing house to stabilize the production market on checks and plaids. They were a marketer of Southern cloth mill-goods to South America in competition with Great Britain. Initially the par value of the capital stock of their new company was fifty dollars per share. There were 20,000 shares of the company, so the value of this new firm was placed at one million dollars. Eventually they took in another forty mills over time to capture control of this market, but their ambitious goal was never fully achieved.

In 1895 Moses purchased a defunct steel mill and developed it into a large cotton mill called Proximity that produced blue and brown denim. He built additional mills throughout the Greensboro area and the deep South and soon became one of the biggest producers of the denim fabric in the world. He and his brother Ceasar were sons of a German Jewish immigrant who came to America as a grocery salesman. They fashioned a textile empire to become one of the leading producers of denim in the world. Moses became known as "The Denim King" in the late nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century he began supplying denim to Levi Strauss and Company, a relationship that the Greensboro firm retains to this day.

Cone Mills Corporation was the world leader in the manufacturing of denim and largest supplier in the world. Moses was instrumental in the development of Watauga Academy, now known as Appalachian State University. In 1899, Moses donated $500 to the founders; it was the largest single donation received for the school's construction.