Burlington Industries
company
Burlington Industries, formerly Burlington Mills, is a diversified American fabric maker based in Greensboro, North Carolina. Founded by J. Spencer Love in Burlington, North Carolina in 1923, the company is a subsidiary of Elevate Textiles and has operations in the United States and China.
History
On November 6, 1923 J. Spencer Love founded a textile corporation in Burlington, North Carolina. Love and his father brought to Burlington $50,000 worth of machinery from a factory they had sold in Gastonia, NC, and also invested $200,000 that they had earned from the sale of the Gastonia plant, as well as selling an additional $200,000 worth of stock to local residents. In early 1924 Love began construction on the Pioneer Plant and a mill village of 70 houses known as Piedmont Heights. The mill opened with about 200 workers. The operation initially produced cotton products without much success, but the company's situation improved once Love adopted rayon as the mill's fabric for manufacture shortly after it had been introduced to the Southern market. Love had a second mill built in 1928 and opened a sales office in New York City the following year.
During the Great Depression demand for rayon dramatically increased as it was a cheaper substitute for silk. Love acquired faltering textile mills across central North Carolina and fitted them with new looms that could process rayon.
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This entry incorporates text from “Burlington Industries” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.