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Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Person.....Young, W.H. 
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Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 April 28, 2007, 7:52 pm

Source:             Special Sesquicentennial Supplement IV Ledger-Enquirer
Name:               W.H. Young
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                     Young, Swift Were Textile Pioneers
                          By Clason Kyle
                         Sesquicentennial Editor

  By 1825 cotton mills began to dot America's eastern seaboard and bright young 
men of vision and imagination began to ponder the possible advantages of moving 
the factories nearer the source of their raw material into the heartland of the 
cotton growing South, into Georgia, into the Chattahoochee Valley.
  The region was ripe for pioneers - men who were willing to come into its 
wildernesses and prepare the way for others to follow. Between 1824 and 1832 
many such men started South. Two who reached Columbus- W. H. Young and George 
P. Swift - were to be remembered as leading pioneers of textiles in The Valley, 
Georgia and the South.
  New York-born Young came south to Georgia in 1824 when he was 17 years old. 
He clerked in Twiggs County before visiting the site of the proposed city of 
Columbus for the first time in 1827. He is today remembered as the father of 
successful textile manufacturing in the South.
  Massachussetts-born Swift also came South at 17, to Georgia's Crawford County 
where he stayed briefly before moving to Upson County where he built one of the 
first textile mills in the state.
  Young was a brilliant visionary who saw the immense potentialities of 
Columbus as a textile manufacturing site a year before the city was established 
yet he was forced to wait for 40 years before he was able to translate his 
dream into reality. Swift realized his initial ambition shortly after he set 
foot in the state of Georgia. At 19 he was managing his own mill and in a short 
time had built a second out of the profits of the first.
  Born in New York Jan. 22, 1807, Young came south to clerk for Ira Peck of 
Marion, Twiggs County. A year later he formed a co-partnership with his elder 
brother, Edward B., an association which lasted for nine years.
  In 1827, Young visited the proposed site of Columbus, only recently surveyed 
and located in forests primeval, with Indians encamped on the opposite bank of 
the then sparklingly clear Chattahoochee. Young was never to forget what he 
found: a source of. immense waterpower, easily controllable; and a climate and 
country suitable for the production of cotton in abundance. Then was born his 
dream of cotton manufacturing. 
 However, much lay ahead for Young before the realization of his youthful 
dream. In 1835, he returned to New York, accepting a position of salesman, at a 
salary of $10.000. A great economic crash fell on the firm and virtually wiped 
it out in 1836. Young remained with the business for four years. putting it 
back on its feet. But the company was unable to pay his originally agreed 
salary, and he returned to the South. For 15 Years, he was in the commission 
business in Apalachicola, Florida with Dr. R. Henry Lockhart. Highly successful 
(one source credits him as having a million dollars by this time), Young moved 
to Columbus to pursue his long cherished ambition.
  When Young came to Columbus, he found that the splendid waterpower and 
factory sites were in the hands of a corporation styled the Water Land Company. 
He purchased one of the lots, and with eleven other persons joining him a 
charter was obtained and the Eagle Mill was built and operated very 
successfully.
  Columbus' largest cotton mill was formed when the Eagle Factory purchased the 
Howard Factory on April 10. 1860. The combined factories operated 10,000 cotton 
and 1.300 woolen spindles, 282 looms weaving both cotton and wool and consumed 
nine bales of cotton and 1,000 pounds of wool per day. The firm employed 500 
workers at a labor expense of $240 per day. 
  The Howard Manufacturing Company, its corner stone laid August 28, 1847, was 
vast for the times, measuring 125 by 48 feet, five stories high, and running 
5.000 spindles. Its president was Van Leonard and Jonathan Bridges was 
superintendent. The Atlanta Journal of 1895 gives this report of Howard 
Mill . . . ''This mill is deserving of more than passing notice, for it is 
unique in the fact that it represents the first and last attempt ever made in 
the South to utilize negro labor in cotton mills.
  The projectors were all wealthy planters and slave-holders, among them 
Colonel J. H. Howard, Major Van Leonard, Colonel John Banks, Colonel William 
Mitchell, Colonel James Chamber, and others.
The plan of these gentlemen was to furnish intelligent slaves for operatives, 
each operative representing so much stock. . ,"    
  During the Civil War, the Eagle Manufacturing Company, in addition to 
devoting its time and service to the manufacture of military supplies, donated 
a thousand dollars a month for the Confederate Government in change for bonds, 
and appropriated a hundred dollars a month to be used by local families of 
volunteers.
  A week after Lee's surrender, when Wilson's Raiders captured and wantonly 
burned Columbus, her factories and her cotton, the Eagle was destroyed. Young 
was wounded while opposing the entry of union forces, and upon his recovery, 
the shareholders met and appointed him to sell the property, collect what 
assets there were, and to close out the business. Young accomplished a major 
feat, returning to them, out of the ruins, twice their original investment.
  Then, with Young as treasurer, and his brother-in-law R. M. Gunby as 
president, the Eagle and Phenix Manufacturing Company was born from the still 
smoldering remains of the former concern, taking its new name from the fabled 
bird which every five hundred years rises in youthful freshness from its own 
ashes. , By 1867, mill No.1 of Eagle and Phenix was in operation  followed by a 
second mill the very next year and  a third mill in 1876-79. When Young became 
president in 1883, the mill employed some 2,000 operatives.
  Unlike Young, who had always centered his vision on Columbus, George P. Swift 
I of Massachusetts was to begin his manufacturing career in Upson County, 
Georgia in the year 1832.
  Swift was born in Fairhaven, Mass., on Sept, 1. 1815, the son of Asa Swift, a 
ship captain engaged largely in whaling. Swift attended public school, clerked 
for three or four years in a dry goods store in Boston, and in 1832 moved first 
to Knoxville in Crawford County, and then settled in Upson County.
  Again unlike Young, Swift did not wait nearly forty years to fulfill his 
ambition. At 19, with his brother-in-law, William I. Waynman.. he started 
Franklin Cotton Mill on the banks of Little Potato Creek at what is known now 
as Waynmanville. While working Waynman fell and was killed, but Swift took 
charge of the immediately successful mill. In a short time, he had added 
another mill called the Waynmansville, built out of the profits of the Franklin 
Mill, Six thousand spindles and 120 looms made brown sheeting, shirting and 
ball thread for all the nearby Southern states. The machinery was imported from 
Manchester, England. With a new partner, Louis Hamburger, Swift was to operate 
the Upson County mills for 30 years. Hamburger came with Paragon Mills, 
operating it under the name of Hamburger Mills. The potential of Columbus as a 
great textile center a drew Swift and his family to Columbus in 1866.
   In 1867, with George P. Swift, Jr. and Samuel G. Murphy, Swift organized the 
No. 1 mill of Muscogee Manufacturing Company on the site of the old Coweta 
Manufacturing plant, which had been destroyed when Wilson burned the city. 
Through  Swift's strict attention to affairs of the mills and his untiring 
energy in promoting their interest, Muscogee has grown from that first small 
mill to the present large industry that now stands in its place.
  In 1963, Muscogee merged with Fieldcrest Mills, Inc., a nationally known 
corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In addition to bed and bath 
fashions, Fieldcrest has one division called Karastan that is well known in the 
rug. market.
  In a building dedicated on the night of January 8, 1851 "with interesting 
ceremonies by Uncle Dabney Jones, the great apostle of temperance," a building 
that was the scene of civic, social, and cultural life of the community, a 
building that served as the first public school .for Negroes in 1872, Swift 
Manufacturing Company had its beginning.
  The building was Temperance Hall, located on the west side of First Avenue 
between 12th and 13th Streets, and the year was 1882. William Augustus Swift, 
son of the pioneer George P. Swift, and G. Mote Williams formed a partnership, 
and started with a few looms on the second floor of the Hall. They purchased 
the yarns necessary for the operation of the looms, and manufactured cotton 
checks and plaids. The partners called their mill Exeisior.
  Success of Excelsior Mill was immediately pronounced, and on November 13 of 
the same year as the founding, a charter was granted to William A. Swift, G. 
Mote Williams, Louis Hamburger, George P. Swift and George P. Swift Jr. for the 
organizing of the Swift Manufacturing Company. (Today,  a fourth member of the 
textile family to bear the name of George Parker Swift founded the carpet-
oriented Columbus Mills, Inc. in  1958.) 
  Some six years later, William Swift was to organize another mill, called 
Paragon, which was bought in 1892 by Major Louis Hamburger. Renamed Hamburger 
Mills, it had begun an expansion program in 1907, directing its attention and 
facilities to the manufacturing of cottonades and plaids when Hamburger died. 
John Mitchell, Hamburger's son-in-law, operated the mill until 1914, when World 
War I caused a twelve month shutdown.
  Reorganized in 1916 under the direction of Guy Garrard, looms were removed 
and concentration of  production was placed on colored cotton yarns. The 
controlling interest of the mill was purchased in 1920 by W. C. Bradley, and 
the name changed once again, this lime to Bradley Manufacturing Company. After 
the mill ceased to operate in 1942, the factory saw service as Teen Tavern. and 
is utilized now by Royal Crown Cola Company.
  The founding partner of Swift Manufacturing Company. G. Mote Williams, born 
in Chambers County, Alabama on January 5, 1842, grew up and was educated in 
Columbus. His first employment was that of clerk in a dry goods store, where he 
worked for a year and a half. Enlisting in Company One, Third Alabama 
Volunteers, Williams soon won promotion to captain.
  Returning to Columbus after the war, Williams was in the warehouse and 
commission business from 1870 to 1880. After 1883, he was secretary and 
treasurer, as well as general manager of Swift Manufacturing Company. In 1889, 
he became president of the rapidly expanding firm, which today sprawls over two 
city blocks and is encroaching on the third, and serving until his death in 
1897.
    His son, Harry L. Williams, was only twenty-six years - old when he was 
elected president of the mills in 1906, a position he held for thirty-one 
years. In  an interview in 1961. Williams recalled that the mill had no carding 
and spinning of its own until 1897 when it was imported from England.
  The factory had a pair of improved "Green" steam engines, built by the 
Providence Steam Engine Company with the capacity of three hundred and fifty 
horsepower. "The whole town turned out to marvel at its power." he said.
  A year before Muscogee merged with Fieldcrest, "Big Swift" was sold to Glen 
Alden, a New York-based conglomerate. In 1965, John A. Boland came in as 
president. and two years later, the name was changed to Swift Textiles. Inc. 
The firm has become one of the country's leading manufacturers of denim for 
fashion products. In  January of  '72. Glen Alden disposed of its Swift 
interest to Johnston Industries, which two years later sold the local firm to 
DHJ Industries, Inc., of New York.
  G. Gunby Jordan I.  and W. C. Bradley were outstanding citizens and leaders 
in many different fields as well as the local textile industry.
  A newspaper of February 3, 1886 said of Jordan's resignation as secretary-
treasurer of Eagle and Phenix Mills. . . "Mr. Jordan has been connected with 
the mill for twenty years and has had the whole routine of the business 
management at his fingers end, so to speak. It would be hardly possible for 
anyone man to infuse more life energy, and business tact into an institution 
than has been done into this one by Mr. Jordan. With the mention of his name, 
the association of the mills is almost indissoluble. He has been conceded a 
necessity." The account concludes by saying Jordan would devote his attention 
to Georgia Midland and Gulf Railroad.
  Born in Sparta, Ga.,  June 19, 1846, where he received his early education, 
Jordan quit school to join the famous Nelson Rangers of volunteer Georgia 
cavalrymen, who served as scouts and as escort to General Stephen D. Lee af
Ter he was appointed Corps Commander in Hood’s army. Coming to Columbus after 
the war, Jordan clerked for a year in a wholesale firm. But when W.H. Young 
reorganized the Eagle and Phenix, he joined this firm as treasurer and credit 
man. 
  After twenty years in textiles, Jordan began another career in railroad. He 
was to have careers in other fields also. He was the organizer and president of 
the Third National Bank, from 1888 until January 11, 1921, also the Columbus 
Savings Bank.
He was succeeded by W. C. Bradley, who served as president of both banks and 
the merged organization, from January 11, 1921 until his death, July 26, 1947. 
( The Columbus Savings Bank and the Third National Bank merged on May 31. 1931 
under the name Columbus Bank and Trust Co.)
  Jordan was elected president of the Columbus Board of Education  1905, and it 
was largely through his efforts that the city put  into operation the first 
municipally owned industrial High School in the United States, a school which 
has attracted the attention of educators  around the world. In 1890  Jordan led 
a movement, inspired by John Hill, the talented mechanical engineer of  the 
Eagle and Phenix Mills. That resulted in the building of the Columbus Power 
Company dam, completed in 1902.
  But Jordan was to return to textiles as president of Eagle and  Phenix  Mill, 
from 1898 until 1916, and was also president of Bibb Manufacturing Company 
(Macon) from 1909-1913. Finding the equipment of Eagle antiquated and 
inefficient when he took them over in 1898, his first move was to send men 
through the buildings with sledge hammers demolishing the old machinery and 
throwing it out. He installed new, up to date equipment, and entirely rebuilt 
the power plant. Jordan also served as president of Perkins Hosiery Mills, 
which in 1937 was  reorganized as Jordan Mills, Inc.
   Building its local branch in 1900, the huge Bibb  Manufacturing Company has 
maintained progressive strides without interruption. The largest vocational 
school in the South was established by it in 1937, and the mill operates more 
spindles under one roof than any other manufacturing plant in the nation. There 
are some  2,500 employees at the local Bibb. Some 1,500 workers and their 
dependents live in Bibb City, which is self governing and completely self-
sustaining. It includes  homes, churches, shops, clinics, schools supervised by 
Jordan ,was elected president of the Columbus board the Muscogee School 
District but in part subsidized by the  company, and a private police force. 
Bibb was organized in Macon in 1876 by J.F. Hasnson, Isaac N. Hanson and Hugh 
Moss Comer.
  W.C. Bradley was born June 18, 1863 at Oswichee, Russell County, Ala. and 
died in Columbus July 26, 1947. 
   See BRADLEY, page 15
  Continued from Page 14
education at Slade High School for boys in Columbus, attended Alabama 
Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) for one year, 1879-80, but left 
college to assume the management of his father's plantation. At the age of 
nineteen, he became a clerk in the Columbus firm of Bussey-Goldsmith and 
Company.
  Two years later, he and his brother-in-law S. A. Carter, succeeded to the 
firm of  Bussey-Goldsmith, and operated the firm under the name of Carter and 
Bradley. When. Bradley purchased the entire interest in 1895, the business 
became known as the W. C. Bradley Company, its present name. From this original 
business in cotton warehousing grew all the succeeding enterprises and 
activities of W. C. Bradley.
  Cotton was his first interest from those early days on the plantation, and 
through his decades in the cotton warehouse business. The steamboat era of  the 
Chattahoochee from the turn of the century, operating more boats than any other 
one person in the long history of river navigation, hauling groceries, 
fertilizers and cotton.
  Cotton continued to be of absorbing interest and concern to him, when in the 
last quarter-century he was a cotton textile manufacturer. Bradley was 
president of Eagle and Phenix from 19i5 to 1932, and was also serving as 
chairman of the board of Columbus Manufacturing Company at his death. In 1947, 
Eagle and Phenix was sold to the textile chain of Reeves Brothers, Inc. of New 
York and is now known as Fairforest Company, Eagle and Phenix division. 
Columbus Manufacturing Company was sold in the same year to the extensive West 
Point Manufacturing Company. Bradley's son-in- law D. Abbott Turner, was 
president of both Eagle and  Phenix and Columbus Manufacturing Company at the 
time of the sales. 
   Bradley amassed one of the South's largest fortunes  and was actively 
engaged in business until late in life. 
  Two textile leaders of the twentieth century were uncle and nephew to one 
another, Edward W. Swift (son of the pioneer George P. Swift) and Clifford J. 
Swift (son of the pioneer's son George P. Swift Jr.), and were closely 
associated in business.
  In 1897, Edward W. Swift became president of Muscogee Manufacturing Company, 
the firm that his father had organized immediately following the Civil War and 
he served as president until 1942, assuming then the duties of chairman of the 
board until his death, August 27, 1954. During Swift's forty-five years as 
president, Muscogee grew into one of the nation's largest towel and ticking 
manufacturers. W.C. Bradley was reported to have praised Mr. Swift's endeavors 
at Muscogee in the following manner, saying "Edward, you've taken a trigger and 
made it into a gun'" Muscogee was the first mill in the country to be operated 
by transmitted electric power, Eagle and Phenix having generated electric power 
for lighting their own plant in 1909, the first in the world to do so, thus 
greatly increasing their output by being able to work day and night.
  In 1906, Edward W. Swift and others, namely A. and J. P. of the distinguished 
Illges family that had come to Columbus from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the 
early 1830s, O. C.  Bullock, E. J. Rankin, Rhodes Browne, Jas. P. Kyle,  F. J. 
Jenkins, and Clifford J. Swift organized the Swift Spinning Mills on Second  
Avenue in North Highlands. This mill, which has quadrupled in size since its 
founding, still confines its activities to the production of yarns for knitting 
and weaving, principally cotton, but also synthetics, wool, and cotton mixtures.
With his nephew as vice-president and general manager, Edward W. Swift served 
as president for twenty-six years, from 1907-1933. He was succeeded nephew on 
Jan. 24, 1934, and  Clifford Swift served until 1949. He became chairman of the 
board of ''Little Swift" on January 25, 1950, serving in that capacity until 
his death, June 14, 1955.
  A. IIlges became president and treasurer on January 2, 1950, and became 
chairman of the board July 26, 1955. Henry, the son of Clifford Swift, became 
president July 26, 1955, and the office of treasurer was added to his title, 
Feb. 5, 1957.
  In 1968, "Little Swift" merged with Genesco Inc. of Nashville, Tenn. In 1973, 
Fieldcrest bought Swift and in 1975, A. IIlges, Jr. was named executive vice 
president. He is now president. 
   Swift Spinning Mills, Inc. won the coveted Army Navy "E" Award during World 
War II. Not only was it the only local cotton mill to achieve such recognition, 
it won it four times.
  Like the local Bibb Manufacturing Company, Columbus Manufacturing Company, 
came in with the new century, commencing operations in 1900. This was a new 
mill with an old name, for another Columbus Manufacturing Company had been 
located on the river above the city many years before, but was always known in 
the vernacular as "Clapps' Factory." 
  A letter from George M. Clapp, son of J.R. Clapp, to Miss Loretto Chappell, 
written in 1927, the following information was gathered. . ."The property 
consisted of 600 acres of land, four hundred in Georgia and two hundred in 
Alabama. The old mill was driven by an overshot wheel about 14 or 16 feet in 
diameter and 12 or 14 feet in length. The water was conveyed to the wheel by a 
race. In addition to the old mill, which  had 2000 spindles and 400 looms 
making white goods, checks rope and yarn, there was also a grist mill. and a 
tan yard and shoe shop.
  Tanning was done the old and long process of placing the hides in vats four 
to six feet wide and four feet deep in the following manner, first a layer of 
hides, then a layer of oak bark, the hides remaining in their vats for months 
until they became leather . ..  Burned by Wilson's Raid, the old grist mill had 
to be started to help feed the people. They had no lumber, so they used pine 
poles for frames,  and fences and cowpens to enclose it . . . The factory was 
rebuilt after the war by the noted Negro bridge builder, Horace King. King 
built both wooden bridges, the 14th and the Dillingham Street, and erected the 
only monument to a white by a Negro. It is in Godwin Cemetery, Phenix City." 
  Like another but earlier textile manufacturer, Frederick B. Gordon came to 
Columbus from Massachusetts, this time the city was Newton,  where be was 
graduated from High School.  The year of has arrival in Columbus was 1878.
  Born in Auburndale, Mass., May 29, 1857 of Scots English parentage, he was a 
member of the firm of J. O.
Mathewson and Company,  commission  merchants of  Augusta, Georgia, from 1881 
to 1889. In 1890 he entered the wholesale dry goods business, associating 
himself with the firm of  J. Kyle and Company for nine years. In  1900, Gordon 
organized and became the first president of Columbus Manufacturing Company, the 
new factory with the old and virtually unused name. For thirty-two years, 
Gordon exerted notable foresight, wisdom and administrative power in the 
development of this important cotton mill. 
  Gordan quickly became one of the town's leading citizens. He was twice the 
president of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. A member of the Georgia 
Commission by appointment of Governor Terrell, Gordan represented the state at 
the St. Louis Exposition. He was the executive head of the Georgia Cotton 
Manufacturers Association. 
  Gordor, was to play an active and often critized  part in Georgia Legislation 
from 1902-1914, regarding child labor in the cotton mills. Gordon took the 
position that the children were not exploited. It was his sincere belief that 
they were often hired “purely as a matter of charity, and were better off 
working in the mills, than running loose, and learning the first lessons of a 
vagrant's life." 
  Active in civic affairs. Gordon possessed a genial, sympathetic nature, and 
took pride in his adopted city.
  The pioneers who came into this wilderness, prepared the way for others to 
follow and some of these in turn became leaders: and behind their success lay 
the skills and loyalties of vice-presidents, purchasing agents, carders, 
warpers. doffers, stenographers, and janitors.

Special Sesquicentennial Supplement IV 
Ledger-Enquirer, Sunday May 7, 1978, S-14-15
           

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