Remember Cliffside | Cargill Memoirs

The morning of October 11, 1908, I first saw the world at 10 Reservoir Street in the little town of Cliffside, North Carolina, a small textile village located in the southern section of Rutherford County. I was named Mabel Anne Bridges. My parents were Mr. and Mrs. Boyce Bridges. Two children older than I had been born into this family. The oldest child, a brother, had died. A little sister, Ruby Mae, lived eight months after I was born and she, too, died at the age of three years and three months. That left me being the oldest of five children. Howard Paul, Minnie Inez, Lillium Wytle and D. S. B. Bridges, Jr., were the names of the other four.

Cliffside was a most unusual town. I would like to tell about the early beginnings of this little town. My grandfather on my mother's side, Samuel Daves, was an itinerant cabinet-maker, and he has told about the area where Cliffside was built before the land was bought. He told that there was a family of Haneys who lived in one section. He walked and went from one home to another in his work—building cabinets, bottoming chairs—and would spend the night with different families. He had spent many nights in the Haney Home. He said it was an area surrounded with the little, wild “blue bottles.” We now call them grape hyacinths.

There is an interesting story about the Haney family and how the land was purchased. One of the Haney sons was put in jail for freeing a slave. The jail was at Rutherfordton, which was the county seat. This young man Haney broke out of jail and fled to Kentucky and assumed another name. He married and had a family. On his deathbed, he made a confession that his real name was Haney and that there was property back in Rutherford County in North Carolina that belonged to his family. A daughter made a trip back to the Cliffside area, and Dr. T. B. Lovelace, one of the associates of Mr. Raleigh Rutherford Haynes who founded Cliffside, purchased a good part of the land from this daughter. The other part of the land, over on the bluff across the Second Broad River where the mill was built, was purchased from a colored man by the name of Logan. (All this information I received from Dr. T. B. Lovelace when he was in his nineties.)

Mr. Raleigh Rutherford Haynes founded the town of Cliffside. He was one of the pioneers in textiles. He had helped to build the Henrietta Mill, the Caroleen Mill and the Florence Mill in Forest City. And he had then decided to build a town all his own. It was in the year 1899 that the land was purchased for building this town. In 1902, the mill was started and the first material manufactured was gingham. Getting the machinery to the area to install in this mill was a very difficult thing. The Seaboard Air Line (SAL) Railroad had built within three miles of the town so the machinery had to be unloaded at this point and then carried to Cliffside by mule-drawn wagons.

Mr. Raleigh Haynes provided well for his employees. He built nice homes—in those days they were considered very nice homes. He provided for the people in practically every way for a good living. He built churches—a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Methodist and one for the Blacks, named for him, Haynes Grove. The first school was held in a part of the mill. Before long, it became very inadequate and he had built a store building, which contained a department store, a drug store, and upstairs a town hall and offices for the doctors and a dentist. The school was moved to the town hall and before too long, a schoolhouse was built up next to the Baptist church, the first Baptist church that was built there.

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