Once Thriving Mill Town Now Subsists On Its Memories

Once Thriving Mill Town Now Subsists On Its Memories

By Dot Jackson
The Charlotte Observer, March 12, 1982

In a column Wednesday, Dot Jackson wrote about Charlotte Artist Jim Scancarelli’s tabletop model of the town of Cliffside. What was known as Cliffside no longer exists. What’s left is in Rutherford County in Western North Carolina. Art and imagination took over Scancarelli’s adaptation of Cliffside. But what about the reality? Today Dot talks with Cliffside school principal Phil White, who has a biography of old-time Cliffside both in film and memory.

Hanging over a doorway at Cliffside School, there’s a sign that says, “Cliffside Inn.”

“The inn was the last teacherage in Cliffside,” principal Phil White explains. It was the place for straitlaced maidens to properly bed and board. “I pulled the sign out of an old chicken house,” White says, and put it over the teachers’ lounge.

Phil White, born 39 years ago, 10 miles west in Forest City, is the curator of the once lively town of Cliffside. It’s a town that exists largely on film and in yellowed clips and memories.“It’s the only town in North Carolina that its main street is a dead-end road,” White says.

Cliffside was born in 1899 when a native Rutherford Countian named Raleigh Rutherford Haynes bought a steep-sided tract of woods on the Second Broad River, in eastern Rutherford County near the S.C. line, and built a cotton mill.

Haynes was already an owner of the Henrietta Mills, a few miles upriver. Among his close friends were three foodbroker brothers from Pennsylvania, named Caesar, Julius and Moses Cone. The Cones bought stock in the Cliffside Mill. They bought land and planted cotton to learn more about textile making, literally from the ground up.

Meanwhile, the classic mill village grew: the company stores, the bank, telephone exchange, entertainment halls, the barber and doctor and undertaker. “So much a week was taken out of your pay,” Phil White notes, “so you could have a nice funeral and a nice tombstone.”

Unlike the stereotypical mill town, with shotgun houses jammed up all in a row, the architecture of mill-owned Cliffside was varied as almost any town’s, with emphasis on keeping things nice. On a hill overlooking the mill, Haynes, twice widowed, built the house where he raised eight children.

Charlottean Joe Shull, born in Rutherford County in 1913, remembers his grandfather Haynes’s house. “It was build about 1906,” he says, “a frame house with 17 rooms, and every room had a fireplace. It had beautifully landscaped grounds, with a goldfish pond in the yard.”

“Anybody could go up there,” Phil White has gathered from research. “It wasn’t like there was a gate or anything. Common folks went up there just like everybody else.”

Haynes was a great believer in greenery and beauty, Shull remembers. “They used to have a contest for the prettiest yard and garden. My grandfather would give a $100 prize for the best…”

The Cliffside Railroad came in, about 1903. “My uncle used to call down to the station and say, ‘Send up the train,’” Shull says. “We’d get on and ride to Ellenboro.” It was a little under 4 miles, and people were not the only passengers. A family of banty chickens nested in the coal tender, and would hop off and scratch about the yards until the whistle blew, and then return to their mobile roost.

A mill electrician who remembered Haynes described him this way, White says: “He was the kind of fellow that if he was walking along and saw a 2-foot length of 2-by-4 lyin’ on the ground, he’d kick it a couple of times and it would be 8 feet long…”

With his brainchild running like a top, Haynes died in 1917. A memorial built to him housed the music hall and hotel and restaurant and gym. The mill, which had started out weaving gingham, wen to towels and then in later years to denim. The town clock crowning the Memorial Building chimed away the hours, and the years.

In the early 1960s, Cone Mills, grown out of the Cone brothers’ self-education, bought out the Haynes family and took over the Cliffside Mill. Many mill houses were sold for $10 per room, and moved to outlying country sites. The Haynes house, no longer occupied, was torn down, as was most of the downtown, except for White’s school and churches.

A few days before the Memorial Building fell, Phil White took a tape recorder to the river, near the dam, one night, and captured the ringing voice of the clock against the roaring water. It is a song to make one weep — though the clock still stands and chimes in a Haynes homesite monument.

As White, the town historian, says, “Cliffside’s not a place; it’s a feeling…”

Reprinted with permission from The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer