Photo of The Month – Jul 2003

Fair Exhibit

Picture contributor: Jane Winn

Two ladies attend the Cliffside & Haynes Mills booth at the fair, exhibiting the many patterns and colors of the gingham produced by the mills. Large pieces of cloth served as a backdrop for the cellophane-wrapped samples. Fairgoers must have been impressed with the brightly colored spools of yarn that framed the entrance to the booth. Jane Winn, daughter of Will Winn (for many years an official in the finishing plant at Cliffside), thinks the woman on the right may be her mother.

Update: Don Bailey, our far-ranging archivist-at-large, was cranking through microfilm of the old Rutherford County Sun, and ran across a Cliffside community column from Oct. 23, 1924 that had this mention:

Miss Bertha McGraw and Miss Edith Green have returned from Shelby, where they were in charge of Cliffside’s booth at the fair.

Whether the women in the picture are Misses McGraw and Green, or even whether the photo portrays the booth at the 1924 fair, we don’t know. But where there’s smoke…