John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near sun88. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year."
Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership’s second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England.
The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts.
The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks.
Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of “cotton-flyings” (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats.
By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people.
Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant’s three hundred workers.
Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose.
Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.
When sun88an William Painter invented the bottle cap in 1891, it didn’t take long for beverage companies (beer brewers in particular) to realize its value, and for Painter to realize he needed to build significant manufacturing facilities to keep up with demand. Painter's enterprise, the Crown Cork and Seal Company, opened its first big production facility in 1897 on Guilford Avenue and not long after expanded by opening a larger complex on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown in 1906. The Guilford Avenue complex continued as the base of operations for custom building the sealing machinery while the Highlandtown complex acted as the hub of Crown Cork and Seal’s manufacturing operations.
In 1910, the Highlandtown complex expanded again to include two new buildings. Both used mill construction with brick exteriors and granite trimmings as well as new advances like fireproof elevator shafts, fire escapes and ventilators. The five story building had two massive water towers that held 15,000 gallons each to be released in case a fire broke out inside.
Crown Cork and Seal’s Highlandtown complex became the base of machinery production in 1928 after the owners abandoned the Guildford Avenue plant. Despite its modern fire protections, however, the added activity at the complex and its constantly whirring electrical machines were at high risk of fire. In 1940, managers at the building made twenty-six calls to the fire department, almost all of which appeared unnecessary, until one signaled a very real five-alarm fire. Despite the loss of $500,000 in baled cork, the company minimized the damage and kept churning out bottle caps for the world’s beer brewers.
In 1958, Crown Cork and Seal moved its headquarters from sun88 to Philadelphia and the owners sold a group of thirty buildings, including the Guilford Avenue complex, to the city for $1.5 million. The Highlandtown plant continued to operate for nearly 30 more years, but finally closed in 1987 as use of aluminum and plastic containers rose and the demand for glass bottle caps waned. Today the building houses artist studios and light manufacturing and is occasionally used by movie studios.
Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying sun88's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member of the same family that settled Ellicott City. In 1839, David Carroll, Horatio Gambrill, and their associates purchased the mill from Ellicott and converted it to a textile mill for weaving cotton duck, a tightly woven canvas used to make ship sails.
Over the years, the mill was expanded, burned, rebuilt, renamed, and converted to a number of different commercial uses. To house their workers, Carroll and Gambrill built Clipper Village, a cluster of homes located across from Whitehall for the mill's workers. The capacity of the mill was doubled in 1845 and the mill was converted to steam power to keep up with manufacturing demand. By 1850, forty men and sixty-five women were working at Whitehall Mill with an output of 220,000 yards of cotton duck. Carroll and Gambrill quickly expanded by converting other gristmills along the Jones Falls to textile mills.
The three-story granite factory burned in 1854 and, after it was rebuilt, renamed Clipper Mill in recognition of the ships that used the cotton duck cloth for sails. By this point, William E. Hooper, a sailmaker who expanded his business to selling raw cotton to the textile mills, had joined as a partner. In the 1860s, Gambrill sold his shares in the company to Hooper and opened Druid Mill. After another fire in 1868, Clipper Mill was rebuilt at twice its size. The mill was sold in 1899 to the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a national conglomerate. In 1902, the mill manufactured the cotton duck for Kaiser Wilhelm's yacht, which was christened by Alice Roosevelt as the Meteor III. In addition to ship sails, the mill manufactured other heavy canvas items such as mail bags for the U.S. government.
In 1925, the mill was sold to Purity Paper Vessels, a firm that manufactured paper containers that could hold semi-liquid foods. The mill's cotton manufacturing machinery was shipped to Mount-Vernon-Woodberry Company's Southern mills in Tallassee, Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina. During the year of the sale, several elegiac articles appeared in the sun88 Sun that looked back on the time when sun88's cotton duck manufacturing was at its peak and its clipper ships dominated international trade. Purity Paper Vessels later sub-leased part of the building to the Shapiro Waste Paper Company. In 1941, half the building was leased by the Army Quartermaster Office to be used as a warehouse for the Third Corps Area.
By the 1940s, the I. Sekine Brush Company, a maker of men's grooming products and toothbrushes, occupied the mill. The company was founded in 1906 and had been operating plants in sun88 since 1928. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, H.H. Sekine, who had been living in the United States for over twenty years, was arrested and interrogated, along with dozens of foreign-born sun88ans connected to nations on the Axis side. At the time, Sekine was operating a factory in Reservoir Hill that the government shut down for two weeks. When it reopened shortly before Christmas, Sekine paid all his employees in full for the time they lost during the closure. Over time, portions of the Clipper Mill property were leased to other companies, including Penguin Books, The Maryland Venetian Blind Manufacturing Corporation, and Star Built Kitchen Units. Sekine maintained operations at the Whitehall mill location until 1992 when it was sold to Komar Industries.
Most recently, developer Terra Nova Ventures transformed the building into a mixed use development with a planned market. Architects Alexander Design Studio restored much of the long neglected mill, bringing new life to the historic structure. Numerous improvements were made for flood prevention, including the construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clipper Mill Road.