Large textile mills had been a Northern story for sixty years before Erwin Mill broke ground. Lowell, Massachusetts had pioneered the model in the 1830s; the South, agricultural and rail-poor, had stayed largely outside it. After the Civil War that began to change. Railroads pushed deeper into the Piedmont. Durham businessman Julian Carr opened the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company in the 1880s to weave cloth bags for the local tobacco industry - and proved that a Durham mill could pay. Benjamin Duke saw the opportunity. He had tobacco money to invest, a workforce of post-Reconstruction farmers desperate for wages, and a railroad running through his backyard. In 1892 he incorporated the mill, recruited Erwin from the cotton industry up north, and started construction on Mill No. 1 in West Durham. Erwin and Duke worked with the British-American Tobacco Company to push their muslin pouches into the Asian market. Even so, in the recession of the 1890s, Erwin reported that the mill was having "strenuous times."

What made Erwin Mill profitable in those strenuous years was also what made it brutal. The workforce was poor white tenant farmers who had been forced off small holdings by the collapse of cotton prices, and they accepted wages no Northern mill could have paid. Men earned at most $2.50 a day. Women and children earned less. Boys as young as ten worked the floor until child labor was banned in North Carolina in 1913 - and in the early 1900s, a worker named O.C. Crabtree was putting in 66-hour weeks at the age of twelve. Around the mill grew a company town: houses owned by the company, a store stocked by the company, schools and churches built with company money. In 1908 Erwin funded the construction of what would become St. Joseph's Episcopal Church on Main Street, still one of Durham's oldest Episcopal congregations, donating proceeds that would otherwise have bought tobacco, alcohol, or soft drinks. Mill village residents rarely needed to leave the few blocks around the factory. They also rarely could. Today the residential neighborhoods west and north of the old mill site still hold the small frame houses where workers raised families on Erwin wages.

The mill expanded relentlessly. Erwin's successors acquired plants in Stonewall, Mississippi, and in Wake County, North Carolina, brought them under the Erwin name, and shifted production from tobacco pouches into a wider range of cotton goods. By the early 1900s, Erwin Mill was one of the largest producers of denim in the world - feeding the booming American demand for workwear. Then came the 1930s. Like every Southern textile mill, Erwin met unionization with hostility, but the workforce eventually won a contract. When that agreement expired in 1943, the union came back in 1945 with a set of demands that, in the words of one news account, "no other Southern cotton mill granted" at the time: paid holidays, a lunch break, and an outside arbitrator to write the next labor agreement. Management refused. They argued that the mill couldn't stay profitable if it gave in - the same argument every Southern mill made. Workers had spent half a century inside Erwin Mill's walls. The cracks were finally showing through.

Erwin Mill survived another four decades, eventually folded into Burlington Industries, but the structural problem never went away: Asian and Central American factories could weave denim cheaper than Durham could. Burlington spent millions improving the plant. It wasn't enough. The last bolt of cloth rolled off the line in 1986, one hundred and three years after the first. The brick buildings stayed. Today the complex at Main and Ninth has been reborn as Erwin Square - apartments, offices, shops - keeping the name, and the brick, while erasing the soot and the noise. The smokestack still rises above West Durham. A short walk away, St. Joseph's Episcopal still holds Sunday services in the church Pa Erwin built with money he kept out of his workers' liquor cabinets, on a street where the descendants of mill families and Duke University students now share the same coffee shop.