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AFTER TRYING TO FORGET THE FATAL 1929 LORAY MILL STRIKE, GASTONIA IS READY TO REMEMBER.
Loray Mill getting historical marker
Gastonia ready to remember fatal 1929 strike
JOE DEPRIEST
JDEPRIEST@CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM
The strike broke out in the biggest mill in the South's largest textile center.
The Communist Party made it an international cause. Two people were shot and killed -- a police chief and a woman who was a union activist. The headlines were worldwide.
Gastonia, 1929: The bloody Loray Mill strike split a Carolina textile community.
Mill workers all over the South were rebelling against what they saw as mistreatment by management, but the most bitter strike was in Gastonia. It was a time of mobs, night-riding vigilantes and outside agitators. And it scarred the community so deeply that many wanted to forget it.
Seventy-eight years later, Gastonia is about to get a North Carolina historical marker identifying the strike's location. A symbol of the city's textile past, the marker will stand near the massive old redbrick Loray Mill, itself a symbol of an industry that shaped the region.
In 1986, a state proposal to put up a historical marker calling attention to the strike failed because Gastonia officials objected to the wording. They wanted to omit any mention of the deaths and to include a reference about local citizens defeating "the first Communist efforts to control southern textiles." The state rejected the city's alternate wording and shelved the project.
But attitudes changed with time.
Gastonia officials recently asked the state to reopen the 1986 proposal. In May, an advisory committee with the N.C. Office of Archives and History reaffirmed the proposal.
Gastonia Mayor Jennie Stultz said the marker sparked no controversy this time.
"It's a painful part of our history," she said. "But it's an important part of who we are."
Within the next two months, the marker will be cast at a foundry in Marietta, Ohio. In November, it will be dedicated on West Franklin Boulevard near the old mill.
The text is the same the state proposed in 1986: "A strike in 1929 at the Loray Mill, 200 yards S., left two dead and spurred opposition to labor unions statewide."
Gastonia Planning Director Jack Kiser, who asked the state to reopen the marker proposal, is working with an Atlanta firm on a $42 million development project for the six-story mill building, sometimes called the Firestone Mill.
The structure is owned by Preservation North Carolina, which also recently asked the state to reopen the issue.
"The Loray is an icon -- a lasting symbol of what made the community," Kiser said. "This is by far the most historic site in Gastonia."
But textile executive Duke Kimbrell, doesn't think much of the old mill building or the historical marker. Just the mention of Loray Mill and the strike irritates him.
The building "is the ugliest thing in Gaston County," said Kimbrell, 82, board chairman at Parkdale Mills. "It's an eyesore and should be torn down. And I'd rather spend the money on the marker for tearing it down."
Brent Glass, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, called the historical marker a "touchstone of memory."
Glass spoke in Gastonia two years ago at Preservation North Carolina's annual statewide conference on "New Life for Old Mills" and co-wrote the entry on the Loray strike for the recently published "Encyclopedia of North Carolina."
The strike "marked the memory of Gastonia for several generations, and still does," Glass said. "It's past time for recognition of this very significant event by the community and state."
The Loray strike began in the spring of 1929 when workers reacted to declining pay and poor working conditions, such as "stretch-outs" -- faster production for the same pay. The financially troubled Loray (the name was derived by combining the last names of two company officers, Love and Gray) was owned by one of the country's largest textile companies -- Rhode Island-based Manville-Jenckes. When management refused to negotiate, community tensions grew.
On June 7, 1929, Gastonia police Chief Orville Aderholt was shot dead when he and his officers went to a union hall.
On Sept. 14, union activist and balladeer Ella May Wiggins was shot and killed while riding in a truck headed to a union meeting.
The strike dragged on through the summer and fall of 1929. By the end of September the communist-led union had left town. Union organizer Fred Beal and several other strike organizers were tried for Aderholt's killing. The first ended in a mistrial. A second trial followed, but by the time of the verdicts Beal and four other defendants had jumped bail and gone to the Soviet Union. Eventually Beal served prison time.
Charlotte historian Robert Ragan, a member of a pioneering Gaston County textile family, said the strike was the one event in Gastonia's history that hurt the most.
"All of a sudden the name of their nice, beautiful little city was in headlines around the world, and it was connected with oppression," he said. "It was an event people just did not want to talk about for years, even generations. They would rather have seen it buried."
Years after the strike, Ragan's father, Caldwell Ragan, was interviewed for a UNC Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History project on textiles.
"When they got around to the subject of the (Loray) strike he played dumb and closed up," said Robert Ragan.
People from his father's generation probably wouldn't have welcomed a historical marker on the Loray strike, but 69-year-old Ragan thinks time has healed much of the division.
"It's an event that happened in Gastonia," he said. "Whether history is beautiful or sad, it's history. And it should be commemorated."
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