Abandoned Appalachia Series – The Lonaconing Silk Mill
In Lonaconing the brick bulk of the old silk mill still holds its corner of the Georges Creek valley, a long rectangular block of windows facing the rail line and the hills. For more than half a century its belts and spindles turned raw silk from across the Pacific into thread that traveled on to factories and department stores far beyond western Maryland. Since 1957 the machinery has stood silent, but the building has never been gutted or repurposed. Shoes, lunch pails, paper time cards, sample bobbins and company records still sit where workers left them when the doors were locked at the end of a long summer dispute. Visitors who step through the doorway walk into an industrial landscape that belongs to the mid twentieth century, not the present day.
The mill that began as a symbol of opportunity in a coal town became, in the words of textile historian Rebecca M. Trussell, both “monument and tomb” for the silk trade that once tied remote Appalachian valleys to global markets. Its story reaches from Japanese and Chinese sericulture to the households of miners’ families, from World War I cartridge cloth to Cold War deindustrialization, and finally to the long fight to keep a fragile building standing against time and weather.
Silk Comes to the Georges Creek Valley
When investors first created the town along Georges Creek in the 1830s it was coal and iron that drove development, not textiles. By the turn of the twentieth century the valley was lined with tipples, company houses, and the infrastructure of hard coal labor. It was also a place where miners could be idled at any time by market downturns or strikes. That combination of railroad access, cheap fuel, and a surplus labor pool drew the attention of the New York based Klotz Throwing Company.
According to later accounts, local banker Duncan Sloan learned that Klotz was searching for a new site and pressed the case for Lonaconing at a town meeting in the Evans Opera House. He pointed to coal for steam power, rail connections, and a labor force that badly needed steady work. Within weeks, townspeople endorsed the proposal, ground was broken in August 1905, and construction moved quickly.
The mill opened for business in April 1907. A short spur line brought bales of raw silk from Japan and China directly to the factory’s own siding. Workers unpacked each bale, recognized by its distinctive chop mark, sorted the skeins, and began the long process of washing, dyeing, drying, winding, and twisting them into usable yarn.
From the beginning the Lonaconing plant was part of a larger regional network. Klotz already operated a successful mill in South Cumberland, and the new facility extended that footprint deeper into the coal towns of the central Appalachians. The choice of site followed a broader pattern that Trussell identified in her study of the mill for the Textile Society of America. Silk manufacturers of the Gilded Age liked remote mill towns where industrial capital and transportation were available, but state laws and big city labor politics were less intrusive.
Building, Expansion, and a Women’s Workforce
The Lonaconing mill was a three story, reinforced concrete and brick building with long rows of windows to bring light into the twisting and winding rooms. By 1916 a large addition had been constructed to handle growing orders. Company documents and later reconstructions suggest that by 1920 approximately 359 workers were on the payroll.
Most of those workers were women and girls from the town and surrounding camps. One photographic essay estimates that as many as eighty percent of employees were women, many of them the teenage daughters and young wives of coal miners. Children in the earliest years could be found in the mill as well. Oral testimonies collected decades later recalled girls who understated their age to secure a job and help keep their families afloat.
Betty Lou McIndoe went to work at the mill in 1948 when she was eighteen. Her mother had started there in 1924 at age thirteen, her stepfather served as superintendent, and her aunt, uncle, boyfriend, and several friends also worked in the building. With her first two week paycheck of seventy four dollars she bought herself a gold wind up wristwatch with a black face. Looking back, she remembered the plant as “a big happy family, well, all my family worked here.”
The Klotz plant converted raw hanks of silk into finished yarn in a series of steps that occupied nearly every inch of the 48,000 square foot floor plate. Bales were opened in the basement, where workers, often women like Betty Lou, sat at long tables to unravel skeins and prepare them for washing. The silk moved into tubs, through drying rooms, then out to winding machines and twisters on the upper floors. There it was thrown, doubled, and finally wound onto bobbins, quills, and cones that could be shipped onward to stocking and garment manufacturers.
At its height in the 1920s, the mill payroll reached into the high three hundreds by some counts. The steady cash wages those jobs provided mattered deeply in a community subject to the booms and busts of the coal trade. A former worker, Burt Rowan, later said that the mill “kept the bread and butter on a lot of people’s tables because of the coal mine strikes and other problems.”
Surviving Depression and War
The silk mill did not escape the economic turmoil of the interwar years. In 1932 the company went bankrupt and reorganized under the name General Textile Mills, a reflection of the broader instability of the American silk industry as fashion cycles shifted and synthetic fibers emerged.
During the Great Depression, orders for luxury items such as silk hosiery and lingerie fell sharply. Oral history participants remembered shutdowns and shorter hours when demand dried up. At the same time these wages often bridged gaps when miners were laid off or mines closed temporarily, reinforcing the mill’s place in the survival strategies of families across the valley.
World War II transformed the plant’s production. Japanese silk was suddenly unavailable, and the federal government directed resources toward military needs. The Lonaconing mill used its remaining silk and shifted to rayon for cartridge cloth, parachutes, and other wartime textiles. The Washington Bureau of Labor Statistics later estimated that wartime textile production provided more than a million jobs nationwide, and Lonaconing shared that temporary resurgence.
The reprieve did not last. By the late 1940s nylon and other synthetics had permanently changed textile markets. The machinery in Lonaconing dated to the early twentieth century and required continuous hands on attention. Competing plants with newer equipment and different labor arrangements could turn out yarn more cheaply and in greater volume. The old rationale for placing a silk mill in a coal town, where miners’ wives supplied an inexpensive workforce, was also weakening as mines closed and women demanded better pay.
Work, Skill, and Everyday Life Inside the Mill
Descriptions from former employees emphasize not only the economic role of the plant but also the skill embedded in its work. Textile historian Trussell has argued that the surviving machines and tools reveal an intricate choreography of labor and physics. Workers knew the speed of each winder, the precise twist needed to reach a set weight and strength, and the quick motions required to tie broken filaments without slowing the line.
In interviews conducted for Allegany County projects through Allegany College of Maryland and Allegany High School alumni, former workers recalled the constant motion and noise of the twisting rooms. A later owner remembered the sound from childhood as “millions of crickets in the fall of the year” echoing down to Main Street.
The interior photographs that now circulate online show why those memories remain so vivid. Ranks of iron frames run away into the distance, bobbins still perched on their spindles. Wooden swifts, porcelain thread guides, tubs and drying racks, steam chambers, and heavy centrifugal extractors occupy nearly every corner. Time cards rest in their slots beside the office door. Calendars from October 1957 still cling to the walls.
These images, combined with oral testimonies from men like Ronnie Shaw, who maintained the machines in the 1950s, give a rare view of day to day industrial life. Shaw remembered working his way down each row of machinery, oiling spindles and aligning gears while the equipment produced a “singing noise.” He also remembered how quickly that work ended when business slowed and he was furloughed after only a few months on the job.
Strike and Sudden Closure in 1957
By the early 1950s the workforce had dropped sharply from its interwar peak. One reconstruction of payroll records shows numbers falling to between seventy and eighty employees by mid 1941, then down to just a few dozen in the early 1940s. A generation later former workers remembered walking through half empty rooms where only some of the long rows of machines still ran.
Labor relations had been tense for years. Accounts in student oral history projects and in later newspaper reporting point to repeated disputes over wages. Workers were paid on a piecework basis and pushed themselves to keep machines moving. Nearby, the Celanese Amcelle plant outside Cumberland offered higher wages and more stable employment in synthetic fibers. According to an article in The Washington Post, the opening of Amcelle intensified pressure on the older mill, as workers in Lonaconing sought pay closer to what their neighbors earned.
In the summer of 1957 the last group of workers, by then fewer than seventy, voted to strike for a wage increase. Rather than negotiate, the company closed the plant. Journalist Russell Shorto later summarized the moment in his profile for The New Yorker. After years of disputes and at least one earlier strike that had ended without a raise, the remaining employees walked out again. Management’s response was to lock the doors for good. The company survived as Gentex Corporation, shifting into helmets and protective gear, but the Lonaconing mill never reopened.
Because the closure came suddenly, workers were not allowed back inside to collect personal belongings. A straw hat belonging to the last superintendent still waited in the office decades later. Bottles of aspirin, powder compacts, slippers, and lunch pails remained on shelves and benches. Calendars marked the last month of operation. The factory became, unintentionally, a sealed record of mid twentieth century industrial life.
“Time Capsule” and Preservation Battles
For twenty two years after the closure the building stood vacant but intact. In 1979, when it was finally offered for sale, local auto body teacher Herb Crawford bought it with a partner. He hoped to lure another manufacturer to the valley and imagined himself as a hometown hero if he could bring hundreds of jobs back into the old shell.
The deals never materialized. Locating a new textile or apparel operation in a small coal town no longer made economic sense. Instead, preservationists and industrial historians began arriving at the mill’s door. Trussell and others catalogued the machinery and documents, treating the building as a rare in situ record of silk throwing. A 2002 paper presented to the Textile Society of America described walking into the darkened rooms and slowly making out “strange machines, bobbins, and silk everywhere,” comparing the experience to opening a tomb.
Photographers arrived as well. Extensive portfolios by Matthew Christopher, Sterling E. Stevens, Louis Dallara, and others captured row after row of winders and spindles, dusted with silk and lit by shafts of light from tall factory windows. Their work, like the documentary project “The Last Silk Mill” by Antiquity Echoes, helped draw attention to both the beauty and the fragility of the site.
Concern over the building’s future grew in the early twenty first century. The mill was recognized as a contributing resource in the Lonaconing Historic District, which the Maryland Historical Trust and National Register of Historic Places list as significant for its coal, iron, and silk related architecture. That documentation highlighted the silk mill as a plant that “employed the wives of miners” and anchored the industrial side of the district.
Regional groups nominated the building to “Endangered Maryland,” a roster of threatened historic sites maintained by Preservation Maryland, and the George’s Creek Watershed Association sought recognition from the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.” Studies and press coverage increasingly described the site as the last intact silk mill in the United States with its original machinery, records, and personal effects still in place.
Crawford welcomed preservationists and photographers, offering tours in exchange for donations that helped cover taxes and basic maintenance. Shorto’s profile captured the tension in his position. Salvage dealers offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for the lumber and machinery, promises that would have stripped the structure down to bare walls or rubble. He turned them down, saying “this place is the last of its kind, a piece of U.S. history,” even as he joked that a slightly larger offer might have forced a different decision.
By the 2010s the roof had begun to fail in multiple places, windows were broken, and water damage buckled parts of the maple floor. Preservation articles and photo essays warned that unless a new roof could be funded, the mill would eventually cross a point of no return.
In 2019 Crawford died after decades of caretaking. Three years later, in March 2022, a new owner named Brandon Sloan purchased the property from his heirs and pledged to focus first on stabilizing the roof while keeping the interior largely as it was. The AbandonedOnline history of the mill notes that Sloan’s goal is to preserve the building as a historic site, even if full rehabilitation remains a distant prospect.
The Silk Mill in the Story of Western Maryland
The silk mill’s story cannot be separated from the larger history of the Georges Creek valley. The National Register nomination for the Lonaconing Historic District stresses that the town’s industrial landscape reflects successive phases of iron making, coal mining, and textile production on a narrow strip of level land between steep mountains. Duplex housing, churches, war monuments, company offices, and the long brick facade of the mill together tell a story of how people adapted to a rugged environment and a volatile industrial economy.
Industrial surveys such as Donna Ware’s Green Glades and Sooty Gob Piles and Patrick Stakem’s Down the ’Crick place the Lonaconing Silk Mill among a broad set of Western Maryland sites where manufacturing and mining reshaped the landscape. In that context the Klotz plant represented a diversification of the local economy, offering wage work to women in a coal dominated town.
Oral histories and newspaper features like Mary Otto’s reporting in 2004 underline the extent to which the mill became woven into family life. Women remembered sneaking in underage, meeting husbands at the machines, and hosting co workers in their kitchens at lunch. They also remembered the exhaustion of piecework, the sting of fiber cuts on their fingers, and the anxiety when layoffs and shutdowns came.
At the same time, the site tells a national story of industrial change. Textile mills that once clustered in the Northeast and Appalachian foothills migrated south and then overseas. Synthetic fibers replaced silk. Work that had been coded as women’s industrial labor, demanding speed and skill, disappeared or reappeared in different forms elsewhere. The calendar that still hangs on the wall for October 1957 marks more than a local closing date. It marks a turning point in the long history of American manufacturing, when entire sectors began to leave regions like western Maryland behind.
A Factory Between Memory and Future
Today the Lonaconing silk mill stands in a precarious balance between decay and preservation. Its machinery and artifacts offer scholars of labor, gender, and industrial technology an unusually complete record of early twentieth century silk throwing. The oral histories gathered by local students, community colleges, and regional institutions preserve the voices of the people who kept those machines running, from teenage girls learning to tie broken filaments to maintenance men walking the rows with oil cans in hand.
The building also serves as a physical reminder of how global economic choices reach into small Appalachian towns. Decisions about where to locate mills, how much to invest in machinery, and whether to grant a nickel wage increase or answer a strike with a lockout all reverberated through the kitchens, churches, and union halls of Georges Creek.
If the roof can be stabilized and a sustainable plan found, the Lonaconing silk mill has the potential to become more than an abandoned curiosity. It can be a place where visitors walk through a working class past that has rarely been preserved with such completeness, a museum of industrial labor whose exhibits are the real machines and real objects of work. In that future the voices recorded in interview transcripts, the named faces in 1948 group photographs, and the worn handles of the mill’s doors would all remain part of a living conversation about what it meant, and still means, to make a life in the hills of western Maryland.
Sources & Further Reading
Allegany College of Maryland Oral History Program. Oral History Transcripts: Illustrated, Volume 2. Cumberland, MD: Allegany College of Maryland, Donald L. Alexander Library, Appalachian Regional Collection, 2022. https://www.allegany.edu/oral-history/Oral-History-Transcripts-V2.pdf
Allegany College of Maryland Oral History Program. Oral History Transcripts: Illustrated, Volume 3. Cumberland, MD: Allegany College of Maryland, Donald L. Alexander Library, Appalachian Regional Collection, 2023. https://www.allegany.edu/oral-history/Oral-History-Transcripts-Volume-3.pdf
Allegany High School Social Studies Department. The Lonaconing Silk Mill, 1907-1957. Cumberland, MD: Allegany High School Maryland Student Service Alliance Oral History, 1999. Digital facsimile in Western Maryland’s Historical Library. https://digital.whilbr.org/digital/collection/p16715coll27/id/7
Allegany County Genealogical Society. “Resources and Library Holdings, Allegany County, Maryland.” Includes obituary and local history files referencing Lonaconing Silk Mill workers. https://www.acgsmd.org/libraryfiles.html
“200 Furloughed as Lonaconing General Textile Mill Closes.” Cumberland News, August 18, 1951, 16. Accessed via Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/
“History from the Evening Times Files.” Cumberland Evening Times, February 24, 1931, 4. Accessed via Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/
“History from the Evening Times Files.” Cumberland Evening Times, May 20, 1939, 4. Accessed via Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/
“Lonaconing Silk Mill to Resume Operations Next Saturday.” Cumberland News, June 9, 1939, 24. Accessed via Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/
Chidester, Robert C. A Historic Context for the Archaeology of Industrial Labor in Allegany County, Maryland. Report prepared for Allegany County Government and the Maryland Historical Trust, 2003. https://heritageumd.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/chidester-robert-c-_historic-context.pdf
Christopher, Matthew. “The Abandoned Klotz Throwing Company: At Long Last.” Abandoned America, 2011, updated 2015. https://abandonedamerica.us/abandoned-klots-throwing-company
Curtis, Jennifer Keats. “Endangered Maryland.” Maryland Life: America in Miniature 3, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 49-63. Summary and citation in Preservation Maryland, “Endangered Maryland.” https://www.preservationmaryland.org/programs/endangered-maryland/
Dallara, Louis. “Historic Lonaconing Silk Mill.” Louis Dallara Photography, March 18, 2014. https://www.louisdallaraphotography.com/2014/03/historic-lonaconing-silk-mill/
Duckworth, Charles Wesley. “Lonaconing Silk Mill.” Oral history interview, April 22, 1977. Allegany Community College Oral History Project, Allegany College of Maryland, Appalachian Regional Collection, Cumberland, MD. Project landing page: https://www.allegany.edu/oral-history
Failing, Anne, et al. “The Lonaconing Silk Mill Project: Students Research Their Community’s Labor History.” Labor’s Heritage 10, no. 4 (1999-2000): 54-75. Cited and summarized in regional labor history bibliographies. Example reference: https://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/files/Documents/Planning/historic/Bibliography%20of%20Western%20MD%20Industry.pdf
“Georges Creek V2” exhibit catalog excerpt in Stakem, Patrick H. Down the ‘Crick: The Georges Creek Valley of Western Maryland, Western Maryland Series no. 8, version 2, 2015. Includes “Preliminary Catalog, Georges Creek History Exhibit, Georges Creek Regional Library” with 1948 Lonaconing Silk Mill employee photograph. Full text at Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/GeorgescreekV2/georgescreek%20v2_djvu.txt
Maryland Historical Trust. “Lonaconing Historic District, AL-VI-A-175.” National Register of Historic Places nomination form, 1983. Includes discussion of Klots Throwing Company and the silk mill complex. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=766
Maryland Historical Trust. “Vertical File List, Allegany County: AL-VI-B-087, Klots Throwing Company (General Textile Mills, Gentex Corporation).” MHT Library Vertical File List, c. 2024. https://mht.maryland.gov/Documents/research/MHT-Library-Vertical-File-List.pdf
Meyers, Mary. Lonaconing: Home in the Hills. Piedmont, WV: Piedmont Herald, 1987. Referenced in regional biographies and WHILBR notes on Lonaconing. Cataloged via Western Maryland Public Libraries. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyWomen/Ruth-Bear-Levy-1898-1994
Mountain Discoveries. “World War I.” Mountain Discoveries (Fall/Winter 2018): 38-43. Includes contextual discussion of World War I era industries in Western Maryland and references to the Lonaconing Silk Mill. https://www.mountaindiscoveries.com/images/fw2018/wholebook.pdf
Otto, Mary. “Grasping for a Thread of Hope: Long-Shut Silk Mill’s Memories Inspire Preservation Effort.” Washington Post, December 31, 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2004/12/31/grasping-for-a-thread-of-hope/8a9deee4-b8b5-4dc0-8a09-1c3e2c17120e/
Shorto, Russell. “An Economic Moment, Frozen in Time.” New Yorker, August 11, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/an-economic-moment-frozen-in-time
Stakem, Patrick H. Down the ‘Crick: The Georges Creek Valley of Western Maryland. Western Maryland Series no. 8, version 2. Self-published, 2015. Includes section “The Silk Mill” and a detailed silk mill bibliography. https://archive.org/stream/GeorgescreekV2/georgescreek%20v2_djvu.txt
Stevens, Sterling E. “Abandoned Maryland – The Lonaconing Silk Mill / Klotz Throwing Company.” SE Stevens Photography (blog), c. 2013. https://sestevens.com/the-lonaconing-silk-mill/
Textile Society of America. Trussell, Rebecca M. “The Klotz Throwing Company in Lonaconing: Opening Tut’s Tomb.” In Silk Roads, Other Roads: Textile Society of America 8th Biennial Symposium Proceedings, 2002, 229-238. Textile Society of America, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/423/
Ware, Donna M. Green Glades and Sooty Gob Piles: The Maryland Coal Region’s Industrial and Architectural Past. Crownsville, MD: Maryland Historical Trust, 1991. Industrial bibliography and survey widely cited for Allegany County mills. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5339/000217/000000/000010/restricted/housing.pdf
Western Maryland Regional Library. “Silk Mill, Lonaconing, Allegany County, 1907-1957.” Western Maryland’s Historical Library (WHILBR) digital collection of photographs and documents. https://digital.whilbr.org/digital/collection/p16715coll27
Wyckoff, William C. Silk Manufacturing in the United States. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1883. Provides national context for siting silk mills in coal regions and low wage markets. Digitized at HathiTrust. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008595784
“Bibliography of Industry in Western Maryland.” Baltimore County Department of Planning, July 5, 2005. Includes entries on the Lonaconing Silk Mill, Anne Failing’s work, and regional industrial studies. https://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/files/Documents/Planning/historic/Bibliography%20of%20Western%20MD%20Industry.pdf
“Lonaconing Silk Mill – Abandoned.” AbandonedOnline.net, March 6, 2019, updated 2024. Narrative history of the mill from 1907 opening through 1957 closure, with extensive bibliography and recent condition report. https://abandonedonline.net/location/lonaconing-silk-mill/
Author Note: As a historian drawn to coal towns and industrial ghosts, stepping inside the Lonaconing silk mill feels like walking into a workday that simply stopped in 1957 and never restarted. I hope this piece helps you see the Klotz Throwing Company mill as more than peeling paint and machinery, and instead as a fragile record of families, labor, and global markets that once met in this Western Maryland valley.