Appalachian Community Histories – Fries, Grayson County: Washington Mills, the New River, and Virginia’s Textile Town
Fries, Virginia, sits in a bend of the New River in northeastern Grayson County, close to the Carroll County line. Today it is a small Appalachian town surrounded by mountains, river scenery, and the landscape of the New River Trail. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Fries was one of the most ambitious industrial experiments in Southwest Virginia.
Unlike older Grayson County communities that gradually formed around farms, crossroads, churches, or courthouses, modern Fries grew with astonishing speed because investors saw industrial power in the New River. Within only a few years, a dam, railroad, enormous textile mill, workers’ houses, stores, boarding houses, churches, streets, and public buildings appeared along the river. The Washington Mills Company did not simply place a factory beside an existing town. It helped create the town that would support the factory.
For most of the twentieth century, the mill and the town were difficult to separate. Generations of families worked within the textile plant while the company shaped housing, commerce, recreation, transportation, and the physical appearance of Fries itself. When the mill finally closed in 1988, Fries was left to answer a question faced by company towns across Appalachia: what happens to a community when the industry around which it was built disappears?
Francis H. Fries and Bartlett’s Falls
The industrial story began before there was a town called Fries. Grayson County remained largely agricultural through much of the nineteenth century, although small woolen mills and other industries were appearing by the closing decades of the century. Cotton manufacturing was far more strongly associated with the Piedmont sections of Virginia and the Carolinas, making the decision to build a large cotton textile operation along the New River in mountainous Grayson County unusual.
Colonel Francis Henry Fries came from a prominent North Carolina textile family and already had experience in manufacturing, banking, and railroads. He had established textile operations at Mayodan, North Carolina, and helped organize the Wachovia Loan and Trust Company. Those interests in finance, transportation, and manufacturing placed him in a position to attempt something much larger on the Virginia side of the mountains.
According to the local tradition preserved in the National Register documentation for the Fries Boarding Houses, the opportunity may have begun with an 1898 conversation involving Grayson County horse trader James “Pipe” Carico. Talk of the water-power potential of the New River near the Stevens Creek community eventually reached Fries. He visited the place known as Bartlett’s Falls in early 1900 and recognized the possibilities of the site. Because this part of the story comes through local tradition rather than a contemporary account of the conversation itself, it should be treated cautiously, but the land transactions that followed are well documented.
Fries and W. C. Ruffin began purchasing land from Carico, the Bartlett family, and other property owners. On July 13, 1901, Fries, Ruffin, and their wives transferred accumulated property to the Washington Mills Company for $26,029. The Washington Mills Company itself was chartered in New Jersey, with Fries serving as president and Ruffin as secretary-treasurer.
The investors had land, but their plan depended upon controlling the river.
Congress Authorizes the New River Dam
On June 4, 1900, Congress passed an act granting F. H. Fries and W. C. Ruffin permission to construct and maintain a dam across the New River in Grayson County at a point within two miles of the mouth of Stevens Creek. The act specifically authorized the project for water-power purposes while reserving federal authority over navigation and requiring provisions for fish passage when directed by federal officials.
That brief federal law became one of the foundational documents in the history of Fries. The investors were not merely buying land beside the New River. They intended to harness the river to drive an industrial complex.
Construction on a dam approximately thirty-nine feet high began in April 1901. Federal research on reservoir sedimentation later recorded that the Washington Mills reservoir was completed for power generation in November 1902. By that time, the surrounding landscape was being transformed almost as quickly as the river.
Railroad access was equally important. The Norfolk and Western Railroad was extended from neighboring Carroll County to the mill site in 1901. The railroad brought construction materials and raw cotton into the valley and eventually carried finished cloth outward to distant markets. It also brought workers, visitors, merchants, and customers into a community that only recently had been rural countryside.
The great brick textile plant opened in February 1903. Around it stood hundreds of workers’ houses and the beginnings of a commercial district. What had been a river bend was becoming an industrial town.
From Washington Mills to Fries
The legal history of the town deserves some clarification because later accounts occasionally give different incorporation dates. The official Virginia charter history traces incorporation to 1901 and identifies the community’s previous name as the Village of Washington Mills. The original act was amended in 1902. Some later preservation histories describe Fries as incorporated in 1902, but the Commonwealth’s official charter record places the original incorporation in 1901.
The new name honored Francis H. Fries, but the community that carried his name was more than a collection of company houses. Washington Mills planners envisioned what preservation researchers have described as a largely self-sufficient industrial town. Their plan included approximately 300 one-story workers’ houses, larger residences for managers, two substantial boarding houses, a railroad depot, commercial buildings, water and sewer service, street lighting, and eventually a social center.
The steep hillside above the New River helped determine the shape of the community. The mill stood near the dam at the northern end of town. Main Street and Railroad Avenue followed the river, while workers’ houses climbed the slope above them. Larger management homes occupied prominent sites overlooking the industrial complex. The twin boarding houses stood above the commercial district, and the Lyceum, constructed in 1910, became one of the centers of community life.
By 1910, only a few years after the mill began operating, Fries had a population of 1,775 and was the largest town in Grayson County. Galax, which would later become the region’s dominant commercial center, then had only 755 residents. A 1911 directory showed that Fries supported physicians, attorneys, dentists, a bank, general stores, hotels, a grocery, a livery stable, jewelers, Methodist and Baptist churches, and the large Washington Mills company store.
Fries had become a boomtown.
The Railroad, the Mill, and the Company Town
The railroad functioned as the town’s connection with the outside industrial economy. Cotton and other materials arrived by rail, finished textiles departed from the same depot, and passenger trains moved employees and shoppers through the community. A resident who arrived at Fries by train in 1904 later remembered trains so crowded that passengers could barely find standing room.
Yet the prosperity of Fries came with an extraordinary level of company influence. Washington Mills owned much of the housing and provided many of the improvements that elsewhere would have been responsibilities of municipal government. An industrial survey from 1929 described a town in which practically all houses were company-owned and public improvements were paid for by Washington Mills. Fries possessed a mayor and council, but economically the company remained the dominant institution.
That arrangement could provide remarkable infrastructure for a small mountain community, but it also meant that employment, housing, and the local economy were connected to the same employer. When Washington Mills prospered, Fries prospered with it. When the mill contracted, there were few parts of the community that could remain untouched.
The surviving records make that relationship unusually visible. Virginia Tech’s Fries Textile Plant Records contain correspondence, ledgers, personnel material, production records, photographs, financial records, blueprints, fabric samples, and other documents covering the plant from its beginnings through its closure. Rather than preserving only the decisions of executives, the collection also makes it possible to follow working hours, pay, production, and portions of the daily lives of employees.
Lewis Hine and the Young Workers of Fries
Among the most striking primary sources for early Fries are photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine for the National Child Labor Committee.
Hine visited Fries during the period when he was traveling throughout industrial America documenting children and adolescents at work. In May 1910, he photographed Washington Mills from outside. His surviving caption commented favorably on the mill’s light and fresh air and described local housing conditions as fairly good, although he criticized housekeeping. The photograph shows the mill, river, dam, and surrounding settlement together, capturing the physical relationship between factory and town when Fries was still remarkably young.
When Hine returned to the subject of Fries workers in 1911, his photographs provided a different kind of evidence. One image shows a group of adolescent spinners at Washington Cotton Mills. Hine noted that the youngest workers “would not be photographed.” The image places young faces directly inside the labor history of the mill and provides evidence that cannot be reduced to production totals or company balance sheets.
Hine also photographed mill families in Fries, while surviving company time books, pay materials, personnel files, and later employee records provide other ways of reconstructing who worked there and how the labor system operated. The research material preserved at Virginia Tech includes early time books and decades of personnel and pay documentation, creating the possibility of tracing individual workers across company and census records rather than treating the workforce as an anonymous mass.
The photographs are particularly valuable because they remind us that the rapid creation of Fries required human labor at every stage. Behind the impressive dam, railroad, and brick mill were families whose wages depended upon spinning, weaving, repairing machinery, moving materials, inspecting cloth, and performing dozens of other jobs that kept Washington Mills operating.
Boarding Houses, Churches, and Life Beyond the Looms
The population continued growing. Fries reached approximately 2,000 residents in 1920 and around 2,100 by 1930. Washington Mills expanded in 1912 and again in 1919, adding equipment, manufacturing space, and workers. By 1929 more than 600 people worked in the mill, which accounted for nearly three-quarters of Grayson County’s textile workforce.
Housing all those workers became a challenge. The original plan provided approximately 300 workers’ houses, so employees also lived outside town, boarded with local families, or rented rooms in the two company boarding houses. Census research incorporated into the National Register nomination reveals something of the population moving through those buildings. In 1910, one boarding house contained mill weavers while another housed female cloth inspectors. The young boarders came from Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and elsewhere, showing that Fries was pulling workers toward the New River from beyond the immediate community.
By 1920, one apparent boarding-house household included eighteen boarders. In 1930, other boarding-house residents worked as weavers, carders, spoolers, laborers, and shop hands. Their occupations show how closely domestic space and factory labor overlapped in a company town where a bedroom might be occupied by one shift while another worker was at the mill.
Community life nevertheless extended far beyond work. Churches, schools, clubs, music, sports, and the Lyceum gave residents institutions around which to build lives of their own. The Lyceum became a YMCA in 1923 and contained a gymnasium and movie theater. A 1948 renovation added a bowling alley, library, kitchen, game room, and improved gathering spaces. Local newspaper reports recorded Girl Scouts, garden clubs, community meetings, socials, and other activities that filled the calendar between mill shifts.
The boarding houses even played a role during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Preservation research records that the buildings were used to house men who were not sick and who assisted the community by carrying supplies to ill residents and burying the dead. In a town designed around industry, buildings constructed to solve a labor-housing problem became emergency infrastructure during one of the deadliest public-health crises of the twentieth century.
War Years and the Height of Washington Mills
Fries’s population declined somewhat between 1920 and 1940, reaching 1,677 residents in 1940, but the Second World War brought another period of intense production. The mill operated on three shifts, and residents remembered the town as crowded with workers. Company records examined by preservation researchers show both the scale and hierarchy of textile work. In early 1944, ninety-seven spinners earned roughly forty cents an hour, 184 semi-skilled weave-room employees earned about forty-six cents, and seventeen fixers earned approximately fifty-two cents an hour.
By the company’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 1953, Washington Mills employed about 1,100 people. More than 2,000 looms produced over fifty million yards of sheeting and print cloth annually. Fries itself had roughly 1,700 residents. The figures reveal just how enormous the plant was in relation to the town. There were nearly two mill jobs for every three residents, including children and retirees.
For families throughout this portion of Grayson and neighboring Carroll County, employment at Fries could span generations. The mill was not simply where one member of a household worked. Parents, children, siblings, spouses, cousins, and neighbors might all pass through its departments over the course of their lives.
That generational connection survives especially clearly in Virginia Tech’s modern oral-history collection. Former employees describe working in the spool room, weave room, card room, slash room, cloth inspection, production, and maintenance. Others remembered summer employment or families in which several generations depended upon Washington Mills. The interviews transform industrial terminology into remembered experience, preserving what it felt like to spend a working life inside the mill.
Black Life and Segregation in Fries
Company records can create the impression that a mill town had one common experience, but Fries was also part of segregated twentieth-century Virginia.
One of the most important additions to the documentary record is the oral history of Christine “Chris” Beamer Cooper, who grew up in the Hollow, a neighborhood within Fries. Cooper’s interview preserves memories of African American life in the community, segregated schooling, later integration, and Black families whose history can be difficult to recover from company-centered narratives.
Her testimony matters because much of the surviving written record naturally revolves around Washington Mills. Ledgers preserve wages. Maps preserve buildings. Corporate correspondence preserves decisions. Those documents are indispensable, but they do not automatically capture every experience within the town.
The oral-history collection broadens that view. Taken together with employee records, census schedules, photographs, church histories, newspapers, and local records, such testimony helps recover a Fries made up not simply of “mill workers,” but of different families and neighborhoods living within the racial and social structures of their time.
Generations Inside the Mill
The endurance of Washington Mills meant that the factory changed along with the people who worked there. Employees who entered the plant in the 1960s and 1970s encountered a workplace far removed from the one Lewis Hine photographed before the First World War, yet the basic connection between town and mill remained recognizable.
Melva Anders began working there in 1966 and later recalled jobs involving spooling, weaving, creeling, cloth inspection, and production. Willie Wilson returned to the Fries area in 1965 to work at the plant, eventually spending decades in the weave room. Their recorded memories describe not an abstract manufacturing process but departments, machines, lunch breaks, benefits, changing owners, fellow employees, and the rhythms of working life.
Ownership became increasingly complicated during the mill’s final decades. Corporate reorganizations and sales eventually placed the Fries operation under Riegel Textile and then Mount Vernon Mills. Federal environmental records document the late ownership transfers, while contemporary accounts and worker recollections describe attempts to keep production competitive as employment declined.
The problem was larger than Fries. Southern textile manufacturing was facing changing markets, foreign competition, aging machinery, corporate consolidation, and demands for expensive modernization. Virginia Tech’s history of the Fries collection notes that the infrastructure needed to remain competitive was costly and that successive owners were reluctant to make the investment necessary to preserve the old plant.
The company town that had once seemed permanent was approaching its end.
The Closing of the Mill
Production was reduced gradually rather than disappearing in a single instant. Former workers remembered departments shutting down and employees being laid off as work dwindled. Willie Wilson recalled being among the small number of workers remaining near the end. Dennis Hines remembered families suffering when the mill closed and the painful experience of later watching the enormous building dismantled.
In 1988, after roughly eighty-five years of textile production, the Fries mill closed for good. Virginia Tech’s archival description places the end of operations in that year, and the surviving Fries Textile Plant Records likewise run through 1988.
For other communities, the closing of a factory might mean the loss of a major employer. In Fries, it meant something larger because the town itself had been designed around the plant. The mill had once employed approximately a thousand people, supported stores and boarding houses, shaped transportation, influenced housing, and provided a reason for people throughout the surrounding countryside to travel to the New River.
By 1990 the population had fallen to approximately 690. The huge mill building was demolished not long afterward, leaving the dam and an open space where one of Southwest Virginia’s most important industrial complexes once stood.
The industrial legacy also complicated efforts to reuse the property. Federal environmental records identify the former mill site as Mount Vernon Mills and document concerns involving transformers and capacitors containing PCB oil, drums, asbestos, and other materials left at the property after textile operations ended. The site did not ultimately qualify for placement on the National Priorities List, but the records demonstrate that closing a century-old industrial complex involved more than locking the doors.
From Railroad Town to New River Trail
The railroad that once made the textile town possible was also disappearing.
In December 1986, Norfolk Southern donated fifty-seven miles of abandoned railroad right-of-way to the Commonwealth of Virginia for the creation of a state park. New River Trail State Park opened in May 1987 with an initial four miles and eventually expanded along approximately fifty-seven miles of the old railroad corridor. The trail now links the history of places such as Fries with a landscape increasingly associated with hiking, cycling, fishing, and outdoor tourism rather than freight trains and textile shipments.
The transition provides one of the great contrasts in the history of Fries. Railroad tracks once carried raw cotton toward the mill and finished cloth away from it. Today the old transportation corridor carries visitors through the New River landscape.
Fries did not simply vanish when industrial employment disappeared. Residents remained, buildings were reused, the river became an economic and recreational asset of a different kind, and preservation efforts began identifying the surviving pieces of the company-town landscape.
What Remains of Old Fries
Some of the most important surviving buildings are the twin Fries Boarding Houses. Constructed during the first phase of company development, probably around 1905, they once housed employees and others drawn into the expanding mill community. Their size, hillside position, and surviving architectural details distinguish them from the smaller workers’ houses that originally covered much of the town.
The boarding houses were listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places in 2007 because of their association with community planning and industrial development. Their preservation is especially significant because the great brick mill they once overlooked is gone.
Other parts of the old town plan remain legible in the landscape. The New River is still held by the dam that made Washington Mills possible. The former Lyceum survives as part of the civic landscape. Streets continue to climb the same steep hillside where workers once walked home after their shifts.
Yet the difference in scale is unmistakable. The 2020 Census recorded only 450 residents in Fries, barely one quarter of the population documented there in 1910 and far below the community’s industrial-era peak.
Population numbers, however, tell only part of the story.
Why the History of Fries Matters
Fries is one of the clearest examples in Appalachian Virginia of a community whose physical form, economy, and identity were constructed around a single industrial enterprise. The New River provided power. Congress authorized the dam. Investors purchased the land. A railroad entered the valley. Washington Mills built its plant and housing. Workers arrived. Stores opened. Churches organized. Children went to school. Clubs met at the Lyceum. Families settled into routines measured partly by factory shifts.
Then the industrial system that had created the town receded.
What makes Fries especially valuable to historians is the survival of evidence from nearly every level of that story. Congressional legislation records the legal beginning of the dam. Company maps show how the town was laid out. Lewis Hine’s photographs put faces beside the machinery. Census schedules reveal boarding houses crowded with workers. Payroll and personnel records document employment. Newspapers preserve the social calendar. Oral histories record segregation, factory life, family memory, and the emotional shock of closure. The immense Fries Textile Plant collection at Virginia Tech carries the documentary story from the first years of Washington Mills to its final days in 1988.
Fries was built because men at the beginning of the twentieth century looked at a bend in the New River and saw enough power to operate a textile empire. The mill they constructed is gone, but the town remains, carrying in its streets, houses, dam, archives, photographs, and memories the history of what happened when industrial Appalachia came to the river.
For most of the twentieth century, the sound of Fries was the sound of looms. Today the river is easier to hear.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Fries Textile Plant Records, 1900–1988. Ms1989-039. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3436
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Fries Textile Plant Records, 1900–1988 (Ms1989-039), Digital Collection. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms1989-039
United States Congress. “An Act Permitting Building a Dam across New River.” United States Statutes at Large 31, chap. 620, June 4, 1900, 264. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-31/pdf/STATUTE-31-Pg264-2.pdf
Commonwealth of Virginia. “Charter: Fries, Town of.” Virginia Law. Richmond: Virginia General Assembly. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/fries/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “View of the Washington Mills, Fries Va.” Photograph, May 1910. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018674828/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Group of Adolescent Spinners in Washington Cotton Mills, Fries, Va.” Photograph, May 1911. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018674161/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Family of J. J. Moore.” Photograph, May 1911. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2018676471/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Family of A. P. Stata.” Photograph, May 1911. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018676474/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, 2019–2022. Ms2019-045. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045
Cooper, Christine “Chris” Beamer. Interview by Kevin Combs, April 4, 2022. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_ChrisCooper
Combs, Kevin. Interview by Bess Pittman, May 20, 2020. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_KevinCombs
Wilson, Willie. Interview by Kevin Combs, August 29, 2022. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_WillieWilson
Anders, Melva. Interview by Kevin Combs, November 26, 2022. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_MelvaAnders
Wood, Craig. Interview by Kevin Combs, April 24, 2022. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_CraigWood
Hines, Dennis. Interview by Jessica Taylor and Joe Forte. Fries Textile Mill Oral Histories, Ms2019-045. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/Ms2019-045/Ms2019-045_DennisHines
Worsham, Gibson. A Survey of Historic Architecture in Grayson County, Virginia, Including the Towns of Independence and Fries. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2002. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/GY-029_AH_Survey_Grayson_County_2002_WORSHAM_report_TEXT.pdf
Wyatt, Sherry Joines. “Fries Boarding Houses.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2007. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/220-5015_Fries_Boarding_Houses_2007_NRfinal.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Fries Boarding Houses, DHR No. 220-5015.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/220-5015/
Nuckolls, Benjamin Floyd. Pioneer Settlers of Grayson County, Virginia. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1914. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/15019440/
Washington Mills Company. The Story of Washington Mills: Manufacturers of Mayo Spruce. 1961. Rockingham County Public Library, North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/105279?v=uv
Bond, Avery, and Martha Nichols, comps. and eds. A History of the Town of Fries, Virginia. Collinsville, VA: Collinsville Printing Company, 1977. Bibliographic information preserved in the Fries Textile Plant Records finding aid. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3436
Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. “New River Trail State Park.” Virginia State Parks. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/new-river-trail
Mount Vernon Mills, Inc. “Response to February 3, 1992 Request for Information, Mount Vernon Mills Site, Fries, Grayson County, Virginia.” September 18, 1992. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records. https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/322404.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record: Senate, January 9, 1931. Discussion of New River navigation, water-power development, and the 1900 authorization for the Fries dam. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1931-pt2-v74/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1931-pt2-v74-6-1.pdf
Author Note: Fries is one of Appalachia’s clearest examples of a town whose identity grew around a single industrial enterprise. I hope this history helps preserve the stories of the workers, families, and community that remained after the looms fell silent.