Name: Former Ashley & Bailey Silk Mill
Location: Third and Linden Streets, Columbia
Date: c. 1897; c. 1920
Architect: Unknown
Until recently, the former Ashley & Bailey silk mill in Columbia was a bewildering and improbable ruin– a knotted curtain of brick, vines, and broken glass. The building lurked on the edge of the town like a Dickensian spectre, not just of an industrial past, but also of a landscape yet to come, a post-apocalyptic premonition of a built environment returned to nature. Its ruinous state was the legacy of a tragicomic history of abandonment, redevelopment pipe dreams, and a demolition campaign that was itself ultimately abandoned. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the mill complex was half-heartedly hacked away at for decades while redevelopment plans and liability concerns came and went and an encroaching wild ecosystem took root. Trees replaced the concrete mushroom columns of the factory floor, wildflowers sprouted between amputated floorboards and joists, and hawks perched atop the ivy-covered water tower.
More than a century ago, Frederick Law Olmsted revolutionized landscape architecture by fabricating naturalistic vignettes (New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Chicago’s Jackson Park) within an industrialized urban grid. He worked in direct response to the threats posed to the American landscape by the new social and architectural orders embodied in buildings exactly like the Ashley and Bailey, constructed only a few years before Olmsted’s death. In a sense, then, the chickens came home to roost in Columbia, as a sublime natural ecosystem returned Olmsted’s favor and inserted itself into this industrial shell after the fortunes of enterprise waned. This was architecture gone feral, and it was something to behold.
All this changed when a new set of redevelopment plans were unveiled last year. The site is now being scraped clean (pasteurized?) for the Turkey Hill Experience, a dairy and iced tea tourist mecca and erstaz factory to be housed in stabilized portions of the old mill structures. Demolition of the site has intensified over the last few months, with vegetation and windows stripped away, the smokestack lopped in half, and large portions of the surviving original 1897 mill cleared. These were undertaken ostensibly for structural reasons, though it is worth noting that plans call for a mini-mart–first proposed in the mid 1990s–on the newly-leveled site, and there are whispers of a giant fiberglass cow standing perch on the shortened smokestack platform. Perhaps in an ode to the recent spirit of the place, however, the mini-mart will reportedly feature a green roof.
Note: The above rendering and half the photos below depict the site before redevelopment began this summer. As can be seen in the historic images, this constituted only a portion of the original complex, the bulk of which was demolished in 2000. (Click to enlarge)
October 17, 2009 at 6:54 am
[…] Building that will be the Turkey Hill Experience Ben Leech helps us see the Ashley & Bailey Silk Mill in Columbia like we’ve never seen it before in the latest post on the Lancaster Building Conservancy […]
October 19, 2009 at 2:16 pm
personally, i would have liked to see it overtaken by Nature, or better yet, revitalized and filled with something a bit more… useful, in my opinion, than the Turkey Hill experience. I experience Turkey Hill each time i partake in they’re tea, ice cream, and mini-marts… no more is necessary.
April 8, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I would like to know if there is any written history or records of the workers from the Ashley-Bailey Silk Mill. There was another A-B Silk mil in Fayetteville, NC that was managed and run by African Americans in the early 1900’s. I believe some of those workers may have started in this mill.
April 13, 2010 at 2:51 pm
I don’t know if any company records survive– I would start by browsing census records for Columbia and Fayetteville.
February 21, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Dear Roland Hunn,
The African-Americans in the Fayetteville, NC mill did not come from the A-B PA mill. The PA mill produced silk; workers who handle silk need to have small, soft hands–that is why women and children are ideal workers. I do not think the Fayetteville Mill produced silk; didn’t it produce cotton?
Sincerely,
Ashley Simpson
March 29, 2011 at 3:52 pm
There are a few records on the internet. Dwight Ashley was President of the Hawthorne Silk Company. It was located at the end of Robeson St. in Fayetteville. Ashley bought hundreds of acres of land for a “Negro colony” for workers at the plant. Most of the workers were children. Parents had to sign a waiver allowing corporal punishment if the children did not work hard enough or obey the rules. Management of the plant was African American. There is a picture of the mill on the NC Archives site. The location shows on the Sanborn Map of 1915, also on the Archives site.
April 22, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Dear Lancaster Building Conservancy,
Do you have the original of the 1894 bird’s eye rendering of the Ashley & Bailey Mills? I would love to get a copy.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Sincerely,
Ashley Simpson
April 23, 2010 at 9:09 am
Ashley,
The rendering is a detail from a bird’s eye view of Columbia republished in the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Lancaster County (Historic Arts Press, 2006).
February 17, 2011 at 7:29 pm
why was the mill abandoned?
March 29, 2011 at 3:56 pm
There was an article in the New York Times dated October 15, 1913 that reported the sale of the Patterson Plant for $115,400. The article stated that ten plants including New Jersey, Pennsylvania and North Carolina were to be auctioned off that week to liquidate the company.
March 5, 2011 at 7:23 pm
My husband’s grandfather, Oscar Jennings Hall I, was an overseer at the silk mill in Fayetteville, N. C. according to the U. S. Census for 1910. We would like more info on the silk mill and pictures, if possible.Thank you.
March 30, 2011 at 4:19 pm
I have a picture of the mill from the NC Archieves if you are interested. My gg aunt sold the family farm to H.G. Hill who sold it to Dwight Ashley, founder of the silk mill.