No. 14
1884-85
Big Business Sets Up Shop White Lily, Brookside Mills, C.M. McClung
I
Couretsy of the Calvin M. McClung Digital Collection
white lilly flour
n the mid-1880s, thanks to the area’s natural resources, a large and growing labor force, and constantly improving railroad connections, major local industries were suddenly building factories in Knoxville. J. Allen Smith flour company, later to be known as White Lily, and Brookside Mills, a major textile weaving mill about a mile north of downtown, popped up along the tracks on the north side of town almost simultaneously. The C.M. McClung Co. was a major wholesale company that did much of its business by mail order, becoming in effect a Sears, Roebuck for a multi-state region. Soon, C.B. Atkin was claiming to be the world’s largest producer of hardwood mantels. These were major employers, and that was important enough for Knoxville. But what boosts them beyond, to the realm of broader significance, is that they were industries whose products developed a reputation well beyond the region. Numerous other factories sprang up about the same time, including marble mills, which by the late 19th century bestowed Knoxville with a nickname: the Marble City. Knoxville had always had a few mills, but by the 1880s, it was a city of heavy industry that employed tens of thousands of men, women and children in as many as 40 factories at once.
brookside mills 26