How One Company Built and Destroyed an Entire American City: Kannapolis, North Carolina

In 1906, James William Cannon bought 800 acres of North Carolina farmland and built a city from scratch. He named it after himself, filled it with towel factories, and created what would become the largest unincorporated community in America — a place with no mayor, no city council, and no government of any kind. Just one company that owned everything: the houses, the roads, the police, the water, the hospital, the YMCA, and every job in town. For nearly a century, Cannon Mills dominated Kannapolis. At its peak, the company was the largest towel and sheet manufacturer in the world, employed 24,000 people, and produced 300,000 towels a day. Charles Cannon — "Uncle Charlie" — ran the company and the town for fifty years, building a Colonial Williamsburg-inspired downtown, fighting off every union drive, and keeping Kannapolis entirely under his personal control until he died of a heart attack in his office in 1971. What came after was a cautionary tale about what happens when a city has no foundation beneath a single company. A California billionaire bought Cannon Mills in a $413 million leveraged buyout, stripped it for parts, and sold it off. The company changed hands twice more before Pillowtex Corporation shut down all operations on July 30, 2003 — the largest single-day layoff in North Carolina history. Then the 5.8-million-square-foot factory complex, nearly the size of the Pentagon, was demolished in a series of controlled explosions. This is the story of the most complete company town in American history — and the most complete collapse. Kannapolis was also the hometown of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, who grew up in a mill worker's neighborhood and dropped out of school at sixteen to race stock cars. Today, a minor league ballpark and a biotech research campus sit where the factory once stood. Sources: Tim Vanderburg, Cannon Mills and Kannapolis: Persistent Paternalism in a Textile Town (University of Tennessee Press, 2013) Timothy Minchin, "'It Knocked This City to Its Knees': The Closure of Pillowtex Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina and the Decline of the US Textile Industry," Labor History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2009) NCpedia entries on Cannon Mills and Charles Albert Cannon, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources NC State University Libraries, NC Research Campus Archives and Kannapolis Oral Histories Collection (2008) Charlotte Urban Institute, "Kannapolis, the Town That Towels Built, Faces Its Future" Barry Yeoman, "Laid Off," reporting on Pillowtex workers in Kannapolis (2009)