Cedar Falls

The Leadership Randolph class will be meeting at Cedar Falls tomorrow. The mill site at Cedar Falls was originally owned by the Regulator Hermon Husbands, who was run out of the area after the Battle of Alamance in 1770. The grist mill was owned by Benjamin Elliott by 1800, a local lawyer and owner of a mercantile store in Asheborough. He was the employer of Jonathan Lewis, accused murderer of Naomi Wise. His son Henry Branson Elliott went away to Princeton, and came home with the desire to add yarn production to their grist mill in 1836.

That spinning frame grew into a brick factory in 1846, the one in the background of this ca. 1930 photograph of the Cedar Falls covered bridge. To the right of the bridge, downstream, was the Allred grist mill, which became Sapona Manufacturing Company in 1895. The 1846 factory has the gable roof; the additions to the left were all made in the 1930 by the Jordan family, when the mill was known as the Jordan Spinning Company.  This photograph is part of the Randolph Room collection, and copies can be purchased there.

Notes on Local History

There have been many times over the years that I’ve needed to share information on the history of Randolph County with other people, and I’ve decided to open this blog as a way of making that task easier.

For example, tomorrow I will be lecturing the 2007 class of the Asheboro-Randolph Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Randolph, and I want to avoid the xeroxed handouts I’ve used for many years. Last year I distributed a CD of information- but it was hard and expensive to duplicate 30+ CDs.

So give me feedback about this method– I’ll post links and photos and the old Historical Chronology of Randolph County here, and you let me know if this is easy enough to use.

Thanks!