08/30/2026
Local history, you should know.
A Harvard man from Cambridge, Massachusetts started a cotton mill outside Burlington, watched it struggle, and bet the whole thing on a fabric most mill men did not trust. 🧵
James Spencer Love was born in Cambridge on 6 July 1896. He took a Harvard degree in three years, spent a year at the business school, and ended up in the North Carolina Piedmont. On 6 November 1923 he incorporated a textile company on the edge of Burlington. He and his father put in fifty thousand dollars worth of machinery from a mill they had already owned and two hundred thousand from selling off its real estate. People in Burlington subscribed another two hundred thousand in stock. That is how a town bought itself a mill.
Cotton was not the answer. Love turned to rayon, the new synthetic, and became one of the first American mill owners to weave it at scale. Rayon bedspreads were the breakthrough, and they sold enormously. By 1928 four more mills in the Piedmont Heights area were running wide Jacquard looms, turning out upholstery goods, draperies, bedspreads and dress goods. ✨ By 1937 Burlington Mills was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with twenty two plants and twenty five million dollars in sales.
Love died of a heart attack on 20 January 1962 in Palm Beach, at sixty five. By then the company, renamed Burlington Industries, was the largest textile manufacturer in the world, holding close to six hundred and seven million dollars in assets and employing more than sixty two thousand people. Somewhere in the story of nearly every Piedmont family there is a shift at a plant like his, and the shifts and the plants are mostly gone now.
