Today, we take you to Hiatt Street between Spring Garden Street and the Pomona Rail Yard. What was once the Rolane Sock Factory is about to be repurposed as apartments and townhomes. It was built almost 95 years ago in 1926 and for years was known as the Mojud Hosiery Company. In 1938, a retail outlet was added to the facility. Over time the factory expanded and became Rolane. The building and businesses therein were a big part of Greensboro's history as a mill town. Jim Schlosser wrote a wonderful article about factory, telling us that at peak production there were 2,000 employees on three shifts. At one time, the factory produced over 19 million pairs of stockings a year. Mostly women worked there and the factory was such a vibrant place with a cafeteria and with their own baseball team. They held games on a field adjacent to the mill. The plant closed in 1972, but the outlet store onsite remained open until 1999. Many people remember the joy of going to the outlet store section and getting great bargains on socks, hose, and more- even Jordan almonds!
The building languished on its 8.7 acres for years. It changed hands a few times with a few stumbling blocks on the road to being repurposed. Issues were addressed and voilá, the conversion to housing has begin. As we drove by yesterday, we saw that all of the weeds were gone and the land around it is stripped down to red clay; some of the fencing is down, the building has been gutted, and the facelift has begun. The interior will be transformed. However, the exterior will not change much as the building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2011. From this view of the Northside of you building, without any landscaping, the enormity of the building is noted. It takes up a whole city block. We'll watch the progress and feature the building when it has transformed. In the meantime, there is a great article in the O. Henry Magazine this month and one we used as a reference (see p. 38-39 for more history about the factory). Also, we featured it on GDP in 2014.
That looks like it'll be a lot of work.
Posted by: William Kendall | Friday, January 22, 2021 at 12:46 PM