Beacon Blankets

For four generations, Beacon Manufacturing Company in Swannanoa, North Carolina, created some of the most appealing blankets, crib blankets, hospital bedding and adult robes available in the United States.

But Beacon — founded by Charles D. Owen and later run by his namesakes, Charles D. Owen Jr., Charles D. Owen III, and Charles D. Owen IV — was much more than just a mill. 

“I don’t think people understand the huge economic force Beacon was, not only to Swannanoa or Buncombe County,” but for the entire state, says Rebecca Williams, who specialized in researching and presenting folk history plays in Oklahoma, Florida and Kentucky before she “landed” with her husband in Swannanoa in 1999.

The sheer social story of Beacon and the Swannanoa community appealed to her, first possibly as another folk history, she said, before realizing it needed to be a documentary. That film, titled Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town, is nearing completion.

Yet, Williams knows she can’t tell the whole story of how Beacon made its mark on Western North Carolina.

For years, Beacon was the largest blanket manufacturer in the world, says J. Tedd Smith, of Hendersonville, North Carolina. “I was the last president of Beacon,” Smith says with pride, but also chagrined that such an economic powerhouse could have been brought to its knees by politics and globalization that sent textile manufacturing around the world after American factories could not compete with pay scales in developing countries.

“I was standing there with tears coming down my cheeks when Beacon closed” in 2001, Smith said. “There were people who had been working there for 40 and 50 years,” he said, and many families would need fingers on two or more hands to count the number of relatives who had held good, middle-class jobs in America’s top blanket factory.

Boomtown to ‘Swanna-no-where’

Smith says there were years when Beacon manufactured the most adult retail blankets sold in the country. “Also, over 60 percent of the baby blanket business; baby blankets and crib blankets,” he added.

The sprawling factory, which brought raw material in one end and churned finished product out the other end, created retail items for all the top retailers, “for Sears, J.C. Penny, Carter’s baby blankets, Gerber, department stores, L.L. Bean,” Smith said. “The Swannanoa valley shipped 81 percent of the blankets sold in the United States,” he said. “That last year, Beacon did $207 million in total business.”

Then it all went away. However, it wasn’t just a factory that closed. An entire community that had built up around the Beacon facility was devastated. Many workers still lived all around the plant in homes that had once been factory housing but were later sold to the employees. Retailers had sprung up all around Swannanoa, selling goods to the Beacon families. Doctors located in or near the town to care for the workers and their children. Banks anchored downtown Swannanoa to hold the payroll deposits and family savings.

According to a 2012 interview archived at the Swannanoa Valley Museum and History Center, resident Joan Barnwell remembered how Swannanoa thrived during Beacon’s heyday. “We had a department store, we had a furniture store. … We had a theater and … two drugstores.”

 All were devastated when the plant closed.

Williams said people she interviewed for her documentary referred to Swannanoa after the factory closed as “Swanna-no-where.”

From Connecticut to Carolina

In 1904, the oldest Charles D. Owen and his son, along with a cousin, bought the defunct Beacon Manufacturing Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which included a 35,000-square-foot building and the company name. They started production the next year with 20 employees and 78 state-of-the-art Jacquard looms from France that could weave intricate designs.

They made cotton flannel bed blankets and bath robes. They later added infant blankets to the product line. They employed close to 1,000 by the time the elder Charles died in 1915. By 1919, the company had 1,600 employees and 1,200 looms.

Charles D. Owen Jr. was facing increasing union pressure in Massachusetts, and in 1923 he traveled south to look for a new factory location. According to a company history, he spotted a tract of land in Swannanoa and initially bought 160 acres. He added 1,300 acres over time.

Charles Jr. broke ground for a Swannanoa plant in 1923, and near the start of the Great Depression, Charles D. Owen III suggested to his father that they move everything down from New Bedford. His argument was that Swannanoa was closer to where the cotton was being grown, and there were plenty of bright and eager workers in the North Carolina mountains.

“The site had all of the natural resources, and a potential pool of labor that was willing to work,” Smith said. 

So the Owen family moved the company south, dismantling the Massachusetts factory and shipping everything—looms, machinery, inventory, even thousands of bricks from the building structure—on what the company history says were “thousands of railroad freight cars.”

They needed many of their Massachusetts managers and higher-skilled workers to come south with them, but some balked because word had gotten out that Swannanoa didn’t have a Catholic church. So St. Margaret Mary Church was built nearby, with the blessing of Bishop William Hafey of Raleigh.

By 1936, the factory move was completed, “and the Swannanoa plant was now the largest blanket mill in the world,” with over one million square feet of manufacturing space, according to the company history shared by Smith.

Quality was unsurpassed

The Owen family used noted American artists to create their advertising, including Eanger Irving Couse, who was known for his paintings of the American Southwest and native Americans, and beloved American painter Norman Rockwell. Original works by both men decorated the corporate offices in Swannanoa.

Fine robes were an important part of Beacon’s business, and Hollywood took note. Beacon robes appeared on lead actors in numerous movies, including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Psycho,” “Giant,” and the 1935 Oscar-nominated “Alice Adams,” starring Katherine Hepburn. Floyd the barber wore a Beacon robe on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Michael Richards’ character Kramer wore one on “Seinfeld,” and so did Johnny Galecki as Leonard in “The Big Bang Theory.”

Today, Beacon blankets and robes are popular on eBay and Etsy, and many are priced in the hundreds-of-dollars range. 

A family affair

However, the real story of Beacon is the story of the people who worked there.

Kaye Tipton, of east Buncombe County, began working at Beacon right out of high school. Her father and mother both worked there, as well. In fact, most of her family worked at the factory.

“Grandpa Tipton, Levi Jack was his name, was working down on the French Broad River at the old power plant” near Weaverville, North Carolina. “He heard that they were putting up a textile plant in Swannanoa. He came … and got a job in the boiler room,” she said.

His family also came to Swannanoa. “Roy was the oldest boy. My aunt Thelma was the oldest girl. Then Vic, then Clarence—my dad, my Uncle Bandy, his name was Charles, my Uncle Bill, my Uncle Shuford, and my Aunt Mildred,” Kaye recalled. “Every one of them, except for Shuford, worked at Beacon at some point,” she said.

Clarence married Myrtle, and she worked there, too. 

“I was the first girl to graduate high school,” Kaye said. “It was very important to my mother and father. My dad’s education was up to about the fifth grade. My mother’s was up to about eighth grade,” she said. 

Kaye said her mother once noticed Clarence was testy about something when he got home from the mill. What was wrong? “I hate fractions,” he said, but he needed to know them better in order to do his job well at Beacon. Myrtle went to Asheville and bought an old math book from the library, “and every night after work, she and he worked on math until he got it,” Kaye said.

“Daddy worked as a weaver and he worked as a loom fixer. Mother worked in the spinning room, doffing the yarn,” which means she tied up the full spindles of yarn and quickly replaced each with a fresh empty spindle. “She worked there about 15 years,” Kaye said.

“Cousin Betty went to work at Beacon at 17 years old, and she worked there all her life,” Kaye said.

What did it mean for Grandpa Tipton to get that initial job at the mill? “It meant a home, food, clothes, lights, water,” she said. “My dad went to work when he was about 13, sweeping floors at Beacon” during the Depression. “It gave him money to help the family.” 

Kaye rattled off numerous other family members who worked at Beacon; maybe 20 in all. So many of them “spent their entire lives working at Beacon Manufacturing Company,” she said. “It changed the families,” giving them a middle-class existence. “The grandkids got educations,” she said, meaning they had professional jobs beyond the factory walls.

A fiery end

In 2003, the shuttered Beacon factory burned down, likely due to arson. 

“On the night when Beacon burned we could see the flames above the tree line; there was no question about what it was” that was burning, Williams said.

“We walked down the dark street, hugging the side of the road. There were already so many people there, watching,” she said. They had come to say goodbye. Then they kept returning to just sit and look at the smoldering debris. “We were down there every day,” Williams said. “It became a vigil site. For months later, people would come and park their cars, then they’d pick up a brick” from the debris to take home as a keepsake.

“Why did this place mean so much to this community?” Williams wondered. “It’s a factory. It’s a job. But no, it was so much more,” she said. One of the people interviewed for her documentary put it plainly: “Beacon was the big red thumping heart of Swannanoa.”

“In a way, it created a very tightly knit community of people who came to work at Beacon from all of these outlying places,” Williams said. 

She was told that some workers lived in Swannanoa boarding houses during the week, then walked on the weekend back to their rural farms in adjacent counties to tend to their crops.

“The Owen family lived here; they cared for their community. They cared for their workers. They were invested with their community,” Williams said.

Those that lived in the Beacon Village benefited from that attitude, because the owners provided many services in order to keep workers happy and engaged in the work.

“There was a mill doctor. There was a baseball team. There was the Presbyterian Home for Children pool. They had dances, they had recreational opportunities for children, and summer rec teams. You had so many needs that were taken care of,” Williams said. 

Workers could come in with few initial skills, but then they grew and learned how to perform increasingly important roles in the manufacturing process. Williams said workers summed it up in one simple sentence: “You graduated from Beacon University.”

Kaye Tipton said work at Beacon “prepared a lot of people for life. A young woman with a secretarial course or two in high school could come in and learn how to be a secretary at Beacon and move on” later to more responsibility and higher pay elsewhere. 

“These kind of jobs that stabilized the middle class do not exist now, in the same number,” Williams said. At Beacon, “there was a sense of teamwork, a sense that we’re all in this together, all working towards this one goal,” she said.

Or, as Kaye Tipton puts it, she can’t separate Beacon from the story of her family. “My families history was Beacon manufacturing,” she said.