1076 West Main Street was a storied address once. Schoolfield began with a mill complex at this site, which grew to over 80-acres of manufacturing and processing for Dan River between 1903 and 1969. Now only a few of the buildings that made up that sprawling mill site remain. One of those remaining is this original building, the Company Office Building, designed by Lockwood Greene for Dan River to house their executive offices in their new division of Schoolfield.
A two-story building built in 1903 with a seamless 1921 addition on its northern elevation, this Italian Renaissance Revival style brick office building showcased the sophisticated design of its architects at Lockwood Greene and the regularity, order, and prestige of the management who officed there. The office building’s front eastern elevation faced away from the mill site and overlooked a small reservoir and the bend of West Main Street. The exterior walls of the rectangular building are Flemish-bond variant of dark brick with decorative detailing around each window and the two main entrances on the eastern elevation. Approached by stone steps, the two main entrances have arched openings with fanlights surrounded by a course of brick with keystone and decorative sawtooth detailing. The rectangular building features a terra cotta hipped roof and decorative vents ribboned the upper attic level of the building just beneath the roof eaves. Each floor has large windows, once adorned with awnings to shield the morning sun for management staff, who arrived at their desk at 8:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday, almost two hours later than millhands were expected to be at their looms. Ordering millhands’ lives was easily realized from the seat of the office building. Strategically located at the southeastern corner of the mill site, the offices were close enough to the mills to feel the ground shake with the production of the weave shed next door, but also close enough to West Main Street so executives could keep an eye on the comings and goings of millhands, the majority of whom lived in the residential section just to the south. In the intimacy of this pedestrian environment everything was close, and everything was seen.
Today this site includes new construction, such as the Caesars Virginia Casino and Resort, as well as historic landmarks like the three smokestacks, the 1938 Canteen Building, and this 1903 Company Office Building. After the completion of the Dan River Executive Building in 1967 at 2291 Memorial Avenue, middle-management were housed in the office building at 1076 W. Main until the company’s closure in 2006.
Scans from the UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Historical Collection Dan River Mills Inc. Photo 1: 1950s Dan River President William J. Erwin stands among Dan River fabrics. Photo 2: Some fabric samples of patterns manufactured at Dan River. Photo 3: Management discuss important items on the shop floor in the 1970ca photo. Photo 4: Dan River VP Linwood Wright, center, discusses fabric quality with two colleagues in this 1970ca photo.
A 1906 photo showing the mill site in Schoolfield. Courtesy of Lockwood Greene Archives at the Smithsonian. A 2023 photo of the building today.
The right-hand upper corner of this 1910 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map shows the original Company Office Building before its 1921 addition building at. Courtesy of the Salem Public Library.
Some of the first executives to office at the Company Office Building were R.A. Schoolfield, in the first photo, and his protege H.R. Fitzgerald, in the second photo. Courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill Wilson Library’s Southern Historical Collection Dan River Inc. Papers.
See also:
Lockwood Greene Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.1113
schoolfieldvillage.com 