The Charlotte industrialist with a complicated legacy

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Editor’s note: You see their names on street signs or parks, but who were some of the big-name people from decades ago who shaped Charlotte? They have fascinating stories, and for the next few Saturdays, we’re sharing them with you.

by John Short

The history of the South is filled with men who have “complicated legacies.” Many Southern leaders from the early 20th century left behind soaring heights of economic and innovative achievement, but also archaic views on class, race and morality. One of those men is Daniel Augustus Tompkins. 

As an engineer, industrialist, newspaper owner, educator, author and civic booster, perhaps no man in Charlotte’s history is more responsible for laying the foundation of the last century of growth and economic prosperity in Charlotte than he. However, any reading of his achievements must include a consideration of his thoughts and writings on social issues like child labor, class structure and race.

Tompkins’ social views from atop the socioeconomic ladder began at birth. He was born in 1851 in Edgefield County, S.C., just north of Augusta, Ga., on the family plantation. Tompkins showed interest from an early age in engineering and eventually made his way to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where he graduated in 1873.

After graduation, he apprenticed to become a master machinist at Bethlehem Iron Works in Pennsylvania under the legendary industrial engineer John Fritz, learning not just industrial theory but the practical realities of modern industry. He worked as a machinist, draftsman and mechanic, and in 1877 was sent by Fritz to Germany to introduce American machinery overseas at the Schwerte Iron Works.

After a brief stint in Missouri after his return to the United States, Tompkins would arrive in Charlotte in 1883 to a city that barely resembled the banking capital that exists today. The Charlotte of the late 19th century had been a rail hub for two decades, but was still struggling to define itself economically in the aftermath of the Civil War. Cotton was grown as a primary crop across the Piedmont, often making its way through Charlotte to leave the South by rail to New England, where most textile processing mills were situated. This flight of raw cotton leaving the South to be finished up North meant the opportunity for cotton wealth generation left the area as well. 

Tompkins argued that the economies of the South would be perpetually poor unless it stopped exporting raw materials and began producing finished goods. This meant that the path to a prosperous South was via an embrace of modern industrial capitalism, and he sought to marshal resources to build factories, process the region’s cotton and develop local industry.

Soon after Tompkins’ arrival in Charlotte, he left his job at Westinghouse Machine Co. to partner with R.M. Miller, an investor and owner of a local gold mine, to establish the DA Tompkins Co. in 1887, which installed steam engines and other machinery in the existing cotton mills in the greater Charlotte region. At the time, Charlotte had just one textile mill, the Charlotte Cotton Mills, which had been operating since 1881.

In the years after the founding of DA Tompkins Company, Tompkins created an entire industry, seeing the potential in the processing of cottonseed, largely considered a worthless byproduct of textile mills, into oil. Tompkins established Charlotte’s second, third and fourth mills (the Alpha, Ada and Victor mills) in 1888-1889, and acquired others in the region (Atherton in Dilworth, High Shoals in Gaston County and Edgefield in his hometown of Edgefield, S.C.). 

Tompkins’ operational successes led him to literally write the textbook on establishing a successful mill operation, with “Cotton Mill: Commercial Features,” which he published in 1899. By 1910, Tompkins and his company had directly developed over 250 cotton oil mills, 150 electric plants and 100 cotton processing plants from Maryland to Texas.

Because of Tompkins, cottonseed processing was chief among the region’s economic engines, and his vision for what the “New South” could become, bolstered by manufacturing and the skilled machinist labor, as well as the unskilled labor required, charted a path forward for a Southern economy decimated by the Civil War. The size of the industrial workforce in North Carolina doubled from 1880 to 1890, and again from 1890 to 1900, while the value of factory production in the state increased by 400%.

While the South was rife with economic opportunity, Tompkins was a savvy promoter and knew that publicity could sway public opinion in the community to enable his economic vision. In 1892, he purchased the struggling Charlotte Chronicle, renamed it The Charlotte Daily Observer (later dropping the “Daily”), and hired J.P. Caldwell as editor. Owning the primary newspaper in the region ensured Tompkins’ platform to trumpet his “New South” ideas of industrial growth and economic prospects above all else. Tompkins himself stated: “The one thing I wanted a newspaper for was to help preach the doctrine of industrial development.”

Tompkins and the pages of The Observer were often staunchly opposed to progressive ideas like compulsory public schooling, child labor laws and efforts to establish a minimum wage to maintain a certain quality of life for workers. His approach focused on maintaining cheap labor for the mills, without considering the human cost of maximum efficiency.

Tompkins’ often paternalistic views on society would seep into these pages. In his writings, Tompkins made it clear that he viewed Black workers as inferior to white workers, and mill employment in Charlotte was almost exclusively an opportunity only for white lower-class people. Tompkins held the belief that Black workers were better suited for agricultural labor, rather than industrial work, and he frequently wrote about how this segregation was a necessary aspect of southern life. When considering housing for his workers in the mill villages, he said that the homes should not include closets, as the workers wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to understand the concept and would just fill the small rooms with trash.

However, Tompkins was interested in developing the future generations of mill workers and managers. In 1899, Tompkins lobbied the North Carolina General Assembly to fund textile education at the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now N.C. State University), personally designing a campus building to function as a literal, two-story commercial textile mill.

For more than 20 years, he served as a trustee for the college and championed technical and textile education, helping create one of the first dedicated textile programs in the South.

Despite this towering economic success, Tompkins himself did not have much of a personal life. His fiancée died in 1884, and he never came close to marriage again and had no children. His health began to decline in 1910, which led to him stepping away from his industrial empire, and he died in 1914 after an issue with a paralytic condition. 

Daniel Augustus Tompkins succeeded in dragging the Piedmont out of agrarian ruin and engineering the machinery of a modern industrial city. Yet he did so while enforcing the rigid social order of an Old South plantation — treating white labor with paternalistic disdain, barring Black labor from opportunity and fiercely opposing basic worker protections in the name of raw industrial output. 

John Short is a freelance writer, co-host of The Charlotte Podcast and a member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission who loves digging up Charlotte’s past and pondering its future. Say hey when you see him on the streetcar.

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Two years after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, recovery is still unfolding across the region.

Next week, The Charlotte Ledger will be publishing a five-part series called “Helene: Road to Recovery,” which will examine where that recovery stands today — from rebuilding communities, roads and forests to the storm’s lasting effects on healthcare and wildlife — and the work that remains.

The Ledger newsroom will continue to keep readers updated on news happening closer to home as it happens, and our usual weekly newsletters like Ways of Life and Real Estate Whispers will also still publish as scheduled. But we felt it was important to spotlight the lingering impacts of a storm that completely upended an area that touches the Charlotte region and means a lot to folks who live here.

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