Avondale Mills

Avondale Mills

Avondale Mills in Birmingham
Former type	Textile Mill
Industry	Textiles
Founded	1897
Founder	The Trainer Family of Chester, PA; Braxton Bragg Comer; The Birmingham Commercial Club
Defunct	July, 2006

The Avondale Mills were a system of textile mills located predominantly in Alabama, but also in Georgia and South Carolina, with headquarters in Birmingham, and later in Sylacauga, Alabama. The Birmingham neighborhood of Avondale was chosen to be the site of the first mill, hence the naming of the company. Founded in 1897, the mills employed thousands of Alabamians throughout its 109-year history until they closed in 2006. Avondale Mills was founded in 1897 by a consortium of investors including the Trainer family of Chester, Pennsylvania, the future governor of Alabama, Braxton Bragg Comer, and a group of Birmingham civic leaders including Frederick Mitchell Jackson Sr.

The mills refined the plentiful cotton from Alabama fields and, at its peak, devoured 20% of the entire state of Alabama's cotton production. The owners and operators of Avondale Mills were noted not only for progressive stances with regards to the overall well being of their workers, but also for conditions of child labor that, while common at the time, are today considered abusive.

The mills were operated solely in Alabama until Donald Comer released control of Avondale Mills to his brother-in-law, Craig Smith, who helped expand the mills into both Georgia and South Carolina.. Walton Monroe Mills Inc. purchased Avondale Mills in 1986. In 1995, the owning firm acquired the textile operations of the Graniteville Company. Disaster struck when, on the morning of January 6, 2005, a train accident outside of the Graniteville, South Carolina mill caused a massive chemical explosion that killed 9. In 2006, as a result of the Graniteville disaster and increased competition from overseas, Avondale formally shuttered its operations.

The Trainer family of Chester, Pennsylvania sought to expand their already successful textile operations into the American South to bring their operations closer to the source of their raw materials. The Birmingham region appealed to them chiefly due to its wide labor pool and proximity to the abundant cotton fields of Alabama, as well as the transportation infrastructure of Birmingham that allowed for easy transport of their refined materials throughout the American south and the United States as a whole.