By Scott Jenkins
sjenkins@salisburypost.com
When Marlene Kepley talks about the Yadkin Mill Village, her memories flow like the river on whose banks the community once stood.
Her grandmother’s home, where she was born. The schoolhouse where she received her early education. The front porch where a boy first kissed her. The church where her family attended Sunday services. The mill that employed just about everyone in her family and generations of others.
Though the village is all but gone, along with the company that built it, Kepley believes there is value in preserving those memories. That’s why she organized the first Yadkin Mill Village reunion two years ago. And it’s why she continues trying to bring people together to share their own stories.
The third annual Yadkin Mill Village Reunion will be held Saturday at Dan Nicholas Park’s Shelter No. 2 from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
Yadkin Finishing Co. was founded at the edge of the Yadkin River north of Spencer in 1916. The name was later changed to N.C. Finishing Co., and the mill employed as many as 1,100 workers in its heyday.
As many textile mills did, the company built a community where its workers and their families could live, play, shop, learn and worship.
Kepley was born there in 1936, in a home owned by her grandmother, Virgie Byerly Moore. Virgie’s second husband, Pop, ran a store nearby. Kepley’s father, Ralph Messick, worked in the dye house at the mill. Her mother, Ellen, sewed sheets. Her aunts and uncles had jobs there, too.
“Just about all the people in my family worked down there,” she says. “I don’t know of anybody who didn’t.”
Kepley revisited her grandmother’s house recently. One of just a handful still standing, it is a vacant shell with broken windows and peeling paint, garbage covering the porch and vines creeping up its walls.
But Kepley, who lived with her parents in an apartment house behind her grandmother’s home until they bought a house down the road that’s also still there, remembers it as it was: a place filled with kin and fun. She recalls the big Christmas get-togethers and the player piano that made music when she pedaled.
“I thought that was something big,” she said.
There was also sadness in that home.
Kepley’s brother, Ralph Jr., was born there, but lived only eight hours. And she was sitting on the front porch during World War II when she learned her 19-year-old uncle, Quincy Lee “Spud” Moore ó who always gave her whatever change jangling in his pocket ó had died in battle.
“I can see them guys coming now just like it was yesterday,” she says, “coming up the front steps just like it was yesterday to tell my grandmother her son had been killed.”
Mostly, though, her memories of the village are good ones.
“I felt like the Yadkin Mill Village was all one big family,” she said. “We was always welcome in everybody’s home. The door was never locked.”
As a child, Kepley attended a school built by the mill that educated children through third grade before sending them to class in Spencer. She and the other children played on the tennis court outside the school and attended square dances there with their families on Saturday nights.
She remembers playing on the swings and see-saws outside Yadkin Methodist Church with the other children, sledding down Red Hill when it snowed and skating on the concrete outside A.B. Martin’s store after closing time.
The Yadkin also drew the children. Kepley recalls “the big rock” where the boys liked to go.
“They’d all go down there and pull their clothes off and go swimming when they wasn’t supposed to,” she says, “and they got in a lot of trouble doing that.”
The children were always at one another’s homes. Her grandmother was the first person in the mill village to get a television set, and she welcomed them to watch it.
“Sometimes we just saw a test pattern,” Kepley says. “Other times, we saw ‘Howdy Doody’. ”
It wasn’t just the children. The entire village pulled together in tough times, including a 1950s strike. And the adults played together as well. The mill sponsored a baseball team, as many textile mills did in the early decades of the 20th Century.
At some point, the mill’s owners decided they didn’t want to maintain the village anymore. They sold the houses to workers who wanted to buy them, and who could have them moved, and they demolished most of the others.
“It was a sad day when they decided to tear all those houses down,” says Kepley, who moved away after graduating high school.
The mill was sold in 1998 to Color-Tex, which shut its doors in October 2000. Since then, the site’s owners have razed the mill and developed a plan for a race track, condominiums and commercial development, but none of that has happened.
Some doubt it ever will happen, but Kepley hopes it does.
“I hope it comes about before I leave this life,” she says. “I would love to see something come to Yadkin to build that place back up, where there would be life in that little village where we all grew up.”
For now, there’s just a barren patch of land beside the river and the old times that took place there.
Those times are getting more distant, and the folks who remember them are moving on, too. But they won’t be forgotten. Not as long as Kepley has a say in it. Not as long as she can get some of those folks together to share those times and tell their stories.
“I do miss it, miss it very much,” she says. “But we’ve got the memories, and that’s worth it all.”