The News and Observer from Raleigh, North Carolina • 191

-00 4 Am 4 4C6' fri TITANS QF BUSINVSS AND INDUSTRY THE NBVS OBSERVER SUNDAY AUGUST 22 1999 Ti sL 141 4T MOSES CONE CLOSE TO THE SOURCE JAMES DUKE THE RIPPLE EFFEG OF MONEY Si 11( to P1 1 Blue Ridge Parkway Cone's wife Bertha left their multimillion-dollar estate to Greensboro's Cove Memorial Hospital when she died in 1947 The medical center today is known as the Moses Cone Memorial Hospital everything from denim to foam rubber Although he died in 1908 at the age of 51 Moses Cone left a pair of lasting legacies beyond his sturdy textile mills The 3500-acre tract he chose for his manor near Blowing Rock is now a park and one of the most-visited recreation areas along the The secret of Moses Cone's success was in his jeans The oldest of 13 children Cone first started coming to North Carolina after the Civil War to hawk groceries for his father's Baltimore wholesale food company Moses and his younger brother Ceasar often its competitors in New England were much farther from the cotton fields of the Old South The business prospered and Moses Cone became widely known as the "Denim King" by the turn of the century In its heyday the Cone Mills company operated 30 plants turning out swapped groceries for the fabric produced in the dozens of mills that sprang up across the Piedmont during Reconstruction The two eventually left their father's grocery business and built their own textile mill in Greensboro That first plant was called the Proximity Mill because BOB WILLIAMS BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY ARCHIVE PHOTO Along with $107 million James Buchanan "Buck" Duke left careful instructions and uncharacteristically an explanation Today the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment's grants ($13 billion since his death in 1925) are still limited to Duke's chosen beneficiaries in North and South Carolina: health-care institutions in increasing the efficiency of mankind" he said) orphanages Methodist churches and retired preachers from the "rural districts" that provide "the bone and sinew of our country" and four colleges and universities including It 0 1 1 1 ra-1' 4 I 4 44' I It) -'N i I 14Pt i- -I- 1 1 1 ''-t :4 i tt 0 4 if p' 4 1 A 4- I 4 tt401 44 i 1 A 'C it 1 1 i 1 i i 1 1 fir i I LIr I i 1 1' l' i 1 ft it a fi i -k 4' 0" 0 e' All 4 OP 0 40LP: I s-' 0 '4 di 'It' tsr 0 1 i141 '11 to: 01 I' I 1 -8- rimu 1 itr- 1 '11 (i) 1 1 i -ilar) 4 ivt? 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Spaulding John Merrick and a secretary in the offices of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Co in 1906 PHOTO COURTESY NC CLLECTION UNC LIBRARY CHAPEL HILL CC SPAULDING BUILDER OF BLACK WEALTH JOBS AND PRIDE company that reached beyond Durham's city limits Today even as most other black-owned insurance companies in the nation have disappeared NC Mutual is financially healthy with nearly $10 billion of insurance in force Its record of creating wealth jobs and pride for black Americans stands in large part on the shoulders of Charles Clinton Spaulding CC Spaulding built Durham's North Carolina Mutual Insurance Co from a shoestring operation run out of a barbershop into the largest black-owned insurance company in the nation As the company's third president from 1923 to 1952 Spaulding took to the rails and roads of the rural South to spread the word about NC Mutual Its gospel of creating black wealth through black industry and the lack of available insurance for black people persuaded the South's former slaves and their children to scrape togeth er nickels and dimes for small insurance policies Spaulding's business acumen and tireless promotion built the company's financial health especially in the World War II years He helped the firm spawn two of the state's black-owned banks Mechanics Farmers Bank and the forerunner of today's Mutual Community Savings Bank both in purham Spaulding also established offices throughout the Southeast fulfilling his vision of a one bearing the family name In the last year of his life Buck Duke helped lay out Duke University's splendid Tudor Gothic and brick-and-marble Georgian campuses The former Trinity Co had been rescued and relocated to Durham in 1892 by Buck's father Washington Duke Their philanthropy was fueled by the company (now Duke Energy) that Buck Duke launched to industrialize the Carolina Piedmont with cheap power for 300 new cotton mills Before hydroelectricity Buck Duke harnessed tobacco power At 33 he forged a multinational combination that controlled most of the tobacco industry until it was dissolved by the US Supreme Court as an anti-competitive trust in 1911 Having pioneered mechanization that made cigarettes cheap and intensive advertising that made them popular Duke declined in 1887 to justify his cutthroat business tactics "I don't talk" he said "I work" William Ellis "Billy" Smith learned early what it took to earn a living from the sea while growing up in Atlantic a tiny fishing village in eastern Carteret County He took over the family's grocery and clam-processing business from his father in 1950 at the age of 21 He launched the family's first fishing boat named for daughter Myron Ann 10 years later and added 10 more boats over the next three decades The Smith fleet and its seafood-packing houses became one of largest seafood enterprises on the North Carolina coast Smith used his organizational and business acumen to help establish the NC Fisheries Association an industry trade group that faced the formidable task of bringing together fishermen and seafood dealers who were fiercely competitive and notoriously independent The association and Smith a charter board member became primary advocates for the commercial fishing industry in legislative and regulatory matters Also independent in politics Smith was an active Republican in the eastern region which was overwhelmingly Democratic On the local level he served on the Carteret County Board of Commissioners At the state level he was active in the NC Congressional Club and was a strong supporter of Republican US Sen Jesse A Helms Smith died in 1996 while fishing for mullet with his grandson-in-law after a wave capsized their small boat near Atlantic RAH BICKLEY OP CHARLES ALBERT CANNON THE KING OF KANNAPOLIS IV 4tN't I' i si 11 irlig' i' ti :440 Nsi i ittss 'kr showers or tubs draped in a trademark Canngn towel At one point he managed to capture half the nation's towel business After Cannon died the company went through a series of corporate buyouts that quickly erased the paternalistic feel of the mills and the town In 1997 the company was sold for the fourth time to Pillowtex Corp which promptly transferred the headquarters to Dallas When Charles Albert Cannon died April 2 1971 at the age of 78 the governor ordered state flags flown at half staff in honor of the last of the great textile barons of North Carolina Neither the Cannon Mills company nor Kannapolis where it had headquarters nor the textile industry itself would ever be the same again Cannon was born in Concord in 1892 the youngest of 10 children of James William Cannon founder of Cannon Mills When his father died in 1921 Charles Cannon took over the company as well as the unincorporated town of Kannapolis most of which was built and owned by the company For five decades he ruled both the company and the town greatly expanding both At its height in the 1960s the company employed 25000 people most at a string of mills in and around Kannapolis Cannon was a pioneer in national consumer advertising with his magazine ads often featuring just-bathed women emerging from BRUCE SICELOFF IRWIN SPEIZER JERRY ALLEGOOD HUGH McRAE1 BUILDING TOWNS FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE SEA BILL LEE GENERATED JUICE FOR THE STATE'S ECONOMY He was also a pioneer in electric and railroad development and experimented with agricultural gazing programs Starting in 1906 McRae offered free transporta- 7 tion and the chance to buy farmland to Europeans who 1 would settle in his planned communities and try to prove it i- his thesis that scientific meth: '4 ods of agriculture would I produce high yields He colonized six rural communities in Pender New Hanover and Columbus counties and his 41 influence brought dairies nurs- cries and bulb-growing blueberry and truck farms to southeastern North Carolina Today his grandson carries on the family tradition as a developer and conservation activist 1 4k 4 A Expansion Act Since its adoption the act has been responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of incentives that have helped lure a Federal Express hub to the Piedmont Thad and a Nucor steel mill to Hertford County among other successful recruitment efforts To Lee Duke was almost a family business His grandfather was Duke's first chief engineer who designed and built some of the original hydroelectric plants along the Catawba River Lee trained as an engineer as well and joined the company in 1955 moving up to chairman and CEO in 1982 He retired in 1995 after 40 years of service to the company 457 47T ij 't 1 I 'I 4S A Born in the waning months of the Civil War Hugh McRae sprang from a family that landed in Wilmington from Scotland in 1770 and produced generations of entrepreneurs whose ambitions stretched from the mountains to the seaside While working as a young mining engineer in the North Carolina mountains McRae became interested in land development so he bought 16000 acres and organized the Linville Co which developed the mountain resort town Linville and purchased Grandfather Mountain ft' tMcRae's grandson Hugh Morton has managed the PHOTO mountain into a major scenic WILNINGT( attraction) Later McRae developed the seacoast resort of Wrightsville Beach building the legendary Lumina pavilion PHOTO WILMINGTON 1-e' I 1 0 1 N- P' I 4 l'''' 4110 William States "Bill" Lee was a powerful man literally and figuratively As head of Charlotte-based Duke Power Co in the 1980s and early '90s Lee guided the company's growth into one of the nation's largest and most successful utility companies and a worldwide leader in nuclear energy Active in national energy policy groups and regional politics Lee was chairman of the state Economic Development Board in 1996 and spent his final day lobbying the state Senate for a bill providing incentives to attract businesses and jobs After Lee's death in July 1996 at age 67 the Senate renamed the bill in his honor as the William Lee Quality Jobs and Business C( 4 OURIESY STAR-NEWS HMV TAR-NEWS FELICIA GRESSE1TE IRWIN SPEIZER.