Randolph Heritage

The Riverside History Park in Franklinville.

The Randolph Heritage Conservancy, Inc., is a North Carolina corporation chartered in 1994 to preserve the historic site of the antebellum Franklinsville Manufacturing Company. It is a charitable 'non-for-profit' corporation, certified with the IRS as entitled to receive tax-deductible donations under section 501-c-3 of the Internal Revenue Code. Since 2017 Randolph Heritage is also the legal owner of the ASME landmark collection of historic textile machinery and artifacts transferred from the American Textile History Museum of Lowell, Mass., after it closed.

The Franklinsville Manufacturing Company was the first of two mills on Deep River within the Franklinville corporate limits. Known as the “Upper” (upstream) mill, it was chartered in 1838 as the Randolph Manufacturing Company, and renamed in the 1850s after a catastrophic fire. The “Lower” mill was chartered in 1846 as the Island Ford Manufacturing Company. In 1923 both mills were merged under the name of Randolph Mills, Inc., owned by John and David Clark, sons of Chief Justice Walter Clark. The Upper Mill closed for Christmas vacation in 1978 and did not reopen; the Lower Mill reopened but then closed after the Easter vacation in 1979.

For more extensive history of the Franklinville area, see www.cottonmillmuseum.com

What we do:

The mission of Randolph Heritage is “To use our region’s past as a guide to building educational, social, cultural and economic legacies for our common future.” Since acquiring the ATHM machinery collection, we also have adopted a further mission to "Preserve, manage and interpret the history of the American textile industry generally, with particular focus on the impact of the industry in transforming manufacturing and mechanical engineering in the United States."

The modern South is built on a foundation of industry and manufacturing, a story of how entrepreneurship and community-building transformed an agricultural society devastated by war. Yet now we are in a new era of change, where manufacturing and agriculture have largely been replaced by service and light industries, with corresponding radical changes in local communities.

The challenges facing the organization involve (a) how best to preserve and present its historic properties and open space to cultural heritage tourists, and (b) how to interpret industrial history and machinery in a way that interests and educates visitors who no longer have any direct understanding of or connection to industrial work.

Randolph Heritage seeks to tell the story of industry transforming the rural south in a way that not only illustrates a vanishing way of life, but engenders a feeling of pride in the accomplishments of the past, and builds on that to improve the future.