Oakdale Cotton Mill Village

Oakdale is a mill village on the east bank of the Deep River, about a mile southeast of Jamestown. It includes a brick factory complex raised in stages during the 1880s, a brick store, and frame two-story mill houses built between about 1900 and 1924. The factory has load-bearing brick walls, a four-story tower with corbeled string courses and pilasters, and heavy timber interiors. The site had earlier served as a grist mill and, during the Civil War, as a gun factory that produced between 1,500 and 3,000 rifles. It became a cotton mill in 1865 under the Logan Manufacturing Company, later renamed Oakdale Mills. Power came first from water wheels and turbines, then steam, and by 1940 entirely electricity. The mill is described as the oldest textile firm in continuous operation in Guilford County. It keeps the traits of nineteenth-century Piedmont industry: a small family-owned mill beside a water-power site, surrounded by its village.