White Oak New Town Historic District

Built about 1920 by the Proximity Manufacturing Company, a Cone family firm, this mill village in northeast Greensboro contains one hundred hollow-tile houses finished in stucco and sixty-four car sheds set along parallel alleys. Eighty one-story gable-front bungalows and twenty two-story gable-end houses stand on a regular grid of streets near the White Oak Mill, about half a mile away. Each house had about four or six rooms and was rented cheaply, at roughly $1.00 to $1.25 a week in the 1920s. Residents worked in the mill as speeder operators, dolphers, card holders, weavers and loom fixers. The village is regarded as the most intact example of such housing in the city, and it documents the everyday lives of textile workers and the company's paternalistic provision of schools, gardens and housing during the 1920s and 1930s.