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Howard Gardner Nichols was born April 16, 1871, Haverhill Massachusetts. Died June 23, 1896, Atlanta, Georgia.
In the distance a bell tolled faintly on a somber Saturday afternoon, June 27, 1896. It summoned the residents of the Dwight mill village and Alabama City to Dwight Hall to a memorial service for young Howard Gardner Nichols, whose funeral was being held simultaneously in his hometown of Newton, Massachusetts.
Howard Gardner Nichols was the first agent and builder of the Dwight Manufacturing Company in Alabama City, where he also served as mayor. Located between Gadsden and Attalla, the little town had been incorporated in 1891 and on July 13, 1932, merged with the city of Gadsden. The eldest child and only son of Charlotte Peabody and John Howard Nichols, he was born April 16, 1871, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He had received the best educational advantages and had traveled extensively in this country and abroad.
After graduating cum laude from Harvard University in 1893, Young Nichols joined his father in the cotton manufacturing industry in Massachusetts. Devoting his energy to mastering the technology and the operation of the mills, the young man became renowned for his shrewd business judgment. To his business associates, he was considered to be a prodigy who plunged into his assignments with an intense zeal that resulted in exceptional achievements.
The post-Civil War years saw unparalleled growth of the textile industry in the United States. The South in the 1890s, while still struggling to overcome the ravages of the civil War and Reconstruction, remained primarily an agricultural area with cotton as the dominant crop. Mills in New England and Europe were the South’s most important cotton markets.
Alabama businessmen and politicians encourage investors to build cotton mills in the state. Business men reasoned that by manufacturing their own products, cotton would yield more money for the state than the sale of the entire crop outside of the South.
By 1890, many New England cotton mills already had begun considering southern investment opportunities. Textile manufacturers prepared to use their capital to establish new mills to take advantage of nearby raw materials, plentiful and cheap labor, fuel, and water power, available transportation facilities, and favorable tax exemptions.
In 1894, investors and town councils pressured the Alabama legislature to repeal the law prohibiting women and children from working more than eight hours a day in factories. This move was to entice Northern cotton mill investors to the state. Such relief would eliminate some of the competition from cotton mills in neighboring states where this prohibition did not exist. Also, the legislature was urged to pass a law to exempt new mills from taxation for ten years after the beginning of operations in order to compete with states who had provided this business enticement.
The Massachusetts legislature had attempted to discourage this drain of resources from their area; however, in March, 1894, the Massachusetts legislature granted permission to the Dwight Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, to increase its stock to $1.8 million for the purpose of establishing cotton mills outside of that state.
The Manufacturer’s Record judged the Dwight Company to be one of the best managed cotton enterprises in the United States. John Howard Nichols, treasurer of the company, grew concerned about the increasing competition of other mills that already had moved south. The operations of such companies were more economical than those remaining in the Northeast. In 1894, at the behest of John Howard Nichols, the directors of the company authorized an immediate southwide search for the location of a new mill site.
When news spread that the Dwight Manufacturing Company planned to construct a mill in the South, southerners besieged John Howard with letters asking to be considered for the location of the mill. When the site was selected, the younger Nichols was to construct and operate the mill. Also, he would be responsible for the design, planning and building of the mill village and the associated amenities.
Among the business leaders who contacted the Nicholses to promote their area for the new mill were Gadsden/Alabama City businessmen Robert B. Kyle and James M. Elliott, Jr. and Gadsden mayor, R. A. Mitchell. In 1891, Elliott, a progressive industrialist, had initiated the incorporation of Alabama city, with a population of ninety people. He envisioned the city becoming a major industrial center.
Elliott noted the advantages of the site in Alabama City, a location served by five railroads: The Alabama Great Southern, The Chattanooga Southern, the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis, the Rome-Decatur, and the Louisville and Nashville. He also claimed that Alabama City was located in one of the best cotton-growing sections of the South, where the Coosa Valley and Sand Mountain areas produced of 60,000 bales of superior quality cotton each year. Coal was available from nearby mines, and sufficient high quality labor could be obtained from the surrounding areas. He also stressed the importance of the nearby Coosa River, which was being made navigable southward to Mobile.
In December 1894, the Dwight Manufacturing Company announced that the company had selected a mill site in northeast Alabama in Alabama City. The location was at the foot of picturesque Lookout Mountain, which covered a rolling stretch of woods, near the rushing mountain stream of Black Creek. The area often had been referred to as the “Switzerland of Alabama.”
Howard Gardner Nichols made the final Decision of the site for the mill. The scenic beauty of the area especially appealed to him as he was a lover of nature and a student of ornithology. He scouted the area and established an immediate affinity toward the Black Creek gorge and the Noccalula Falls. He noted the interesting bird life, the enchanting woods and wildflowers, the high ground, and the absence of swamps that could threaten the area’s health. These attributes combined with the availability of fuel, raw materials, adequate transportation and competent employees clinched his decision to select Alabama City as the location for Dwight’s southern mill.
In September 1894, before location of the new mill was announced, young Nichols opened a temporary office to plan the construction of the mill and mill village. On January 16, 1895, construction bids were opened at the Printup Hotel in Gadsden, and the contract was awarded to A. M. Stewart and Company of St. Louis for $100,000.
Under Nichols’ direction, the mill construction progressed despite delays and discouragements. The mill itself consisted of two levels three and four stories high, and covered three city blocks. Two huge steam engines powered the machinery with a line of coal-fired boilers to supply the steam. Water was pumped from a dam on nearby Black Creek and stored in two lake reservoirs behind the mill. Late, these lakes also were used for recreational purposes, and bathhouses were built to accommodate bathers.
Nichols possessed a paternalistic attitude toward his employees. His proudest achievements was the planning and construction of a mill village to provide comfortable, attractive homes and garden spaces. The streets of the village extended from the north side of the mill, as the spokes of a wagon wheel, into the wooded rolling foothills of nearby Lookout Mountain. Each Victorian cottage was built in a different style, and each was painted a different color. Initially, 160 of 700 houses were built, consisting of three to six rooms each; employees rented these houses for $1 per room a month. Nichols proudly declared that the mill village would be a model one, with no concealed weapons, no saloons, ample public schools, a public library, a handsome Union Church, a bowling alley, a recreational park and bandstand, a baseball field, lakes and bathhouses, and an emergency fire department.
Before the village was completed, many people who had been recruited for employment at the mill moved to Alabama City in covered wagons and resided at the Camp House until the mill houses were completed. These families brought sickness and epidemics with them, and since a resident physician not yet been acquired, Howard Gardner Nichols worked and day as physician, nurse and undertaker. His interest in their welfare quickly endeared Nichols to the village residents. Later a “pest house” was erected in an isolated area of the Dwight property to house patients with contagious diseases that required quarantine.
On Christmas Day, 1895, one year after the announcement of the planned building of the new southern cotton mill, a button was pressed at Dwight’s Chicopee, Massachusetts, mill to set in motion the giant Corliss engine in Alabama City to start up the mill operation. In his daily journal, Howard Gardner Nichols recorded that on Friday, February 7, 1896; workers opened the first bale of cotton and threw it into the feeder. Thus, manufacturing began to furnish three-yard sheeting destined for the Asian market. The sheeting was stamped in indigo ink with the trademark, “Dwight Cabot A.”.
Nichols was a devout Christian concerned about the spiritual welfare of his employees. Church and Sunday school were held in the Cloth Room of the mill, and Nichols usually attended these services following his attendance at the Holy Comforter Protestant Episcopal Church in nearby Gadsden, where he served as vestryman. At the Episcopal Church, he often sang in a quartette or played his violin.
Services continued to be hold each Sunday in the Cloth Room until the new Union Church was built in 1900. A Presbyterian minister from Gadsden often conducted the services. From this nondenominational group, the Baptist organized the Dwight Baptist Church.
The bell in the tower of the mill served as the village alarm clock. Daily, it awakened the village at 4:45 A.M. and sounded curfew at 9:00 P.M. and signaled the opening and closing time for the mill. On Sundays, it tolled for Sunday school, and it also rang on other special occasions.
Usually, after Sunday school services, Howard Gardner Nichols’ love of nature beckoned him to his favorite realm, Lookout Mountain. He rode the tram to the brow of the mountain, where he dined at the famous Bellevue Hotel. Following lunch, he often walked to the brow of the mountain, where he walked to view the lovely cascading Noccalula Falls; he strolled through the green forest of pines, oaks, and flowering shrubs, observing scores of assorted birds darting through the colorful blossoms of spring or the radiant foliage of fall. On other occasions he saddled his horse and rode through the steep boulder filled Black Creek gorge to the falls, then over the ancient Indian trails to view Seven-Room Rock, a sanctuary of the prehistoric Indians. His favorite meditation spot was on the eastern brow of the mountain that overlooked the country for miles around. Below this point was Owls Valley, where a small stream ran toward to Coosa River. Beyond this picturesque valley to the east, mountains rose range upon range for thirty or forty miles, and to the south were more high hills.
From this vantage point, he wrote a letter of condolence to the father of one of his fraternity brothers, who had recently died. He quoted his favorite scripture from Psalms 121:1-2, “I will lift up mine eye unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.” He commented that when trouble tests us and shows what sort of men we are, we should seek help from the highest source. A summer shower interrupted his letter writing, and when he continued, he described the colorful misty clouds in the fast fading twilight. Nothing was more “inspiring or more elevating than to watch the sky at sunset from some high point” while whippoorwills called from the valley. “Whenever I am tired out,” he wrote, “an hour spent on Lookout Mountain makes e feel like another fellow.” In May, 1896, he welcomed a visit from his parents, his mother’s first visit to his new home in Alabama City.
Before daylight on May 23, he went to the mill to supervise the moving of an electric generator. The night shift had worked feverishly to place the huge dynamo in its proper place. Young Nichols joined the work crew. When everything seemed secure for the final move, the huge scaffolding timbers cracked and splintered in a deafening crash as the machine and Nichols fell together; he was pinned in the rubble.
He suffered severe internal injuries and remained unconscious during the morning as local physicians attended him. A surgeon was called from Chattanooga, and early the next morning, he operated on the patient in his cottage. The doctors told the parents that their son could survive but a few hours. The young man rallied, however, and the doctors gained hope for his recovery. A doctor was summoned from Atlanta to assist in the treatment. Eight days later Nichols was moved by special train to a sanatorium in Atlanta. He arrived in good spirits, confident of his recovery. He sent greetings to friends in Gadsden and instructions for continuing the work at the mill in Alabama City. Nevertheless, in mid June complications developed, and despite the best medical care then available, he died on June 23, 1896.
Nichols’ death devastated Alabama City. The Gadsden city council appointed Mayer R. A. Mitchell and T. S. Kyle to accompany the body to Newton, Massachusetts. After the funeral in Newton, Nichols was buried in Mount Auburn.
At the simultaneous memorial service held in Dwight Hall in Alabama City, flowers filled the room. A Presbyterian minister and lay reader in the Episcopal Church conducted the service. Bereaved friends and employees filled the hall. Subsequently, the Dwight Manufacturing Company in Alabama City observed a memorial to Nichols each Wednesday at noon when the bell in the tower tolled. In 1897, the Howard Gardner Nichols scholarship was established at Harvard University, a scholarship that gave preference to boys from north Alabama.
In 1900, two final structures of Howard Gardner Nichols’ planned model village were completed and dedicated as memorials to him. One was the distinctive white columned Howard Gardner Nichols Memorial Library, which became the first public lending library building erected in Alabama. The other was the lovely Union Church, which featured unique Alpine architecture. His sister placed a stained glass window in the church as a memorial gift. When the Union Church was dismantled years later, the window was moved to a special place of honor at Gadsden’s Holy Comforter Protestant Episcopal Church, where Howard Gardner Nichols had worshipped during his years in Alabama City and Gadsden.