Old Mill in Tennessee Manufacturing Company

"Old Mill" is one of the oldest in the complex of six buildings that make up the Tennessee Manufacturing Company. The complex was the largest cotton mill within the city of Nashville in the nineteenth century. Old Mill was built from 1869 to 1871 on high ground in the northern Nashville Germantown neighborhood. Old Mill is four stories tall and Italianate style with arched windows, a central projecting bay with a gable roof, and corner projecting bays with domed roofs. The other buildings date from 1869 to the 1960s. New owners in 1928 manufactured paper bags in the complex. The Tennessee Manufacturing Company complex on roughly 20 acres in two square blocks was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 for its significance in industrial history. Old Mill and three other buildings in the complex have been converted into residential condos called Werthan Mills.

Nashville merchant and industrialist Samuel Dodd Morgan founded Tennessee Manufacturing Company in 1869. Morgan was born in Virginia and operated a successful mercantile business in Alabama before moving to Nashville in 1833. Morgan also built cotton mills in Huntsville, Alabama and Lebanon, Tennessee, and was one of the founders of the Nashville-Chattanooga Railway. During the Civil War, he built a percussion cap factory in south Nashville. When Morgan purchased the two blocks for the cotton mill just outside the city limits of Nashville, the land was east of McGavock St. (Eighth Ave. now) and north of Taylor St.

Old Mill was officially completed as of August 3rd, 1871. The four-story Old Mill is brick on a rock-faced limestone foundation topped by a smooth limestone water table; the gable roof is slightly pitched. A blind arcade is above the fourth-floor windows, below a corbelled brick and sheet metal cornice. The main (south) entrance, in the central projecting bay in a round arched surround, has double doors below a six-light transom and arched fan light. Above the entrance, a skywalk of wood and steel was added in 1882 and connects Old Mill to New Mill (built in 1882). The interior of Old Mill was designed with an open floor plan and exposed brick walls, typical of industrial buildings of the era. Wooden columns in two rows give structural support on each floor. The mill held nearly 14,000 spindles, 400 looms, and two steam engines of 200 horsepower. The first products of the mill in early 1872 were strong cotton fabric called "drills," cotton sheeting (medium weight fabric for bed sheets), and "shirtings" (light weight fabric for shirts). A wing on the west side of Old Mill functioned as a storeroom until it was modified into two stories of office space before 1920. The two major north wings were enlarged from one to four stories in 1917.

Other buildings in the complex include a cotton warehouse (1869), dye warehouse (1882), boiler plant (1941). and water tower (circa 1900). A bell cast for the company in 1881 was originally in the central tower of Old Mill but was removed around 1950 due to structural concerns; it was placed for display on a wooden platform under the water tower. The complex employed around 800 workers in 1890, making it the largest industrial employer in Nashville. Another cotton manufacturer, Warioto Cotton Mills, bought the complex in 1905. Warioto sold Old Mill building by 1907 to a burlap and cotton bag manufacturer, Morgan and Hamilton Company; Warioto sold them the rest of the complex in 1913.

In 1928, the complex was sold to the Werthan Bag Corporation, a local manufacturer of cotton and paper bags. No major changes were made to the structure of Old Mill by the new owners. A small mechanical room was built against its south facade in the mid-twentieth century. Werthan added a new factory building in 1953 (not part of the historic complex) to the east of the older buildings. A major tornado struck Nashville in April 1972 and caused damage to several buildings at the Tennessee Manufacturing Company complex. The two rear wings on Old Mill were heavily damaged. After the storm, the top floors of these wings were removed; a new one-story wing was added to the rear of Old Mill in 1973. The roofing material of Old Mill had been replaced with asphalt shingles and rolled roofing by the late twentieth century. No other major construction took place at the complex between 1973 and the late 1990s. Most of the complex was owned by Werthan Mills, LLC and Werthan Packaging Co. in 1999 when it was documented for the National Register. The period of significance in industrial history is 1871 to 1949. Most of the original machinery had been removed from Old Mill (and New Mill) by the 1990s; Old Mill and New Mill were sold to investors for possible development in 1998.

Nashville Home Guru. Werthan Lofts and Werthan Mills, Compass RE. January 1st, 2022. Accessed October 13th, 2022. https://nashvillehome.guru/werthan-lofts-sale/.

Thomason, Philip. NRHP nomination of Tennessee Manufactuing Company, Nashville, Tennessee. National Register. Washington, DC. National Park Service, 1999.