The Courtenay Manufacturing Company Records document the operations of a textile mill including the financing of the firm, the purchase of equipment and raw cotton, the sale of cotton products, and the hiring, employment and payment of workers. The operation of a merchandise store and homes for the mill’s workers is also recorded among these records. The records consist of four series: Correspondence, Accounts Receivable, Personnel Records, and Purchase Orders as well as oversize material which consists of the following types of records: Administration, Financial, Operations/Production and Personnel.
The Correspondence series 1910-1971 pertains to the purchase of machinery, sale of cotton products, and general plant operations. The bulk of these miscellaneous files date from the 1920s and 1930s and should be viewed as the scattered remnants of the firm’s general files. They include insurance policies, some census and tax reports, and information about the merger with Abney Mills.
The Accounts Receivable series 1931-1946 documents both the sale of cotton cloth and waste products as well as the transfer of supplies such as coal and wood to the company store for resale.
The Personnel series dating from the 1940s includes copies of cards for employees containing the names of their parents and children, hire date, occupation, and reason for leaving Courtenay. There are also some records of weekly wage records for some employees from the early 1940s.
The Purchase Orders series 1943-1955 consists of copies of the form used for requisitioning equipment and supplies but not raw cotton. The form was forwarded to the Abney Mills central purchasing office and has a description of items but not their price.
The oversize material documenting administrative activities include notes payable, 1902-1943, listing the person giving the note, amount of the note, rate of interest, and monthly interest payments; monthly statements of condition of the firm, 1895-1903, listing assets and liabilities with profit and loss; and corporate stock ledgers, 1894-1919 listing the names and addresses of shareholders and number of shares owned.
Among the oversize financial records are: cash books and journals, 1894-1949, recording daily financial transactions; ledgers, 1892-1949, recording the balances in various accounts; raw cotton purchase books, 1914-1943, listing owner, price per pound, weight of each bale, its number, shipper, date used or shipped, and in some cases, dockage and grade; the receivables/payables, 1943-1948, 1954-1956, 1968, covering gross payrolls by department, costs of some raw materials and various income accounts; the voucher record books, 1904-1943, identifying accounts debited and credited; tax returns for the corporation, 1922-1940 are drafts of IRS Form 1120 which includes taxes owed based upon income and balance statements with supplementary schedules; the trial balances, 1901-1946, recording monthly summarized balances of various accounts; and the copy of invoices from Courtenay’s agents Woodward, Baldwin, and Co., 1951-1954, indicating quantity and specifications of cloth orders shipped to its customers.
There are a variety of records documenting operations at the mill. The account sales records, 1925-1949, document the production of various cloth constructions for Courtenay’s agents with information about price, yardage, bale number, terms and delivery specifications. The cloth production books, 1918-1955, have daily production of types of cloth with monthly summaries. The production record books, 1895-1926, provide monthly summaries of types of cloth produced by yardage and weight, numbers of looms run, summaries of production costs including labor by department, and estimated cost per yard of cloth produced.
There are two miscellaneous oversize items: an inventory of supplies, parts, fuel and sizing as of August, 1958 and a record of the ginning of cotton bales, 1918-1924, which includes name of the bale’s owner, gross weight, weights of cotton seed and cotton, and amounts due for ginning.
The personnel oversize material includes various monthly, bimonthly, and weekly payroll records, 1934-1960, listing employee name, amount of payment and various deductions. Most of these records are organized by pay period, and thereafter by department and thereafter alphabetically by the worker’s name. There is also a volume of Payroll and Check Ledgers for 1950-1951 which includes employee name, number of hours worked, gross and net pay, deductions, and taxes.
Courtenay Manufacturing was incorporated in 1893 with $300,000 in capital. That year, a site in Oconee County was selected for building the textile mill at a place called Newry. The following year, on June 14, 1894, the Courtenay Manufacturing Company began operations using water power. By 1903, the firm was producing fine sheetings for converting proposes with 19,440 ring spindles and 635 forty inch looms. The Courtenay family continued to manage the business until the 1920s when the firm was sold to Isaqueena Mills of Central, South Carolina. It produced pajama checks and carded broadcloth with 25,344 spindles in 1927 and used a combination of water and steam generated power from three boilers. In 1930, the stock and property was sold to Cannon Mills in North Carolina. The Abney Company bought the mill in 1939. After World War II, Courtenay Manufacturing operated as a unit of Abney producing print cloths until its closure in 1975. The mill houses were sold in 1959, primarily to their tenants.
98.4 Cubic Feet (15 manuscript boxes, 155 oversize volumes, 1 oversize folder)
English
The records consist of four series: Correspondence, Accounts Receivable, Personnel Records, and Purchase Orders. Oversize material is separated from the general collection and consists of the following types of records: Administration, Financial, Operations/Production and Personnel.
The subject correspondence series is organized alphabetically by folder title. The material in the other series is generally arranged alphabetically by name of material and chronologically thereafter.
Sometime after the mill closed in 1975, these records were transferred to the University of South Carolina at Columbia where Professor William Phillips used them for research. During the 1980s and early 1990s they were moved several times and eventually transferred from USC’s Modern Political Collections Repository to the Special Collections Unit of Clemson University Libraries in 1995 as accession 95-57.
Transferred from the Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina in 1995.
Michael Kohl processed these records with the help of the student assistants Jennifer Campbell, Prasad Chebrolu, Vinay Kaza, and Lisa McAlister. Some of the information in the historical sketch was based upon research done by Karen Ellenberg for the register to Mss 154 Henry Cater Collection. Jen Bingham and student Kristi Roberts made minor revisions and entered the register in Archivists' Toolkit in 2009.
Part of the Clemson University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Repository