Then and Now: The Red Mill, 1881-1935, from sawdust to ashes

“The American Engineer” of June 27, 1888, announced that William Kennett and his son, Alpheus Crosby Kennett, had bought the late Henry Metcalf’s spool mill in Conway for “about $10,000.” The exact price was $8,000 for the mill and Metcalf’s house, both of which stood on West Main Street. This was the younger Kennett’s first venture in the wood-products industry, after more than a decade as a railroad telegrapher and depot master. Taking bolts of birch from piles stacked across Main Street, alongside the tracks of the railroad that had delivered them, employees reduced them to dowels, sawed them into spools, drilled them, and carted them back to the railroad depot for shipment. In its heyday the mill sent 65 to 70 million spools a year to J.P. Coates, Clark Thread and the American Thread Co.

By 1896, A.C. Kennett doubled the size of the factory, and under his ownership the crew numbered as many as forty people, while scores more worked in the woods to supply the lumber. The size of the factory and the dress of the pedestrians in the photo suggests it was taken from the top of a railroad car in the late 1890s. A number of families were said to have “come with the mill” when Metcalf moved his operation to Conway from Tamworth Iron Works —the Yeaton, Hobbs, Knox and Warren clans, among others — and some of them stayed on after Kennett sold it. Old A.C. knew when to hold ’em and knew when to fold ’em, and he let the mill go to the White Mountain Paper Co. after the White Mountains had been so thoroughly stripped of timber that the federal government stepped in to stop it.