William James Erwin (18 November 1900–19 August 1977), industrialist, was born in Pineville, North Carolina, and was the son of Robert Monroe Erwin and Dovie Juanita Potts Erwin. He spent his childhood in York County, South Carolina, and graduated from Clemson Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Clemson University) in 1921 with a B.S. in textile engineering. From 1921 to 1927 Erwin worked in Lynchburg, Virginia, at Consolidated Textile Corporation. He became manager of its Ella Mills division in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1927 and two years later assistant to the president of Republic Cotton Mills Inc., located in the town of Great Falls, in Chester County, South Carolina. Erwin married Elizabeth Suttle in Shelby on 18 January 1930. They had two sons, one of whom was stillborn or died in infancy.
Erwin became vice president and a director of Republic Cotton Mills in 1939. After the company was acquired by J.P. Stevens and Company in 1946, he remained vice president. In 1949 he joined Riegel Textile Corporation, which was located in Ware Shoals, on the Saluda River in western South Carolina, where he was vice president and general manager. On 1 September 1953 Erwin returned to Virginia as president of Dan River Mills, Inc. The Danville company had struggled through a strike by members of the Textile Workers Union of America and a subsequent management shakeup. Dan River was one of the largest private employers in the state, and Erwin set about providing stability to the company's leadership and fostering growth. Moving quickly, in his first year he increased Dan River's net income from $822,000 to $1.5 million. Emblematic of the company's growth in Erwin's early years, stock in Dan River Mills began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1955.
During Erwin's thirteen-year tenure, Dan River Mills purchased several other companies and became one of the largest textile producers in the United States. In 1956 it purchased New York-based Iselin-Jefferson Company, Inc., an international textiles seller, as well as cloth manufacturer Woodside Mills, in Greenville, South Carolina, and fabric producer Alabama Mills, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. These acquisitions vastly increased Dan River's industrial capacity. In 1950 it operated more than 445,000 spindles and about 9,900 looms to produce about 177 million yards of fabric. By 1961 it could boast of 771,700 spindles and about 17,400 looms. Dan River added two more companies in 1964 and three more the following year.
By the time Erwin retired in 1966, the company operated mills in five towns in Alabama, eight in South Carolina, and one each in Georgia and North Carolina. During the 1960s, it built new mills in Danville to increase production. The number of the company's employees grew from approximately 13,200 at the end of 1951 to 18,500 near his retirement. During this same period, Dan River's net sales increased from $91 million to $246 million.
As president of the largest employer in Danville, Erwin took a leading role in June 1963 in negotiations that persuaded the city's mayor and other officials and some of its businessmen to offer a few minor concessions to African American protestors who took to the streets demanding that the city government hire Black police officers and that the city's businesses desegregate. The protestors clashed with the city's police in some of the most violent scenes of the civil rights movement in Virginia. People picketed Dan River Mills to protest its hiring practices and also picketed Erwin's house.
The textile industry faced new competition in the 1950s from less-expensive cloth manufactured in Japan, and American mills competed with one another in the 1950s and 1960s in the development of new products, especially wrinkle-resistant fabrics for clothing. Dan River Mills, like many other American textile firms, had a sometimes-unsettled relationship with the Textile Workers Union of America, and in 1963 the United Mine Workers of America began a failed two-year attempt to organize the workforce in Danville. By then Erwin had emerged as one of the industry's leading advocates. Early in the 1960s he took part in persuading the federal government to abolish its long-standing two-price system for cotton that had allowed foreign companies to pay a lower price for cotton than domestic manufacturers paid. In May 1961, Erwin represented American textile interests at an international trade conference in Osaka, Japan, and in 1964 he was elected president of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute.
He retired as president of Dan River Mills, Inc., and became board chair and chief executive officer in 1966. Erwin received an award from the textile section of the New York Board of Trade for outstanding service to the industry, and the Clemson Alumni Association also recognized him with a distinguished service award. William James Erwin died at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, on 19 August 1977. After a funeral service at the First Presbyterian Church in Danville, which Erwin had served as an elder, he was buried in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby, North Carolina.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Richard Lee Morton, Virginia Lives: The Old Dominion Who's Who (1964), 308, with date of birth; feature articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 30 Apr. 1961 (with several portraits), and New York Times, 19 Nov. 1965; John Sherman Porter, ed., Moody's Manual of Investments, American and Foreign: Industrial Securities (1953), 790–791; Frank J. St. Clair, ed., Moody's Industrial Manual, American and Foreign (1966), 2,760–2,761; Malcolm A. Cross, Dan River Runs Deep: An Informal History of a Major Textile Company, 1950–1981 (1982), several portraits; Erwin, Dan River Mills: A Story of 75 Exciting Years in Textiles! (1882–1957) (1957); Danville Register, 1 July, 1 Aug. 1953; Erwin's role in Danville demonstrations covered in Danville Register, 13, 18, 20 June 1963, and Washington Post, 13 June 1963; obituaries in Danville Register, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and New York Times, all 20 Aug. 1977, and Danville Bee, 22 Aug. 1977.