Woodpyre Mill: North Carolina's Forgotten Mill Town

Located in the lush Great Balsam Mountains in North Carolina, the mill town of Woodpyre -- now largely forgotten -- was once a hub of commerce and manufacturing (not to mention violent crime) in the 1920s and in the early 1930's.

The Bullock Textile Mill, owned by the wealthy Lile Bullock, was the center of the town, (population nearly 10,000), and residences quickly grew up around it, as did a series of shops and a local doctor's office.

The mill, standing by the Tuckasegee River mainstream, employed town citizenry, including Cherokee Nation individuals. The Bullock mill transformed raw cotton into clothing, which was exported to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other northern states, as well as countries in Europe including France.  

The mill saw its most profitable days in the late 1920's at a time when child labor was still legal in the United States, and there were frequent reports of child injuries, lost fingers, and fainting coming out of the mill.

The Bullock Mill was closed in 1939, and after that, the population, which had organized around that job center, began to migrate to other locations. 

By the mid-1950s, Woodpyre was a veritable ghost town, and legends arose that the town itself was haunted by profiteer Bullock, the so-called "Phantom" of Woodpyre.  His death record lists the year 1944, but a decade laters, teenagers on lover lanes throughout local North Carolina towns told each other grisly stories about Bullock, "the Phantom of Woodpyre Mill," sometimes also known as Linthead.