By Charlie Pike
From our December 2024 issue
In 1831, Boston developer Samuel Batchelder stood on a bluff overlooking the Saco River’s roaring falls, in what is now Biddeford, and envisioned a sea of textile mills in the surrounding pastures. That year, he built the York Manufacturing Company mill on the river’s Saco Island, followed by the Laconia Mills and Pepperell Manufacturing Company mill on the western riverbank in 1844 and 1848 respectively. Boardinghouses were erected for the throngs of young women who worked 12-hour days turning raw cotton into fabric, and residences sprang up in town to accommodate job-seeking immigrants from Canada and Europe. By the time Biddeford became a city, in 1855, the mill complex employed about 3,500 workers and produced more than 25 million yards of fabric a year. “If people who decided to go to the goldfields in California in 1848 had stayed home and invested in Pepperell, they would have made their fortune,” Biddeford Mills Museum curator Dorothy Mathes says.
By the early 1900s, nearly 10,000 millworkers were turning out $6.2 million worth of fabric yardage, as well as sheets, blankets, and towels, every year. But most of the plants were shuttered in the ’50s, when their various owners moved operations to the South, where manufacturing was cheaper. Then, 20 years ago, yet another developer, Doug Sanford, saw potential on the riverbank. His initial purchase of four buildings, and eventually the entire 17-acre Pepperell Mill property, revitalized the complex, which today is home to 154 apartments, plus breweries, restaurants, artists’ studios, shops, and, fittingly, a sewing workroom.
1837
Irish immigrants dig a network of tunnels and lagoons that will conduct rushing water toward turbines in the basements of mill buildings, powering their equipment. When migrating eels turn up in the lagoons, employees arm local boys with fishing poles and pay them a penny for every catch. In the mid-1800s, the mills switch to steam power.
1851
Francis Skinner, part owner of the Pepperell mill, introduces the stylized dragon logo that would be stamped on all company goods (and persists on campus signage today). Pepperell’s strong cotton “drill” fabric was popular in China and India, and Skinner sought a trademark that would transcend language barriers.
1899
Pepperell acquires the struggling Laconia Mills, which had closed during what its owners believed would be a short Civil War and never fully recovered. Pepperell’s owners, meanwhile, purchased extra cotton before the war broke out and negotiated contracts with the Union Army to provide material for uniforms and tents.
Late 1920s
Pepperell launches The Pepperell Sheet newspaper, filled with reports of company achievements, patronizing advice (“Check up on yourself: Am I a person who gets to work on time in the morning and does not imperil the lives of others in an attempt to be the first out at bell time?”), and staff happenings, like the formation of a club called “More Tired Than You” by female employees who gathered in the evenings to sew, play games, and engage in “a little did you hear.”
1966
After toiling for nine years in secret on a product designed to save Pepperell from closure, Francis Spencer unveils the Vellux blanket. Made of layers of foam melted onto a net and covered with nylon flock, the velvety, ultra-light bedding becomes the bestselling blanket in America and keeps the mill afloat for another 43 years.
2009
Biddeford’s last remaining textile mill, Pepperell subsidiary WestPoint Home, closes. Doug Sanford, having already reimagined Pepperell’s North Dam Mill as a mixed-use development, buys the rest of the 16-building complex in 2010, with plans to recruit more businesses and build additional apartments.
2021
Texas-based real-estate firm Presidium purchases the Pepperell Mill campus from Sanford, and begins spending $5 million on interior and exterior upgrades. Last year, the group sold an unused mill building to New Hampshire–based Chinburg Properties, which is in the process of converting it into 76 high-end apartments.
