The neighborhoods of Watts Hospital Hillandale and Old West Durham lie far below Durham County’s average diabetes rate. They grew up in the early 20th century around Erwin Cotton Mills. William Erwin projected a benign paternalism as he oversaw his enterprise. Like many southern mill owners, he provided his workers with modest but affordable company houses. Such mill villages were supplied with running water, vegetable gardens, and had access to nearby small grocery stores. Middle-class families lived not far away in the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood, built adjoining the city’s first hospital endowed by businessman-philanthropist George W. Watts.
Mill villages should not be romanticized: workers (most of whom were women) labored for long hours for near-poverty wages, and were exposed to diseases such as Brown Lung. Yet especially in their early years, the textile mill environment did encourage a sense of familial solidarity between workers and management. Both, it might added, were largely the same race—textile mill villages were almost exclusively a space for white employment.
