Part IThe Story
A Stocking Called Foreva
The stocking was called Foreva, which is the sort of name a company chooses once it has decided that the most valuable word in the language is a promise. It came out in 1962. It was a runless, seamless women's stocking made by a Charlotte, North Carolina, hosiery firm run by a Wharton graduate named J. Chadbourn Bolles. It was meant to end the oldest complaint in the trade: the run that opens at the ankle, climbs past the knee in the course of an evening, and turns a garment into trash in a single step. Seamless meant there would be no dark line up the back of the leg. Runless meant, or was supposed to mean, that the thing would not fail.
In the same week, Hanes Hosiery Mills Co. brought out a competing product. That two rival mills should arrive at the same promise in the same week says less about espionage than about the trade itself. The machines, the yarns, and the anxieties had all been converging on one point for years, and whoever reached it second would have reached it only a few days late. Gordon Hanes, president of the rival company, saw what was coming and made a joke of it.
— Gordon Hanes, president of Hanes Hosiery Mills Co., 1962This is the death knell of the hosiery business.
It is a very good joke, and it holds up because it is also an accurate piece of economics. An industry that sells a product designed to wear out has every reason to be uneasy about a product designed not to. A stocking that never runs is a stocking that never gets bought a second time. Hanes was laughing at himself, at Bolles, and at the whole Piedmont business of knitting nylon into something women bought again and again. Both men had just put a great deal of money into making that business smaller.
They need not have worried, at least not about that. "The promise of 'runless' was oversold," Wharton Magazine noted, with the dryness of an alumni publication describing an alumnus's flop. The stockings ran. Something larger was also under way that neither Foreva nor its Hanes counterpart could address: women's fashion was turning, and the stocking as the industry had known it was about to be "severely challenged." The hosiery business did not die of permanence. It died, in its old form, the way most things do, from a change in taste that no one on a knitting floor could control.
Bolles had been running the company for twenty-four years when Foreva came out. He started in 1938 at a small Burlington operation that had begun two years earlier in rented quarters with nine 42-gauge legging machines and three footers. Its unfinished stockings went out to someone else to be finished and were then sold to chain stores and jobbers who cared nothing about the name on the box. He retired in 1970 with an international, diversified textile and apparel company doing $68 million a year in sales. Wharton Magazine, granted the alumni magazine's right to one pun, put it this way: "Some successful people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But James Chadbourn Bolles used his socks."
He died in 1987. The archive he left is thin and scattered: a 1953 company profile preserved by North Carolina State's textile historians, a single paragraph in Wharton's anniversary issue, his name in the middle of a list of twenty-one men who founded a Charlotte golf club, and a sentence on a Wikipedia page about a mill in Georgia. He wrote no memoir that has survived. No biography of him exists. Most of what can be known comes from the paperwork of acquisition, the trade press and the deed office, and the rest has to be assembled the way a stocking is, one course at a time, with the risk that a single dropped stitch unravels the whole leg.
Even so, what survives has a shape. Every company he bought eventually stopped existing in the form he bought it. The product he was proudest of did not live up to its name. The one physical object from his empire still standing in public, still doing work in the world, is a set of bricks that came from a building he owned for three years and sold. They are now embedded in a tower that tells time.
By the Numbers
Chadbourn, from Twelve Machines to Two Continents
12Knitting machines (nine leggers, three footers) at the Burlington start in 1936
$11.9MChadbourn Hosiery Mills sales in 1952
1,685Approximate employees across Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, 1953
7Plants in three states by 1953
$250,000Price paid by the Muscogee school board for the Shannon Hosiery Mill, 1958
$68MAnnual sales when Bolles retired in 1970
20,000+Bricks salvaged from the Shannon mill's smokestack and set into a clock tower
A Name Made of Other Names
He went by his middle name. The J. stood for James, and he left it as an initial, a placeholder for a first name he apparently had no use for in public. The name he put forward, and eventually put on the company, its sales corporation, its letterhead, and a 4,000-square-foot hole in the Southern textile economy, was Chadbourn.
Plenty of things already carried that name. In Columbus County, North Carolina, close to the South Carolina line, there is a town called Chadbourn. A post office by that name has operated there since 1882, and the town was incorporated in 1883. According to William S. Powell's The North Carolina Gazetteer and the local histories that draw on it, the name came from "a local family engaged in the lumber industry." Strawberries came to Chadbourn in 1895. By 1907 the town was among the leading strawberry producers in the world, and there is a photograph of farmers loading berries onto rail cars that year. Its population went from 243 in 1900 to 1,242 in 1910, a 411 percent increase in one decade, the kind of figure that only a railroad and a perishable crop produce together. Until 1955 Chadbourn was a transfer point on the Atlantic Coast Line, where passengers changed for Myrtle Beach, Florence, Sumter, Columbia, Augusta, and Wilmington.
I could not establish whether J. Chadbourn Bolles had any connection to the town, the lumber family, or Columbus County. The sources say nothing on the point. The name is a fact. The link between them is not.
There is an older link, though, and it is documented in a way that the twentieth century is not. On July 8, 1634, a ship called the Pied Cow landed at Kittery, in what would become Maine, with a house carpenter named William Chadbourne aboard. He had been baptized on March 30, 1582, in the Church of St. Editha in Tamworth, Warwickshire. He arrived under contract to Captain John Mason, with two other master carpenters, James Wall and John Goddard, to build mills and run them on shares. On July 22, 1634, two weeks after landing, the three men started construction on what is recorded as the first water-powered sawmill and gristmill in New England. The contract ran five years. When it ended, they were to receive fifty acres on lease "for the term of three lives," three generations, in exchange for three bushels of corn a year.
Chadbourne's grandson, Lieutenant Humphrey Chadbourne, married a woman named Sarah Bolles, born January 20, 1657, in Wells, Maine, the daughter of Joseph Bolles, Gentleman. Her father's will, dated September 18, 1678, refers to her as Sarah Chadbourne. So the two surnames were joined in the Maine woods more than two and a half centuries before a Charlotte trust officer carried both of them into the hosiery business. I cannot tell you whether he descended from that marriage. The genealogical sites that record it stop well short of him. Still, it is hard to look past the shape of it: a family name first attached in America to a mill, and then, three hundred years later, a man carrying that name who made his fortune buying mills.
The Carolinas held other Chadbourns. James Harmon Chadbourn was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1905, graduated from The Citadel in 1926, and earned his law degree at Chapel Hill in 1931. In 1933 he published Lynching and the Law. A later colleague wrote that he took on the subject "when and where it took courage to do so." He went on to Penn, UCLA, and Harvard, revised Wigmore's treatise on evidence, and is credited as the father of the California Evidence Code. A Harvard colleague called his fascination with the common-law forms of action "utterly mad." His relation to the hosiery man, if he had one, is undocumented. What links them is a name and a generation. In those years, a young Carolinian with that name could argue against the rope in print or work his way into the trust department of a Charlotte bank, and either path required believing that the South's institutions could be made to function.
The Trust Officer Buys a Knitting Room
The 1935 Charlotte city directory, Hill's Charlotte (Mecklenburg County, N.C.) City Directory, opens with advertisements that read now like a New South prose poem. "ELECTRICITY IS CHEAP — Use It Freely to Make Your Home Livable," says Southern Public Utilities Company, and then adds: "A wise woman has said that electric service promotes a good disposition and that good dispositions are essential to happy homes. It's worth thinking about, anyway." The Charlotte National Bank offers "A Complete Banking Service." The Queen City Coach Company promises "All Paved Roads — Courteous and Dependable Drivers — Luxurious Coaches," with daily buses to Monroe, Lumberton, Fayetteville, Wilmington, Gastonia, Chimney Rock, Asheville. Southeastern Ice & Coal Co. sells Pocahontas, Anthracite, Blue Gem, New River, Red Ash. The Morris Plan Bank stands at 122 South Tryon Street.
That was the city where James Chadbourn Bolles, Wharton class of 1929, went to work. Wharton says he joined the American Trust Co. after graduating. His major had been manufacturing, a fact the magazine mentions in passing and that becomes harder to ignore the longer you consider it. He finished business school in the year of the crash with a degree in how to make things, and he took a job in a bank. By 1938 he was an assistant trust officer, managing estates and the money of the dead and the incapacitated, the slowest and most conservative work in finance, where the main duty is to avoid loss.
That year he became president of Rufus D. Wilson, Inc., a two-year-old hosiery maker in Burlington.
How it happened, I could not find out. The NCSU profile says only that "in 1938 J. Chadbourn Bolles, assistant trust officer of the American Trust Co. in Charlotte, became president." It gives no account of an investment, an inheritance, a friendship, or a bad loan that left a bank holding equity it did not want. The sentence goes straight from the bank to the knitting floor with nothing between. Maybe he bought in. Maybe the bank sent him to watch over something and he decided to stay. The record is silent, and silence about the most important decision in a man's career is one of the things this archive teaches a reader to expect.
What he took over can be described exactly. There were nine full-fashioned legging machines at 42 gauge and three footers. Full-fashioned hosiery was knitted flat, shaped as it was made, and then sewn up the back. That seam is what the seamless stocking would later remove. A legger knitted the leg. A footer finished the foot. Nine and three describes a modest operation sized to produce leg sections faster than they could be completed. The output was greige, meaning unfinished, undyed, and unmarked, and it went out to commercial finishers before going to chain stores and jobbers. Rufus D. Wilson, Inc. was the bottom of the hosiery chain: a supplier of components to other people's brands, competing on price, with no say in what the customer saw.
The trust officer's instincts and the manufacturing major's training happened to point the same way. A trust officer learns that value collects wherever control sits, that whoever holds the deed, the mortgage, or the final step in the chain sets the terms. A manufacturing student learns where margin builds up in a process. Greige goods were sold at whatever the finisher would pay. Finished, branded hosiery sold at whatever a woman in a good department store would pay. Bolles spent the next fifteen years moving the company from the first position to the second.
Seven Plants in Three States
The 1953 profile is titled "Chadbourn: A Modern, New, Expanding Hosiery Producer." Its prose has the cheerful flatness of a company describing itself to the public, and it contains the most complete account of Bolles's method anywhere. It is worth reading the way you would read a balance sheet, for what it reveals about decisions.
"Chadbourn Hosiery Mills, Inc., with general offices in Charlotte and seven plants in three states," it begins, "began operation 17 years ago in rented quarters and with a few knitting machines."
The sequence, put in order, runs like this.
In 1943, in the middle of the war, the company bought a knitting plant in Shenandoah, Virginia. In 1944 it bought a building in Siler City, North Carolina, and "entirely renovated" it into "a beautiful and modern knitting plant." Also in 1944, and this matters more than the plants, it set up a sales organization headquartered in New York City "to handle the promotion and sale of the company's production." That same year the name changed. Rufus D. Wilson, Inc., named for a man who appears in the record only as a name, became Chadbourn Hosiery Mills, Inc.
Over the next three years the company built dyeing and finishing capacity and added knitting machines, tripling output. The commercial finishers who had taken the margin on the greige goods were no longer needed. From then on, Chadbourn finished its own stockings.
In 1945 it bought Larkwood Hosiery Mills, Inc., and moved its offices from Burlington to the Larkwood plant in Charlotte. Bolles had returned to the city where he had worked in the bank, this time as the owner of a factory there. Later in 1945 he bought Full Knit Hosiery Mills, Inc., also in Burlington, which took the company into men's hosiery. After that came Best Manufacturing Co. in Gainesville, Georgia, where capacity was doubled after the purchase. The profile calls it "one of the most attractive and modern in the South."
By 1953 the arrangement had become a system. Its sales arm, Chadbourn Sales Corp., was in Room 4219 of the Empire State Building. It was run by Frank T. Hayes, a vice-president of the parent company and president of the sales subsidiary, who, the profile says, "has charge of the distribution of the firm's products." Hayes is the only executive besides Bolles whom the record describes as holding real authority, and his appointment says something about Bolles: he gave the selling a separate corporation, its own president, and an office on the 42nd floor of the most famous building in America. A stocking leaving Siler City went out under a New York address.
The brands it carried were Larkwood and Larkette. Larkwood had come with the 1945 acquisition. Bolles had bought the name together with the plant and then made it the label for his entire full-fashioned line. The profile describes them as "nationally advertised brands" sold "in the finer stores and specialty shops throughout the nation." In fifteen years the company had gone from making greige goods for jobbers to selling branded stockings through specialty shops. Chadbourn, its owner's middle name, was on the corporation, and Larkwood, borrowed from another company, was on the box.
The profile names the plant managers. Garland E. Bennett ran the Burlington full-fashioned plant, about 140 people. E. V. Wood ran Siler City, also about 140. I. B. Grainger, Jr. ran the half-hose plant in Burlington, the only one in the group knitting and finishing men's and boys' half hose and anklets, with about 225 workers. A. T. Glenn ran the Charlotte plant, where "all full fashion dyeing and finishing operations of the company are performed." The North Carolina plants together employed 1,025 people, had about 200,000 square feet of floor space, and carried a payroll of roughly $3,650,000. That works out to about $3,560 per worker per year. With Georgia and Virginia included, employment came to about 1,685.
Then come the sales numbers, which the profile reports proudly and which a careful reader will find slightly worrying. In 1951 the company sold $11,571,000. In 1952 it sold $11,906,000. That is growth of about 2.9 percent. The acquisition spree had ended, and the domestic business had found its level. In 1953 Chadbourn was a large regional hosiery company in a country full of them, its plants modern and its brands advertised, and it was beginning to run into the limit that every company built by acquisition eventually meets, which is that you run out of companies.
The profile ends: "The success of this enterprise led to a program of enlargement and expansion which is still in progress."
Still in progress. Bolles would spend the next seventeen years working out where the expansion could go.
The Other Bolles
The surname reached the South first through a swindle.
Richard Johnson Bolles was born in New York City on August 1, 1843, the son of a physician, and stood five feet six, which is why he was called "Dickie." At twenty-three he held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. At twenty-four he married Julia Arabel Sherman, a niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Over time he was called "the Napoleon of Finance," "a flamboyant capitalist," "a wealthy mining man," "a philanthropist," and "a land swindler," all of them fairly. His obituary summed him up in one forgiving line: "During his long life, it is said, he made and lost several fortunes."
No source I examined connects Richard J. Bolles to J. Chadbourn Bolles by blood, and I make no such claim. They shared a surname. One died in 1917 and the other went into the hosiery business in 1938. Their stories rhyme anyway, and the rhyme is useful.
Dickie Bolles went west in 1885, to Aspen first and then to Colorado Springs, where, according to his obituary, he owned "what was said to be the richest silver mine in the world," which made him $6 million. In Colorado he hired a secretary, Agnes W. Cain, described as "a shrewd Cleveland businesswoman." In March 1880 he had paid $6,000 for 4,000 shares of mining stock at $1.50 a share. The stock was worthless. He sued, claiming that if the seller's statements had been true the shares would be worth $10 each, and asked for $40,000. The case, Smith v. Bolles, was argued before the Supreme Court on October 31, 1889, and decided eleven days later. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled against him. A defrauded buyer could recover what he had paid plus interest. He could not recover what he had hoped to make.
— Chief Justice Melville Fuller, Smith v. Bolles, 132 U.S. 125 (1889)...this liability did not include the expected fruits of an unrealized speculation.
The opinion is still taught in contracts courses as a basic case on reliance versus expectation damages. In plain terms it says the law will repay your losses but not your dreams. Bolles appears to have learned the reverse. In 1907 Florida's governor, Napoleon Broward, invited him to help drain the Everglades. In 1908 Bolles and investors from Colorado Springs formed the Florida Fruit Lands company and bought 500,000 acres of undeveloped land from the state's Internal Improvement Fund at $2 an acre. His salesmen went across the country selling submerged Everglades land as "the Promised Land" and "the Garden of Eden." Nobody mentioned that it was under water.
He settled in Jacksonville in 1909, with an office in the Bisbee Building on West Forsyth Street and rooms at the Seminole Club, and Agnes Cain came with him. Buyers sued in 1911. He went on trial in 1913, blamed his salesmen, said they had been "misled by officials of the State of Florida and officials of the United States Department of Agriculture," and was acquitted as an "honest man." Federal mail-fraud charges in Kansas City kept getting postponed because of his health. In March 1917 he collapsed on Florida East Coast Railway Train 86, northbound from Palm Beach to Jacksonville. Members of the Boston Red Sox, riding from Miami to Macon in the same sleeper car, tried to revive him and could not. The federal charges were dropped after he died. Decades later an English professor quoted from his journals: "I am in nearly every business and social transaction guided almost entirely by impulse, with no fixed principles."
Agnes Cain took control of his estate. She had been in Jacksonville nearly ten years and, in the words of a local history, was "well established in local real estate and investment circles." The year before Bolles died, a boy named Roger Painter had started in the office at four dollars a week. In February 1923 Agnes married him. He was twenty-one and she was forty-eight. When the San Jose Hotel, a Castilian-style resort on a bluff above the St. Johns River, opened on New Year's Day 1926, the Bolles estate held its $200,000 first mortgage. A year later it held a mortgage on the furniture too. The Florida boom collapsed. In 1928 the hotel closed and Agnes foreclosed, buying the property on the courthouse steps. She formed the Bolles Investment Company, sold the hotel to it for $225,000 paid entirely in stock, and so kept control of something no one else wanted. She leased it to a hotel group that lost $100,000 in a year, and then to the Florida Military Academy, which defaulted in the summer of 1932.
A Jacksonville lawyer, John C. Cooper, Jr., gave the Painters some advice: "Why don't you form a school out there? The community needs one." Neither of them had any formal education. On January 5, 1933, the Bolles School opened in the old hotel as a military academy for boys. It was named for the swindler, who had died sixteen years earlier. Its motto is "All things possible."
There are two details here to keep in mind. The first is that Agnes Cain Painter was a trustee in practice if not in title, a woman who took a dead man's estate and kept it alive through a real-estate crash by understanding mortgages, foreclosures, and the stock of a holding company better than the people she dealt with. That was the specialty J. Chadbourn Bolles was practicing at the American Trust Co. in Charlotte in those same years. The second is that the San Jose Hotel was a building put up for one purpose that failed, and it became a school. Hold onto that one.
A Mill on Talbotton Road
On November 8, 1938, the year Bolles became president of Rufus D. Wilson, Inc., in Burlington, a company called Shannon Hosiery Mill, Inc. was incorporated in Columbus, Georgia.
Its founder was Norman Shannon Illges. Seventy years later the president of a university would call him "a courageous visionary," because the mill was one of the few industrial startups in Columbus during the Depression. The middle name went on the mill, as Bolles's had gone on his. N. S. Illges was president, J. P. Illges vice president, W. T. Cothran secretary and treasurer, and E. C. Alford assistant secretary. The mill was a single story on a five-and-a-half-acre lot at 1338 Talbotton Road, on the northeast side of town, and the buildings and grounds cost about $100,000. It made silk hosiery for the Southeast and ran from 1939 until 1955.
In 1955 Illges sold to Chadbourn Hosiery Mills. That year's city directory lists J. Chadbourn Bolles as president of the Shannon mill. Seventeen years after Bolles started, in the same year Illges incorporated, the larger regional company bought the smaller one. That was how the trade was consolidating. The mill was a silk mill in an industry that had moved to nylon, and it may have been bought mainly for its machines, its workers, and its customers, though I don't know that. The record shows only the change of ownership.
Bolles kept it three years. In 1958 Chadbourn sold the property to the Muscogee County Board of Education for $250,000, in a sale arranged by George Woodruff, Jr., whom the same university president described as "one of the Columbus area's most visionary real estate developers." On May 14, 1958, the University System of Georgia conditionally accepted a new two-year school, Columbus College, which the school board, the Chamber of Commerce, and "other local residents" had been pushing for. It needed a building. The board renovated the hosiery mill.
On September 22, 1958, Columbus College registered its first 265 students in the former Shannon Hosiery Mill, and classes started a week later. Fifteen faculty members taught five academic programs in nineteen classrooms carved out of a building made to hold knitting machines. A retired teacher named Gloria Toelle, one of the original students, remembered it in 2009 at a ceremony attended by about twenty-five people: "What I liked so much about the school was that it was small. It was nice to be able to talk to your professors and they knew who you were."
The college moved in 1963, two and a half miles east, to a 157-acre former dairy farm. It became a four-year institution within seven years of opening, and in 1996 it became Columbus State University. By 2009 it had nearly 300 faculty, about 8,000 students, more than 50 undergraduate programs, about 80 buildings, and a house in Oxford, England.
The mill outlasted its first purpose and its second. It made stockings for sixteen years and housed a college for about five. After that the school district owned it, and by 1980 it sat on the books of the Muscogee County School District as a site more than a building. It was demolished in 1988. Hannan Magnet Academy, a public school, now occupies 1338 Talbotton Road.
A hotel in Jacksonville that became a school named for one Bolles. A hosiery mill in Georgia that became a college after it was sold by another. The coincidence is real, but it would be wrong to make too much of it. What it shows is that the buildings of the Southern economy in the twentieth century were often turned into something else, and when they were, it was often education. Industrial plants and failed resorts became classrooms. What an entrepreneur builds to make money can end up, after he is done with it, serving purposes he never had in mind.
Stretch
In 1955, the year it bought Shannon, Chadbourn went into partnership with Burlington Industries to bring out stretch socks and stockings. According to Wharton Magazine, the yarns used "fibers developed during wool and silk shortages of World War II." The war had cut off the silk that mills like Shannon depended on, and the substitutes developed under that pressure were now becoming consumer products in their own right. A stretch sock did not have to come in exact sizes. It fit a range of feet. That changed inventory, retail, and the number of separate items a mill had to knit, stock, and ship.
Bolles had bought every other capability he had. This one came through a partnership, and with Burlington Industries, a company whose name came from the same mill town where Bolles had started with twelve machines and which had grown into one of the biggest textile firms in the country. The source does not explain why Chadbourn partnered rather than developed the yarn itself, and I won't make up a reason. The arrangement suggests a man who knew what his company did well. It knitted and finished. It did not make fiber. When the advance came in the fiber, he found someone who made fiber.
Seven years later Foreva brought together everything Chadbourn had learned about yarn and the knitting machine: a seamless stocking, so made in the round instead of flat and sewn, and a runless one, which depended on a stitch structure that resisted laddering. It was the clearest product of the company's technical progress. It also had the most ambitious name the company had ever used, and that was the problem. The name made a claim the stocking couldn't support.
This is the part of the story where it is tempting to bring back Richard J. Bolles and his Garden of Eden. That temptation should be partly resisted. Foreva was a real product that did real things. It was seamless and more resistant to runs than what came before. Hanes released the same thing the same week, which suggests the whole industry thought it was achievable. The overselling was the ordinary kind that comes with marketing a product, the kind Smith v. Bolles would treat as puffery and not fraud. Even so, the distance between "runless" and what the stocking actually did is the same distance Chief Justice Fuller marked in 1889, between what was paid and what was hoped for, between the promise and the thing itself. Every manufacturer works in that space. The successful ones know how much of it they can afford.
Hamburg, by Way of Portugal
He was in Portugal with his wife, Rosemary, when he bought a stocking plant in Germany.
That is about all the source says, and I'll keep to it. On that vacation Bolles bought the Opel Strumpfwerke AG plant in Hamburg. Strumpfwerke means stocking works. He gave his reason in a sentence that is the only direct statement of strategy from him that survives. He was determined, he said:
— J. Chadbourn Bolles, as quoted in Wharton Magazine...to gain a foothold in the European Common Market.
A foothold. For a man who sold things worn on the feet, maybe the word wasn't chosen with the pun in mind, but it was the right one either way. The Common Market had come out of the Treaty of Rome and was building up a common external tariff. A hosiery company exporting from the Carolinas would find a higher wall around Europe each year, and one already inside it would face none. Buying a German plant was a way into that market. Wharton credits him as "one of the first to target and gain a foothold for his 'runless' hosiery products on the international market." The precise year doesn't appear in the material I reviewed. It falls somewhere between the Common Market's creation and his retirement in 1970.
The point that matters is what the Hamburg plant did for the company when the American business weakened. As fashion turned and domestic demand for stockings dropped, Wharton reports that "by targeting the international market, Chadbourn continued to post sales increases despite the downturn in U.S. demand for hosiery products." The domestic plateau visible in the 1951–1952 numbers was not overcome at home. Bolles got past it by going abroad.
The 1950s acquisitions had been about capacity: more machines, more floor space, more finishing, all in the same region and selling into the same national market. The international move was a different kind of decision, closer to the trust officer's way of thinking about a portfolio than the manufacturer's way of thinking about a factory. You hold assets in more than one market because you can't predict which one will weaken. When the American stocking business went into the long decline Gordon Hanes had joked about, Chadbourn had operations on two continents, and it was the second one that kept the totals rising.
Twenty-One Men at Morrocroft Farm
On April 13, 1959, a Charlotte businessman named James J. Harris held a meeting at Morrocroft Farm. It was the start of the Quail Hollow Club. On December 18, 1959, twenty-one founders signed the certificate of incorporation, which was filed on January 4, 1960. The first ninety members were designated charter members. J. Chadbourn Bolles was one of the twenty-one.
The founders' list is a fair inventory of the people who ran mid-century Charlotte: William H. Barnhardt, John M. Belk, F. J. Blythe, Jr., J. Chadbourn Bolles, B. Irvin Boyle, J. Herbert Bridges, J. E. Burnside, Sr., James G. Cannon, Norman A. Cocke, Sr., John Scott Cramer, John L. Crist, Jr., George S. Crouch, James J. Harris, T. E. Hemby, Jr., H. F. Kincey, William B. McGuire, Jr., Ross Puette, Addison H. Reese, J. H. Robinson, C. D. Spangler, F. N. Thompson. Cocke was the first president, Harris vice president, Boyle secretary, and Cramer treasurer. Bolles held no office. He was a founder, not an officer, a member of the governing group who did not run it, which was where he had placed himself in most things outside his own company.
The course opened June 3, 1961, and the clubhouse on September 14, 1967. The Kemper Open was played there every June from 1969 through 1979, starting the year before Bolles retired. Later came Arnold Palmer's changes to four holes in 1985, rock walls on the 17th in 1993 and on the 7th in 1994, a Tom Fazio rebuild in 1997, and the return of the PGA Tour in 2003. The club the twenty-one founded became one of the best-known courses in professional golf. None of its later history has much to do with any single founder, and that is the reason to mention it. Bolles helped start an institution that outgrew the people who started it. The mills he bought went the same way. So did the college he made possible by selling a building.
The trust officer who moved to the factory floor ended up at a founders' table with Charlotte's bankers and merchants, which is where a trust officer would have expected to find himself in time. He got there by way of nylon.
What Lasts
He retired in 1970. By Wharton's account he had grown "a small regional firm" into "an international and diversified textile and apparel complex with $68 million in sales." In 1952 sales had been $11.9 million, so the company had grown about five and a half times in eighteen years, roughly ten percent a year compounded, through the period when Gordon Hanes's joke about his own industry started to come true. By then the company had a new name, Chadbourn Gotham, Inc., the middle name still on it and a reference to New York added. The 1953 profile's "general offices in Charlotte" had become an operation on two continents. The greige goods were long gone.
That same year, an Episcopal priest named Richard Nelson Bolles, no relation to anyone else here as far as I can determine, published a book on looking for work called What Color Is Your Parachute? It was later revised every year, spent more than a decade on the New York Times best-seller list, and was named by the Library of Congress as one of twenty-five books that have shaped readers' lives. It is just a coincidence. In the year one Bolles left the stocking business, another Bolles started telling a generation of Americans that a job was something you designed for yourself and didn't simply take.
The Carolinas Bolles had worked in were changing. In Columbus County, North Carolina, home of the town that shares his middle name, manufacturing began to decline in the 1990s. The county lost about 2,000 manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2014. Passenger trains had stopped running through Chadbourn in 1965 or 1966, and the station handled only freight by the end of 1966. The town peaked at 2,323 people in 1960 and had 1,574 by 2020. In 2000 its median household income was $24,539, and 31.4 percent of its residents lived below the poverty line, including 45.5 percent of children. None of that is Bolles's doing, and none of it can be laid at his feet. It does show what became of the region he built in once the knitting machines left, most of them moving abroad, the same direction he had once gone to grow.
J. Chadbourn Bolles died in 1987.
The name still shows up now and then. In August 2016 a classic-car site posted a short video of a Lamborghini Espada and tagged it "Chadbourn Bolles," next to the name Rebecca Fuller and the Monterey Car Week. The post doesn't explain who Chadbourn Bolles is, whether a descendant, a namesake, or the car's owner, and I couldn't find out. It is enough that the name is still around, attached to a fast and fragile Italian machine, carried by someone the record doesn't identify.
The Shannon Hosiery Mill was torn down in 1988, the year after Bolles died. It had been Norman Shannon Illges's Depression-era bet and Chadbourn's three-year holding, and it had been the first home of a college that started with 265 students and fifteen faculty in nineteen classrooms. Before the building was demolished, someone at Columbus College decided the smokestack was worth keeping. Faculty, staff, and students took down more than 20,000 of its bricks and cleaned them by hand, one at a time, scraping off mortar laid in 1938 or 1939 by people whose names appear in no directory.
In 1991 the university built a clock tower in the middle of its main campus on the old dairy farm, named for Thomas Y. Whitley, its first president. The salvaged bricks line the inner arches. They are still there, keeping time above a quadrangle, the smoke long gone out of them, and they have held their place longer than Foreva ever did.
Part IIThe Playbook
The record of J. Chadbourn Bolles is thin but consistent. It contains no manifesto, no shareholder letters, and only one quoted sentence of strategy. What it does contain is a sequence of decisions: what he bought and when, what he built inside the company, where he put the sales function, where he went when the home market leveled off, and what he sold once he had no further use for it. The principles below are drawn from those decisions. Each is tied to evidence from Part I. Where the evidence is suggestive and not conclusive, the analysis says so.
The principles
- 1.Read the operation like a trust officer reads an estate.
- 2.Seize the step that sets the price.
- 3.Buy capacity in the downturn, buy brands in the upturn.
- 4.Put the seller where the buyer lives.
- 5.Borrow a better name than your own.
- 6.Partner where you cannot own the science.
- 7.Assume your rival ships the same week.
- 8.Name the product for what it does, not for what you hope.
- 9.Jump the tariff wall before it finishes rising.
- 10.Sell the building to the buyer who needs it most.
- 11.Sit at the founders' table, not the officers' table.
- 12.Leave before the curve tells you to.
C
The Chadbourn Build
From a rented knitting room in Burlington to a plant in Hamburg — the documented sequence of decisions.
1929
Bolles graduates from Wharton with a major in manufacturing and joins the American Trust Co. in Charlotte.
1936
Rufus D. Wilson, Inc. opens in Burlington with nine 42-gauge leggers and three footers, producing greige hosiery.
1938
Bolles, an assistant trust officer, becomes president.
1943
Knitting plant purchased in Shenandoah, Virginia.
1944
Siler City plant acquired and renovated; New York sales organization formed; company renamed Chadbourn Hosiery Mills, Inc.
1945
Larkwood Hosiery Mills acquired; offices move to Charlotte; Full Knit Hosiery Mills acquired, entering men's hosiery.
1952
Sales reach $11,906,000, up only 2.9% on the prior year.
1955
Shannon Hosiery Mill acquired in Columbus, Georgia; stretch partnership with Burlington Industries.
1958
Shannon mill sold to Muscogee school board for $250,000; becomes Columbus College.
1959
Bolles among the 21 founders of Charlotte's Quail Hollow Club.
1962
Foreva runless, seamless stocking launched — the same week as Hanes's rival product.
1970
Bolles retires; company at $68 million in sales, international and diversified.
Principle 1
Read the operation like a trust officer reads an estate
Bolles reached the factory from the trust department, and the bank's way of thinking showed in everything he did there. A trust officer's job is to find out where an estate's value actually sits, which assets carry it and which only look valuable, and to guard against permanent loss before looking for gain. When he took over twelve machines in Burlington, the business sold unfinished goods to people who would control the pricing. Someone raised in manufacturing might have seen a knitting shop to make more efficient. Someone raised in trusts would see an asset whose income was being taken by the next link in the chain.
What Bolles did over the following fifteen years, which was to build finishing, then a sales arm, then brands, reads like a fiduciary bringing value back to the estate from the intermediaries who had been collecting it. Agnes Cain Painter did something similar in Jacksonville, taking a failed hotel through foreclosure into a holding company she controlled. That kind of discipline works in any industry. A newcomer from outside a business who knows how to read a balance sheet will sometimes see its structure more clearly than people who grew up in it.
Tactic: Before you optimize anything in a new business, draw the value chain from raw input to end buyer and mark exactly where price is set and who sets it.
Principle 2
Seize the step that sets the price
The most consequential sentence in the 1953 profile is a quiet one: "During the next three years, dyeing and finishing facilities were added and additional knitting machines installed to triple the productive capacity of the organization." Before that, Chadbourn's stockings were "finished by commercial finishers." Undyed hosiery is a commodity sold by the dozen. Finished hosiery can carry a brand. Finishing was where an anonymous stocking became a Larkwood, so it was where the price was decided.
By the 1950s every full-fashioned stocking the company made was dyed and finished at A. T. Glenn's Charlotte plant. Putting all of it in one building was a decision in its own right. It placed the most valuable step in the company, the one where the brand was actually created, in the city where the executives worked. The knitting plants in Siler City, Shenandoah, and Gainesville were capacity. Charlotte was where the margin was made.
Tactic: Identify the single step in your process where an interchangeable product becomes a differentiated one, own it outright, and keep it physically and organizationally close to leadership.
Principle 3
Buy capacity in the downturn, buy brands in the upturn
Bolles made his acquisitions from 1943 to 1946, during the war and right after it, while silk was scarce, labor was short, and few owners of small mills could see what lay ahead. Shenandoah, Siler City, Larkwood, Full Knit, and Best Manufacturing came in quick succession. After Best was bought, capacity there "has been doubled." The pattern was to buy plants at wartime prices and expand them once peacetime demand came back.
The purchases were of two kinds. Most were for capacity: machines, floor space, trained workers. Larkwood was for a brand. The same distinction shows up a decade later, when Chadbourn bought the Shannon mill, a silk plant facing the nylon era, and apparently treated it as capacity more than identity. A buyer who keeps clear which kind of acquisition he is making will value each one correctly and won't pay brand prices for floor space.
A
Two Kinds of Acquisition
Chadbourn's documented purchases sorted by what was actually being bought.
| Acquisition | Year | What it added | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shenandoah, Va. plant | 1943 | Knitting capacity outside North Carolina | Capacity |
| Siler City building | 1944 | Shell renovated into a modern knitting plant | Capacity |
| Larkwood Hosiery Mills | 1945 | Charlotte plant plus the Larkwood name | Brand |
| Full Knit Hosiery Mills | 1945 | Entry into men's and boys' half hose | New category |
| Best Manufacturing Co. | c. 1946 | Gainesville plant; capacity later doubled | Capacity |
| Shannon Hosiery Mill | 1955 | Silk-era plant in Columbus, Ga.; sold 1958 | Held, then exited |
| Opel Strumpfwerke AG | c. 1958–1970 | Production inside the Common Market | New geography |
Tactic: Label every acquisition before you price it, whether capacity, brand, category, or geography, and refuse to let a seller bundle a premium for one into the price of another.
Principle 4
Put the seller where the buyer lives
In 1944, before he owned most of his plants, Bolles set up a sales organization in New York City. By 1953 it was a separate company, Chadbourn Sales Corp., in Room 4219 of the Empire State Building, headed by Frank T. Hayes, who held the title of president. Production was spread across three Southern states. Selling was in one office in Manhattan.
Hosiery for "the finer stores and specialty shops throughout the nation" was bought by people who worked in New York, and Bolles sent his salespeople to them. Making the sales arm its own corporation with its own president did more than tidy the org chart. It told buyers that Chadbourn was a merchant as well as a manufacturer, and it gave Hayes standing equal to the department-store buyers he dealt with. A mill selling under a Burlington letterhead is a supplier. One selling from the Empire State Building is a brand.
Tactic: Locate your selling function where your most important buyers make decisions, give its leader real title and authority, and let production stay wherever it is cheapest.
Principle 5
Borrow a better name than your own
Bolles put his own name on the corporation and someone else's on the product. The company was Chadbourn. The stockings women bought were Larkwood and Larkette, a name he got by buying Larkwood Hosiery Mills in 1945 and then extended to the whole full-fashioned line. "Larkwood" sounds like a stocking: light, a little pastoral, suggesting birdsong and good legs. "Chadbourn" sounds like a law firm.
Separating the corporate name from the consumer name became standard practice later. Bolles was doing it in the 1940s, and he did it by purchase instead of invention, which kept the risk low. An acquired brand already has recognition and a place in stores. He made his own name the name of the institution, what bankers, suppliers, and other businessmen saw, and handed the customer a name that had already shown it could sell.
Tactic: Separate the name that signals credibility to partners from the name that signals desire to customers, and when a proven consumer name is for sale, consider buying it before you build one.
Principle 6
Partner where you cannot own the science
In 1955 Chadbourn worked with Burlington Industries to introduce stretch socks and stockings made with fibers that came out of the wartime wool and silk shortages. Chadbourn's strengths were knitting, finishing, branding, and selling. It did not make fiber. Developing its own synthetic yarns would have been expensive and slow. Partnering with a big textile company gave it the new material while leaving it in charge of what it did best.
Bolles bought every capability he regarded as central to the business and partnered for the ones he regarded as peripheral, and fiber chemistry, crucial as it was, belonged to someone else's expertise. Stretch yarns fed into the seamless and runless stockings that followed, so the partnership amounted to buying an option on the next product generation without paying to develop it.
Tactic: When a breakthrough arrives in an input you do not make, partner with whoever makes it rather than building in-house, and spend your own capital on the steps where you already win.
Principle 7
Assume your rival ships the same week
Foreva and the Hanes product came out in the same week of 1962. That doesn't mean anyone copied anyone. In a mature industry where everyone uses the same machine builders and yarn suppliers, competitors reach the same breakthrough at about the same time. The edge goes to whoever ships at all, and even more to whoever has a plan for the market after the competitor's version shows up.
Gordon Hanes's joke shows a leader who had already thought about that day after. He saw that a runless stocking would shrink the business and said so in public, which gave his company room for whatever the product actually turned out to do. Simultaneous launches are normal in technology markets and should be expected, not treated as a disaster. The question to plan for is not how to be first by a month. It is what happens once everyone has the same thing.
Tactic: Plan every launch on the assumption that your strongest competitor releases an equivalent product the same week, and decide in advance what will still differentiate you when they do.
Principle 8
Name the product for what it does, not for what you hope
"Foreva." "Runless." The names claimed permanence and the stockings didn't deliver it. Wharton's verdict is short: "the promise of 'runless' was oversold." The product was a real improvement, seamless and more resistant to runs. The marketing turned an improvement into a guarantee, and the stockings broke the guarantee.
Smith v. Bolles is the legal version of this lesson. Chief Justice Fuller drew a firm line between what a buyer paid and "the expected fruits of an unrealized speculation." Customers make the same distinction. They will forgive a product that does what it says and then some. They won't forgive one that falls short of its name, because the name was the deal. Dickie Bolles sold underwater land as the Garden of Eden and spent his last years with lawsuits and indictments. Foreva was nothing close to fraud, but it drew on the same supply of credibility, and every manufacturer has only so much.
§
Promise vs. Product
Two Bolleses, two oversold promises, very different consequences.
| Richard J. Bolles (Florida Fruit Lands) | J. Chadbourn Bolles (Foreva) | |
|---|---|---|
| The claim | "The Promised Land," "the Garden of Eden" | "Runless," seamless, named for forever |
| The reality | Submerged Everglades swampland | A real improvement that still ran |
| The gap | Fraud alleged Suits in 1911, trial in 1913, federal indictment | Oversold A marketing overreach |
| What saved the business | Nothing; charges dropped only at death | International diversification |
Tactic: Write the product name and the headline claim last, after testing, and cap them at what the product reliably does in the hands of an ordinary customer on an ordinary day.
Principle 9
Jump the tariff wall before it finishes rising
"To gain a foothold in the European Common Market." That is the one strategic statement from Bolles in the record, and it explains the most important move of his later career. When the Common Market set up a shared external tariff, an exporter outside it faced a growing cost disadvantage while producers inside faced none. Buying the Opel Strumpfwerke plant in Hamburg put Chadbourn on the inside.
It paid off. When American hosiery demand fell, Chadbourn "continued to post sales increases" because of the international business. The decision came well before the American downturn was obvious, and that early timing is what made it valuable. A foreign plant bought after the home market has already collapsed is a rescue attempt. One bought before is a hedge, and hedges cost far less when nobody else thinks they need one.
Tactic: When a major trading bloc begins harmonizing its barriers, decide early whether you need production inside it, because the cost of entry only rises as the wall goes up.
Principle 10
Sell the building to the buyer who needs it most
Chadbourn held the Shannon mill for three years, from 1955 to 1958, and sold it to the Muscogee County school board for $250,000 through George Woodruff, Jr., a respected local developer. The board needed a building for a college that had been conditionally approved and had no campus. A silk-era hosiery mill had limited value to a nylon-era hosiery company. To a town trying to open a college by September, it was urgently valuable.
The sources don't say what Chadbourn paid Illges, so whether the sale made a profit can't be known. The structure of the deal is still instructive. A physical asset is worth the most to whoever needs it most, and that is often someone outside your own industry. Selling to the strongest outside buyer through a well-connected local broker gives you the best price and goodwill in the community at once. The building went on to house 265 students in nineteen classrooms and became the founding site of a university.
Tactic: When an asset no longer fits your strategy, look beyond your own industry for the buyer with the most urgent need for it, and use a respected local intermediary to reach them.
Principle 11
Sit at the founders' table, not the officers' table
Bolles was one of twenty-one founders of the Quail Hollow Club in 1959, and he held no office. Cocke, Harris, Boyle, and Cramer did. That position is easy to miss and worth noticing. A founder belongs to the governing group, shares in its legitimacy, and gets to know everyone else at the table, without the time and political exposure that come with running the place.
For a manufacturer whose plants were scattered across the South and whose sales office was in New York, being part of Charlotte's founding circle tied him to the city's bankers, merchants, and developers. Bolles had started in a Charlotte bank, and as a club founder he took his place among the city's leading businessmen. The relationships formed at that kind of table add up over decades. The club itself went on to host the Kemper Open and the PGA Tour, so his name is attached to an institution that outlasted almost everything else he was part of.
Tactic: Join the founding group of the civic institutions in your home city, take a seat without taking an office, and treat those relationships as long-term capital that pays out slowly.
Principle 12
Leave before the curve tells you to
Bolles retired in 1970 at $68 million in sales. The company was international and diversified, and sales were still growing even as the domestic stocking market fell. He didn't stay until the numbers turned. He handed over a company whose most recent results were strong and whose exposure to the American decline had been offset by the foreign business he had built.
Leaving is a decision too, and the record suggests he made it with the same timing he brought to the Hamburg purchase. He left while the story was still about growth. Whatever happened after 1970 belonged to someone else, and he was judged, by Wharton among others, on a run that ended high. The founders whose names last are usually the ones who chose when to leave.
Tactic: Set your exit for a moment of demonstrated strength, after you have built the hedge against the next downturn but before the downturn arrives, and let your successors own whatever comes next.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Chadbourn Hosiery Mills company profile, 1953Chadbourn Hosiery Mills, Inc., with general offices in Charlotte and seven plants in three states, began operation 17 years ago in rented quarters and with a few knitting machines.
— Richard J. Bolles, from his journals, as quoted by George Hallam in Bolles: The Standard Bearer (1983)I am in nearly every business and social transaction guided almost entirely by impulse, with no fixed principles.
Maxims
- Value sits where the price is set. Find the step that turns a commodity into a brand, and own it.
- Twelve machines is a beginning, not a business. Rented quarters and a few knitting frames can become seven plants in three states if every acquisition has a clear purpose.
- Put your name on the company, someone else's on the box. The name that earns trust from bankers is seldom the one that makes a customer reach for the product.
- Sell from where the buyers sit. An office in the Empire State Building can turn a Carolina mill into a national brand.
- Partner for the science you will never own. Spend your own capital on knitting and finishing, and let the fiber makers make fiber.
- Your rival ships the same week. Plan for the market that exists after the competition matches you.
- A name is a contract. Call a stocking Foreva and every run counts against you.
- Get inside the wall early. A foothold in a protected market is cheapest before anyone else wants one.
- Old buildings find new purposes. Sell a plant to the buyer who needs it most, even if that buyer is a school board.
- Leave on a rising number. The best moment to hand over the company comes after the hedge is built and before the decline arrives.
