1940 New Car Order

Robert Harper to Ann White Harper, Recorded Voice

Pilot Mills in Raleigh

The following information is from The Village of Pilot Mills Website. 

Mill Hill Village at Pilot Mill - 1892-1982

Pilot Mills in 1896

 Before the existence of the Village at Pilot Mill Mill, another village stood on the same site. Known as Pilot Mill Hill ("Mill Hill" being a name common to the mill villages of North Carolina), it comprised 68 houses of varying sizes. The wooden homes with mud yards fronting unpaved streets were rented to mill workers and their families for a few dollars a month. Covering the area of our present community between Haynes (formerly North Wilmington) and North Blount streets, the old village included a school (now the Hope Elementary School), a church (Pilot Church), and a company store run by the mill.

When the mill closed in 1982, the village was destroyed and the homes were razed. For the next twenty years, the area was desolate, plagued by drug deals, shootings and gang war within the neighboring Capitol Park community.

1914 Plan

In the days of the mill, Haynes Street was called North Wilmington Street, but otherwise the layout of the original village was eerily similar to that of ours today based on the 1914 plan to the left. The former homes have been replaced by buildings much larger and more substantial and the diverse occupations of the new residents are all far removed from mill work. Today high tech industries draw new residents to Raleigh and the Village at Pilot Mill. In the 1890's a new industrial enterprise and the promise of opportunity and a better life drew people to Mill Hill, Raleigh, from around the state.

 

Photo from Mike Legeros at Hidden Raleigh.

Photo by Mike Legeros at Hidden Raleigh

Photo by Mike Legeros at Hidden Raleigh

William Ratcliffe and Etta Rebecca White early 1900s

On the back of the photo reads, Will Rackcliff and Etta White

Portrait of William Ratcliffe and Etta White from about 1900. William and Etta worked at Pilot Mills in Raleigh, NC and are listed in the 1899-1900 City Directory.

Name / Occupation / Address
William Ratcliff; wks Pilot Mills; r 4 Pilot Mills (cotton mill line inspector?)
Miss Etta R White; wks Pilot Mills; r 4 Pilot Mills (cotton mill weaver)

From the 1900 Census, they live next door to each other.

Etta and William are buried in Oakwood Cemetery and her headstone is the Ratcliffe Angel, guardian of Raleigh’s dead. Read a good article written by Josh Shaffer about the Angel on the N&O website.

Shaffer: Graveyard angel glares in darkness

 Photo via Flickr @ Ashe

Etta White

 "By day, the angel guards the grave of Etta Ratcliffe, who died in 1918 after a sickness that dragged on for five months. Stern-faced, unsmiling, the angel doesn’t gaze so much as glower into the distance – a fitting monument to a mother of five dead at 37."

Read more "here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/10/21/2429070/shaffer-graveyard-angel-glares.html#storylink=cpy

 [The angel] came to Raleigh from Italy, ordered by Etta Ratcliffe’s husband and knitting-factory magnate, William. But her ship foundered and sunk off the coast of Wilmington, and the marble angel spent years underwater before a tender-hearted seaman plucked her out of the ocean.