Bancroft Mills

Bancroft Mills, founded by Joseph Bancroft in 1831 on the Brandywine River near Wilmington, Delaware, grew from an old grist mill into one of the most important local businesses and a textile center of national and global significance. Bancroft had joined his family near Wilmington in 1824 after remaining in England to complete an apprenticeship to a cotton manufacturer, was hired by a cotton mill near Wilmington in 1826, and married Sarah Poole in 1829. After purchasing land and water rights in 1831, he converted the site into a textile mill where cotton was spun, carded into thread, and woven into cloth. In 1851 he returned to England to learn new fabric-finishing methods, and during the Civil War his mill became the largest producer in the United States of fabrics for book cover and window shades. An 1865 agreement with his sons began a period of great expansion as the company partnered with the Simpson Company to print fabric, hired a chemist to develop colorfast dyes, became in 1876 the first company outside Europe to produce Turkey Red Cloth, and won a bronze medal for its patents at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. Bancroft Mills continued to lead the industry with new developments, including rayon fabric for hospital and restaurant linens in 1916, while its employee culture expanded through the Bancroft Athletic Association in 1922 and the first issue of The Bancroft Bulletin in 1923. The Great Depression in the 1930s began the company’s decline as family deaths and poor profits hurt the business, though new water-resistant and flame-resistant finishes appeared in 1940 and wartime production changes in 1942, including women replacing men lost to the war effort, were sustained by the Everglaze finishing program for Simpson’s. New cloth finishes improved fortunes in 1945, and by the 1950s research and development, the Ban-Lon program, and the acquisition of other companies and trademarks became more important than finished cloth production. In 1961 Indian Head Mills bought Bancroft Mills, which then employed over 2,000 workers and transferred rights to most of Bancroft’s patents to the new owner. A failed unionization attempt in 1964 marked the worst period of employee relations in the company’s history. Indian Head Mills suspended operations and closed the site in 1973, leaving fewer than 350 employees, but that year Fred Krapf, Richard C. "Kippy" duPont, and Clifford Winton formed the Industrial Park Trust, bought the mill, and kept it running to support remaining employees’ pensions by leasing the site to Wilmington Finishing Company. After Wilmington Finishing Company closed in 1997 and the space was leased to Wilmington Piece Dye, all operations at Bancroft Mills ceased in 2003.

Delaware · United States