Columbiaville Woolen Mills, Columbiaville, MI, circa 1940

About this postcard

A long two-story brick mill with rows of tall multi-pane windows stretches across the frame, a smokestack rising behind it and a water tower at the right. A grassy, overgrown lot and a line of 1930s and 1940s automobiles fill the foreground, and smoke drifts from the stack, indicating the plant was operating when the photograph was made. The caption identifies it as the Columbiaville Woolen Mills in Columbiaville, Michigan, a Flint River community in Lapeer County that grew up around lumbering and water-powered mills in the nineteenth century. A mill of this kind washed, carded, spun, and wove local wool into cloth and blankets, and small Michigan mill towns often kept one running into the early twentieth century before textile production consolidated elsewhere.