Pontiac Mills

History

Pontiac Mills is a historic textile mill complex on Knight Street in the village of Pontiac, Rhode Island within the city of Warwick. The mills produced the original Fruit of the Loom brand of cloth.

The current mills were built beginning in 1863 by Robert Knight and Benjamin Knight (B.B. & R. Knight Company) to replace a smaller textile mill they had acquired from US Senator John Hopkins Clarke. Robert Knight, formerly a clerk at the mill's company store, had begun leasing the mill upon Clarke's election to the US senate in 1846, before purchasing it outright in 1850. The Knights later demolished it to erect the current mill in 1863.

The mills produced uniforms for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. In 1920 Webster Knight sold Fruit of the Loom and the Pontiac Mills to the Consolidated Textile Corporation of New York for approximately $20 million, one of the largest deals ever made in the textile industry at that time.

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