The Tilt Silk Mill

The four-storey brick Tilt Silk Mill stands at 303 North Twelfth Street in Pottsville, at the corner of Twelfth Street and Laurel Boulevard. It was built in 1887–1888 as a silk factory for the Phoenix Silk Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey — and Pottsville paid for it, the town’s citizens subscribing more than a hundred thousand dollars to raise the building on the ground of Anthracite Park, the borough’s baseball field. Operations began on July 16, 1888. The mill worked here for more than ninety years, employing close to a thousand hands at its peak, until it closed in 1979; since the mid-1980s the building has stood in commercial use, and it now houses an auto-rental and self-storage business at Twelfth and Laurel.

The ball ground on Twelfth Street

Before the mill there was a ball field. Anthracite Park was the home ground of the Pottsville baseball club: the Pottsville Republican has the team playing there as it organized in the spring of 1885, and still crossing bats on the grounds in the summer of 1886. When the town set out to land a silk mill two years later, the park was what it offered up. The location was named plainly enough on May 31, 1887 — “the location of the silk mill will be at Anthracite Park” — and confirmed again three weeks later, when the stakes were driven on the spot.

One thread in the record is not settled. A fortnight before the site was announced, a Palo Alto man named J. W. O’Connor offered $10,000 toward “the proposed silk mill to be erected on the Haywood estate,” and the mass-meeting report of May 17 uses the same name. Whether Anthracite Park stood on the Haywood estate or was a competing parcel that won out, the located record does not say, and this profile does not guess.

”We’ve got the silk mill”

The building was a civic undertaking, financed by the town rather than the company. At a mass meeting on the evening of May 16, 1887 — reported the next day — the Board of Trade laid out the terms: Pottsville would subscribe $85,000 to $100,000 to erect the building; the Phoenix Silk Manufacturing Company would install some $200,000 of machinery, then execute a mortgage on the plant and guarantee the subscribers a return of four to four and a half per cent. The paper was emphatic that the scheme “did not involve the gift or contribution of money” — it was “an investment or loan, which would be amply secured.” Walter S. Sheafer called the meeting to order; Burd S. Patterson, secretary of the Board of Trade, carried much of the work; and the subscription list — some seventy names long, with the Yuengling name at its head — went round the town’s banks and businessmen. A telegram from Philadelphia added George R. Kaercher’s thousand dollars and a $3,000 pledge from a Mr. Corbin.

Pottsville was not alone in the running. The mill was a prize contested across the region — a competition a later account placed among Hazleton, Allentown, and Pottsville — and the local paper fought for it in print. Ashland’s own correspondent conceded on June 4 that “Ashland didn’t secure the promise of the silk mill,” and through the summer the Republican traded blows with the Hazleton press, complaining on July 18 that “the Hazleton papers continue to lie about the institution with all the vehemence at their command.” On May 31 the committee brought back the news, in the words the paper printed from its secretary: “We’ve got the silk mill.”

The contract, the architect, and the ground

The papers were executed on June 2, 1887. They fixed the interest to subscribers at four per cent — the earlier meeting had floated “four to four and a half” — set the lot at 600 by 350 feet adjoining the People’s Railway depot, and required the building to be finished by December 1, 1887. The plans were the work of an architect the Republican named Jacoby, of Allentown; the construction superintendent was Louis Soleliac, lately of the Adelaide Mills at Allentown — one of several threads tying the new mill to the older silk district of the Lehigh Valley. The architect’s given name is a small unsettled point in the record: within three weeks the same paper printed his initials three different ways — L. B., L. F., and L. S. Jacoby — so only the surname and the city can be stated with confidence.

On June 15 the Republican printed a rough sketch of the architect’s foundation plan across its front page, its oil room, boiler house, and stack labelled — an early public look at the building thirteen months before it opened. Six days later, on June 21, the siting was made formal: Burd S. Patterson drove the stakes on his thirtieth birthday, with the architect and the surveyor Andrew Cochran. It was settled that the main building would rise four storeys, and the enterprise took the name it would keep — the Tilt Silk Mill Company, for its president Albert Tilt, with Joseph W. Congdon as vice-president, both arriving from Allentown that evening.

The building work went to a local man. “A Pottsville mechanic secured the first contract on the new silk mill,” the Republican noted on June 24, and on the morning of June 27 “ground for the foundation of the new silk mill was broken by Contractor Auman.” For all the ceremony of the stakes, the work ran well past its schedule: the contract had called for completion by December 1, 1887, and the mill did not begin operations until the following July — roughly seven months later.

The mill opens, 1888

Operations began on Monday, July 16, 1888. The Pottsville Republican of that day announced it under the head “The Silk Mill,” with the note “Operations Commenced To-Day”: “work was commenced in the Tilt silk mill this morning.” It was, the paper wrote, “a cause for pride and congratulation” for the more than three hundred townspeople who had put up better than a hundred thousand dollars to secure it. Some later accounts — including the current owner’s website and a local historical-society post — give July 17; the contemporaneous daily, printed on the day itself, is the earlier record, and the reports that follow it describe the plant only beginning to fill that week.

The mill’s first workers were overwhelmingly young women. “Hundreds of young girls have applied for work at the silk mill,” the paper reported on July 19; the first hands were taken on in classes of thirty and taught by thirty experienced women brought down from Allentown, the force to be “increased gradually.” The plant was still finding its feet: on July 20 Superintendent Harris promised the citizens a day to “view the mysteries of the interior,” though “at present everything about the place is more or less in confusion.”

Beyond the mill walls the effect was immediate. Within days of the opening the Republican was pointing to Allentown’s experience and predicting a wave of new houses, and the Schuylkill Real Estate Title Insurance and Trust Company — later the Schuylkill Trust Company, whose downtown tower of 1925 still stands — was advertising home loans directly to “silk mill operatives and others,” with building lots offered “on Laurel St. near silk mill.” The factory reshaped its corner of the borough as much by the houses it drew as by the silk it made.

The working mill

The mill’s middle decades are the thinnest part of its documented life, but the record does not go silent. A Republican historical column, reprinting a notice of December 1910, has the Tilt Silk Mill preparing to run “full handed” in the coming year for the first time in three — a plain trace of the short time the textile trade had worked in the years just before. And the plant was still at work well into the twentieth century: in October 1933 it placed a paid notice ordering all its employees to take their place in Pottsville’s National Recovery Administration parade, which by itself sets aside the occasional claim that the mill had closed in the 1920s. In that same parade the Onyx Blouse Company marched separately, as a distinct Pottsville industry.

The building’s size is reported inconsistently, and the figures are best left as their sources give them: a 1985 advertisement put the whole at 127,000 square feet, a 2003 newspaper feature at 144,000, and the county assessment records the surviving main block as a four-storey brick building. All three can be true of a complex that grew and shrank across a century, and none is worth averaging into a false precision.

Closing and after

The mill’s long working life at Twelfth and Laurel came to an end in 1979. A 2003 Republican & Herald feature on the county’s manufacturing decline records the closure and remembers the mill going “from employing nearly 1,000 people at peak production to just a handful” in the same building — the peak figure this profile follows, in preference to the larger numbers sometimes given.

The building did not stay empty for long. By August 1985 Ed Keese had opened a car-rental and self-storage business in it — Ed’s U Save Auto Rental and Ed’s U Store — at Twelfth and Laurel; a notice that month recorded 24,000 of the building’s 127,000 square feet then given over to storage. That commercial life has continued: as of 2026 the mill houses Ed’s USA Auto Rentals, with self-storage, at 303 North Twelfth Street — a silk factory that Pottsville built for itself, still standing and still in use nearly a hundred and forty years after the town gave up its ball field to raise it.