Agawam Woolen Mill

There has been a mill on Elm Street at Three Mile Brook since the early 1800s. Justus and Calvin Bedortha established a mill there that did only custom work until 1812. The mill began to produce broadcloth during the War of 1812, only to see demand for that product fall once the war ended and foreign imports were once again available. The business was reorganized in 1840 as Norton, Bedortha, and Company. The new owners rebuilt and enlarged the original mill and resumed custom work at that time.

On May 12, 1857, the Agawam Company was incorporated by Ashbel Sykes and Newbury Norton. In addition to the Elm Street mill, they bought a mill in South Hadley, Massachusetts, to make wool prepared in Agawam into cloth. The cloth was then returned to Agawam and finished. In 1875, a new brick mill was built in Agawam and the entire operation consolidated there. An 1899 fire destroyed the building, which was immediately rebuilt.

In addition to the company’s flannels, which were popular throughout New England and beyond, the mill also made satinet and stockinet, and for several years was the only manufacturer of butcher’s frocking, which was made into coats used by butchers and others working in cold storage.

Beginning in 1901, increasing demand necessitated a series of additions to the mill, which was powered by water from the “factory pond” or “mill pond” created by a dam directly behind the mill. In 1918, A.B. Emery and A.G. Harris, whose Harris-Emery Company also operated mills in New Hampshire and Vermont, bought the Agawam Company.

The reorganized company, known as the Agawam Woolen Company, operated until the late 1940s.

After World War II, synthetic materials and less-expensive imports negatively impacted the business, which was reorganized as the Agawam Manufacturing Company in 1952. The company continued to struggle; the company closed and the property was sold in 1954. The following year, a flood washed away the mill pond dam, symbolically ending nearly 150 years of textile work on three Mile Brook.

From Agawam and Feeding Hills, David Cecchi, Arcadia Publishing, 2000