In 1895 Cone and his brother Caesar began a denim mill, Proximity Manufacturing Company, the first of several such mills, on the outskirts of Greensboro. The company was named Proximity because of its close proximity to cotton fields and gins. The Cone mills were soon the world’s leading producer of denim, corduroy, and flannel. By the time of Cone’s death, his mills were producing one-third of the world’s denim. Greensboro was chosen as the site for the mills because of the city’s excellent infrastructure (including railroads going in six directions) and the availability of cheap land. The defunct North Carolina Steel and Iron Company had bought thousands of acres of land for a steel mill, but the nearby ore deposits proved unworthy of production. Initially, twenty-five acres were offered free to the Cones. The brothers subsequently bought 2,142 additional acres from the steel company, including land along the main line of the Southern Railway. The brothers bought additional mills throughout North Carolina, including the Ashville Cotton Mills, Salisbury Cotton Mills, and Minneola Manufacturing Company in Gibsonville.
Explanation: In 1870 Cone’s father founded a wholesale grocery supply business, which with the addition of the four oldest sons became H. Cone & Sons in 1878. The firm soon did a sizable business with several southern cotton mills. Moses and his brother Caesar were full partners by 1878 and spent the next twelve years traversing the South in search of sales. They rode trains to the extent possible, but much of their travel was on horseback. The cotton mills in the Carolinas served their employees with mill towns and company stores. It was the company store that was the customer of H. Cone & Sons. Because of the financial difficulties of their customers, the Cones were soon accepting baled textiles and yarn in payment for groceries. The experience gained from the wholesaling of these textile goods led the Cones to become commission sales agents for some of the textile companies. Moses realized that marketing by southern textile mills was limited because their products were not standardized, and they lacked an organized selling organization. He spent much of 1890 attempting to get several southern mills to form a selling organization that would make products more uniform. The result was the 1891 formation of the Cone Export & Commission Company in New York City. The main office was moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1893. About forty-seven mills in the Carolinas and Georgia eventually joined the organization; there were only about fifty mills in the South at that time. The Cones signed five-year contracts with the mills wherein the brothers had exclusive selling rights at a 5 percent commission.
