Lewis, Kemp Plummer, 1880-1952

A lifelong textile executive with Erwin Mills in Durham, N.C., Kemp Plummer Lewis was the son of Richard Henry Lewis and Cornelia Viola Battle. He attended the University of North Carolina, where he was later president of the alumni association and a member of the first board of trustees of the consolidated university. He was also active in Durham civic affairs and Episcopal church work.

From the description of Kemp Plummer Lewis papers, 1908-1946. WorldCat record id: 31908583

Kemp Plummer Lewis (1880-1952) was born in Raleigh, N.C., to Dr. Richard Henry Lewis and Cornelia Viola Battle. Richard Henry Lewis, a native of Pitt County, N.C., was a noted physician, serving on the state Board of Medical Examiners and the North Carolina State Board of Health. He was also president of the American Public Health Association in 1908. Richard Henry Lewis sat on the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina for 35 years and Saint Mary's School in Raleigh for 23 years. He was professor of the diseases of the eye and ear in the Leonard Medical School of Shaw University. An active member of Christ's Church in Raleigh, Richard Henry Lewis held numerous church offices including that of senior warden. Kemp Plummer Lewis's mother, Cornelia Viola Battle, was the daughter of Kemp Plummer Battle, president and professor of history at the University of North Carolina.

Kemp Plummer Lewis's father, Richard Henry Lewis, was married three times. With his first wife, Cornelia Viola Battle, whom he married in 1877, he had four children: Richard Henry Lewis, longtime president of the Oxford Cotton Mills in Oxford, N.C.; Martha (Pattie) Battle Lewis, who married Dr. Isaac Manning of Chapel Hill, died early in life; Kemp Plummer Lewis; and Ivey Foreman Lewis, biologist and dean at the University of Virginia. In 1890, Richard Henry Lewis married one of the first 13 students of Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, Mary Long Gordon, who died in 1895 leaving a daughter, Nell (Cornelia) Battle Lewis. Nell Battle Lewis practiced law for a short time and taught at Saint Mary's School while writing a popular Sunday column called Incidentally for the Raleigh News and Observer . She was, early in her career, an advocate of labor, penal, and mental health reform, as well as of women's rights. Her later writings were ardently anti-communist and questioning of her previous allies. Richard Henry Lewis's third wife, whom he married in 1897, was Annie Blackwell Foreman; she died in 1917. [For earlier genealogical material see family tree in the inventory to the Lewis Family Papers (#427)].

Kemp Plummer Lewis attended the Raleigh Male Academy, also known as Morson's School, presided over by Professor Hugh Morson, in his day a noted North Carolina educator. In 1900, Lewis was graduated from the University of North Carolina with an A.B. degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key. As a student, he sang in the local Episcopal church choir (Chapel of the Cross) and was a brother of the Upsilon Chapter of the Zeta Psi Fraternity and the Gorgon's Head Lodge. Lewis played tennis and baseball and was elected president of the Athletic Association his senior year.

A few months after his graduation, Lewis joined his father's friend, textile mill owner William Allen Erwin, in business. Erwin had begun his career in 1874 as a salesman in the general store of his great-uncle Edwin Michael Holt's mill village in Company Shops, now Burlington, N.C. Erwin left the mercantile business after one year to become the secretary-treasurer and general manager of the E. M. Holt Plaid Mills before moving to Durham in 1892 to join Benjamin N. Duke in creating the Erwin Mills.

Kemp Lewis began his 52-year career with Erwin Mills as William Allen Erwin's stenographer and personal assistant, going so far as to move into Erwin's home in order to help his employer rear his children. (Erwin's wife, Sadie L. Smedes, daughter of Dr. Aldert Smedes, founder of Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, was ill and out of the home.) After a short time, Kemp Plummer Lewis became the Erwin Mills' purchasing agent and, in 1904, he became the head of the No. 2 mill in the model mill town of Duke, now known as Erwin, N.C. Lewis continued as purchasing agent for both mills. In 1919, Lewis became assistant secretary-treasurer of the company and, eight years later, when the secretary-treasurer, William Allen Erwin, succeeded Benjamin Duke as president, Lewis took the vacated secretary-treasurer position. Erwin was incapacitated the last few years of his life, and, during this time, Lewis became president of the company in all but name. Upon Erwin's death in 1932, Lewis assumed the presidency of Erwin Mills, keeping the duties of the treasurer as well. He held these two positions until 1948, when he became chairman of the board, a post he recommended be created. He was chairman of the board at his death.

For most of these years the Erwin Mills steadily expanded. In 1906, the company acquired the No. 3 plant at Cooleemee, N.C. In 1910, the No. 4 mill and bleachery at West Durham went up. The year 1926 saw the No. 5 mill at Erwin created, and, in 1932, the No. 6 mill (formerly the Pearl Cotton Mills) at Durham was purchased. The company later added a sheeting, bleachery, and sewing plant to the No. 4 mill as well as a bleachery and dyeing plant to the No. 3 mill in Cooleemee. The Erwin Mills group manufactured denims, sheetings, sheets and pillow cases, suitings, cantons, tickings, coverts, outings and flannels, among other materials. During his career Lewis saw the company grow from only one 25,000-spindle mill to a complex of eight mills boasting 200,000 spindles.

These years of growth were also years in which the textile industry in the South was racked by conflicts between labor organizers and management. Lewis, while protesting against government intervention in wage and labor disputes and decrying the tactics of organizers whom he felt were betraying the workers they claimed to represent, did feel that there were mills (which he generally designated as the smaller ones to the south) that did exploit their labor. He was adamantly opposed to closed shops although he did negotiate a union contract for each of the mills under his control. Although his company experienced several strikes in the thirties and forties, they were not violent.

The textile industry recognized Lewis's contributions to his profession and elected him president of the Cotton Manufacturers' Association of North Carolina, 1931-32, and of the American Cotton Manufacturers' Association, 1939-1940. These organizations, under Lewis's direction, dealt primarily with interstate rail freight rates and wage and labor legislation on both the state and national level.

Lewis's other business interests included the presidency of the Erwin Yarn Co. of Philadelphia (which was managed by Sam H. Garrett) and the Bank of Harnett in Erwin, N.C. He was vice president of the Oxford Cotton Mills and sat on the board of directors of the Fidelity Bank of Durham and the Durham and Southern Railway Company. Lewis and his two brothers also received income from a family farm in Pitt County (Ivey Foreman's Greenwreath which was rented by W. H. Moore.) The Lewis family attempted to develop another family farm (their father's Cloverdale). Unfortunately, the Depression occurred simultaneously with this development, and the sales, which dragged on for more than a decade, were not very profitable.

The University of North Carolina remained a major interest of Lewis's for most of his life. As early as the 1930s, he could claim that five generations of his family had taken degrees at Chapel Hill. He and his two brothers not only graduated from this institution, they also spent summers in their youth at their grandfather Kemp Plummer Battle's home, Senlac, now the Baptist Student Union in Chapel Hill. Battle was president of the school at the time. Kemp Plummer Lewis was president of the Alumni Association of the University for two years, 1931-1933, first filling the unexpired term of Felix Harvey who died while in office. During his presidency of the Association, Lewis aided the new president of the University, Frank Porter Graham, in lobbying the state legislature against drastic cuts in funding. He also led a membership drive for the Association. An early supporter of university consolidation which brought together Woman's College in Greensboro (now UNC-Greensboro), State College in Raleigh (now North Carolina State University), and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Lewis joined his father and brother Richard as a trustee and was named to the first board of trustees of the Consolidated University. Lewis remained a trustee for eleven years, 1932-1943, serving on the board's Finance Committee most of this time. Growing from his own years as a college athlete, Lewis's interest in Carolina athletics (especially football) remained strong; he was an early member of the University of North Carolina's Educational Foundation (Ram's Club). Lewis's interest in the University started to wane in the mid-1930s when he began to feel that the University, under the influence of Frank Porter Graham, was becoming too liberal and had begun to exhibit what he felt to be "socialistic tendencies."

Also active in Durham civic affairs, Lewis served on the City Board of Education from May 1925 until April 1937. On the board, he voiced his opposition to long school hours and various innovations in public education such as the study of music, art, civics, and the incorporation of extracurriculars into the school day. In other city matters, he aided committees involved in reorganization of city roads and rails, as well as extension of the city limits. During the Depression, he served on Durham's Relief Committee. Lewis was also a member of Rotary and president of the Durham club. In 1948, the Chamber of Commerce presented him with the City of Durham's Civic Award as the outstanding citizen of the year.

Lewis was a lifelong Episcopalian. A stalwart layman of Saint Philip's Church in Durham, he was for many years a vestryman, including a number of terms as senior warden. He sat on various committees involved in church financial matters, leading several all member canvasses and fund drives. He was on the Executive board of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina and was chairman of the Finance Committee of the Diocese.

Kemp Plummer Lewis lived in the Erwin Mill village from 1900 until 1912, when he married Lottie Hays Sharp of Belhaven, daughter of Carroll Sharp of Hertford County, N.C.. and niece of William Dossey Pruden of Edenton. Pruden was a Confederate officer who, after the war, was recognized as the leading lawyer in the Albemarle section of the state. Lottie Hays Sharp had one sister, Carroll, who married Clark Nickerson, an employee of Sears and Roebuck and one half-brother, William Windley, who briefly attended the University of North Carolina before taking his medical degree from the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia. Kemp Plummer Lewis and Lottie Hays Sharp moved into Durham from the mill village and there had four daughters: Anne Foreman Lewis, who married Edward S. Orgain; Margaret Pruden Lewis, who married Henry Clark Bridgers, Jr.; Lottie Sharp Lewis, who married Charles T. Wollen, Jr.; and Martha Hoskins Lewis, who married David S. Stanley. The daughters attended the Durham elementary schools before beginning instruction in a series of private academies including the Holton-Arms School, Stuart Hall, the National Cathedral School, Saint Mary's, Sweet Briar, and the Abbot School of Design.

Devotees of bridge, golf, and murder mysteries, the Lewises were members of the Princess Anne Country Club and the Cavalier Beach Club in Virginia Beach, Va., as well as the Hope Valley Country Club in Durham. Lewis was a founder and longtime board member of the Durham club. They spent their summers at various North Carolina resorts and in Virginia Beach, Va., as well as on golf courses such as those in Pinehurst, N.C., and Augusta, Ga. The Lewises also regularly commuted to New York City and Washington, D.C., on business and shopping trips.

(Adapted from the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography with additional information taken from the papers.)

From the guide to the Kemp Plummer Lewis Papers, 1908-1946, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)