Here we have issues of Lexington’s The Er-Lantern spanning from 1958 to 1971. Similar Spray’s Fieldcrest Mill Whistle and High Point’s Sew It Seams The Er-Lantern was a company paper depicting everyday life around the Erlanger Mills village.

Opened in 1914, Erlanger Mills was created by Charles and Abraham Erlanger as a source of cotton for their Baltimore underwear company, which originally produced the one-piece “union suits.” By the 1920s, the company’s 250-ace complex included over employee 300 houses, multiple churches and schools, a hospital, and even its own baseball team. The village was officially annexed into Lexington in 1942 and the mill was sold to Gastonia’s Parkdale Mill Inc. in 1972. In 2008, the village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photographer H. Lee Waters, who took many of the photos featured in the paper, has a collection of village-life snapshots on their website here.

These papers were provided to us by our partners at the Davidson County Public Library.