Mildred Gwin Andrews Papers

Mildred Gwin was born on January 31, 1903 in Greenwood, Miss. to Sally Barnes Humphreys and Samuel Lizzie Gwin, a prominent lawyer and cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta region. Mildred attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and after graduation in 1921 returned to Mississippi to study law in her father’s office. In 1923 she married Stephen Barnwell, a cotton broker of Gastonia, N.C. The couple had one child, Gwin Barnwell, but they divorced in November 1937. Eight years later Mildred Gwin married Elmer F. Andrews, who died in 1964. Mildred Andrews began work in the textile industry in 1930 with the Gaston County Yarn Spinners Association, later renamed the Southern Combed Yarn Spinners Association (SCYSA). She also took a night job in the spinning room of a cotton mill in order to learn mill techniques. Andrews advanced to executive secretary of the SCYSA in 1936 and held this position for ten years. During World War II she worked as a consultant on textiles to the U.S. Army Office of Quartermaster General and served on the War Production Board’s Committee on Industrial Salvage. During the years 1946 to 1952, Andrews worked as a field representative with the public relations firm Dudley, Anderson, and Yutzy, served on the Textile Committee on Public Relations, and helped run the Textile Information Service.

In 1952, Andrews joined the American Textile Machinery Association (ATMA) as director of public relations, and became executive secretary of the organization in 1955. While associated with ATMA, she managed the American Textile Machinery Exhibitions-International from 1952 through 1965. During this period she remained active in other fields and with other organizations, directing publicity for the Tungsten Institute in the mid-1950s. She retired from the ATMA in 1968, but continued to work part-time as a consultant and as assistant to the president of ATMA.

Andrews published numerous books and articles regarding the textile industry, including Faces We See (1939), Cotton Magic (1944), Profit Life of Textile Machinery (1957), and The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry (published posthumously in 1987), and articles for newspapers, industry journals, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Written in the 1950s, The Textile Almanac, though never published, provided material for later articles and for The Men and the Mills. She also wrote Tungsten: The Story of an Indispensable Metal (1955) for the Tungsten Institute.

In 1970, Andrews retired from the ATMA and settled in Charlotte, N.C. She remained active, writing The Men and the Mills and American Textiles, a serialized history of the textile industry which appeared in the Southern Textile News. She also ran a public relations firm, Andrewtex, consulted for the first International Trade Mart in Honduras, and lectured on textile machinery in Asian countries. In North Carolina, Andrews participated in civic organizations, church activities, museum fundraising, and various charity functions. Mildred Andrews died in October 1984.

(Birography taken from the finding aid from the Mildred Gwin Andrews papers MS0269, at the Uiversity of North Carolina, Charolotte.)