From the Historian’s Files
July 21, 2012Last night, Mystery released our first beer made especially for the Wooden Nickel Pub in Hillsborough: J.C. Rosemond’s Blackberry Honey Kolsch. We knew we wanted our special Hillsborough-only beer to have a Hillsborough name, so we took a look back through history and found J.C. Rosemond.
Jerome Clarence Rosemond was a businessman in Hillsborough at the turn of the 20th century who owned a shuttle block factory located in West Hillsborough between what is now S. Hillsborough Ave. and S. Nash St. (you can see a 1911 map of the area that includes the factory here). Shuttle block manufacturers were a key support of the textile business; without wooden shuttles, textile mills couldn’t run their looms. Rosemond had an ideal location near the Eno River Cotton Mill (Mystery’s current home) and the Bellevue Manufacturing Company. The J.C. Rosemond factory opened sometime between 1905 and 1910 and lasted into 1915 (you can find his plant, and others, listed on page 352 of a 1915 North Carolina business directory). By 1916, Rosemond had opened a cedar mill, and as of 1921 he was still in the lumber business. He died in 1930 and is buried in the Hillsborough Town Cemetery.