Acme Cotton Company Mill
It was one of those dusky afternoons when the sky fades to the color of old denim that J and I once again found ourselves standing outside Acme Mill, a relic of industry, timeworn and nearly cartoonish in name, conjuring images of Looney Tunes contraptions and Saturday morning chaos. The irony wasn’t lost on us. But beneath that whimsical name was a place brimming with real history, the kind that clings to the walls and lingers in the dust.
We slipped in through what can only be described as a makeshift rabbit hole, a gap near a boarded-up garage door barely large enough to squeeze through. Unknown to us, there were several open doors around the property that we failed to see. We went the hard way. Inside, the air was still, stale with the scent of decaying fiber and damp timber. Light was running out fast, and shadows began creeping in with intent.
The interior unfolded like the final act of a forgotten play. Piles of old product labels, some spilling from the corners, others still vibrant, were left abandoned in their cardboard boxes, stacked without care, like museum pieces in a gallery no one visits anymore. Each label was recognizable, of the everyday products that fill pantries and supermarket shelves.
We moved room by room, our boots crunching over brittle plaster and stray thread. Some spaces still bore a semblance of order, like someone had tried to tidy up before disappearing. But deeper in, chaos took over. The roof in one section had collapsed, scattering bundles of white cloth across the floor like snowdrifts. The materials, cotton, linen, and synthetic blends, had been left where they fell. Whatever operation once thrived here from the last tenant occupant had ended abruptly, mid-thought, mid-motion.
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| Clandestine beginnings of a grow op or just garden beds for vegetables? |
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| Stacks of shrink-wrapped textile fabrics. |
More unsettling than the scattered textiles were the massive holes in the floorboards. Some rooms looked like the earth had opened up beneath them, the yawning gaps revealing blackened lower levels with no safe way down. One particularly strange room at the rear of the building caught our attention. Wooden garden beds sat in tight formation, filled with a perlite-soil mix, the kind you’d use to grow something, anything, but the beds were empty, save for a few abandoned bags of substrate. Whatever cultivation plan had been drafted here never made it past the pages of the seed catalog.
And then there was the car.
There’s always a car.
Wedged between a doorframe like a fossilized beetle was an old blue Saab 900, half-buried beneath the wreckage of fallen beams and bricks. It seemed absurd, out of place, and yet perfectly in step with the surreal logic of these ghost mills. How it got there, why it stayed, and who last sat behind the wheel are questions that, like most here, will remain unanswered.
But Acme Mill held something rarer than rusted machines or packaging: it had a tailrace.
For the uninitiated, a tailrace, sometimes called a millrace, is the channel that carries water away after it’s been used to power turbines or water wheels. Long before electricity grids hummed across the landscape, this was how industries harnessed energy. Water flowed in, turned the machinery, and flowed out. Simple, elegant, efficient. In Acme’s case, that water came from the nearby Acme pond just across the road.
From high up, the third or maybe fourth floor, we could see the remains of the race running through the lower level. It was tantalizingly close and maddeningly unreachable. That whole section of the building had succumbed to time and gravity, the floors slanted at precarious angles, broken stairwells leading nowhere but risk.
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| Lower level of the tailrace of Acme Cotton Co. |
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| Outflow of Acme Pond across the street from Acme Cotton Mill. |
We tried circling to the brook at the back, where the outflow met Whetstone Brook, hoping we might find another way in. No luck. Nature had reclaimed the territory; the mill’s secrets were buried beneath collapse and undergrowth. I’ve explored dozens of tailraces in mills across the region, some intact, others crumbled, but this one evaded me.
And now, it may always will.
In March 2019, Acme Mill burned. Not a small fire, not a contained incident, no, this was a total, devastating blaze. Today, only fragments of its brick skeleton remain. The walls of the oldest building on the far right still stand, a lone sentinel against forgetting. But the rest, its labels, its garden-that-wasn’t, its buried Saab and unreachable tailrace, has vanished into ash and memory.
There’s a haunting sense of finality in that. Some places whisper their stories if you’re patient enough. Others vanish mid-sentence. I never did see what lay at the end of that tailrace. Maybe I’ll return someday to search the ruins, to see if the channel that once gave Acme its power still flows beneath the rubble.
But for now, that part of the story remains unwritten.
Long before the old blue Saab was entombed beneath a collapsed roof, before the garden beds lay empty in a room too quiet for cultivation, before Acme Mill became a hollowed relic explored by the curious and the reckless, the building had a name, a purpose, and an ambition carved into the bones of Killingly’s industrial legacy.
It began in 1846, at a time when the hum of cotton looms defined the economic lifeblood of New England’s small towns. The Chestnut Hill Mill, as it was originally known, rose from the banks of the Quinebaug River under the vision of local industrialists Henry Westcott and Thomas Pray. With the steady push of water from an adjacent dam, the mill began its life spinning cotton and potential in equal measure.
Ownership changed hands swiftly in those early years, tracing a line through the emerging industrial elite of the time. After its initial establishment by the Westcott and Pray Company, it was soon acquired by Mayhew Miller & Co. of Baltimore. Rather than displace the local operators, the firm leased the plant back to Westcott and Pray until 1859, when control passed to Mayhew Miller Jr. His tenure lasted a decade before the mill returned to the Pray family, with Thomas Pray Jr. stepping in as manager under his father’s renewed ownership.
That era, the 1860s through the early 1870s, brought marked improvements to the mill complex. Thomas Pray Jr. invested not only in the facility itself but also in the community around it, erecting boarding houses and tenement dwellings to support the growing labor force. These brick and timber homes, now mostly vanished or transformed, once housed dozens of families who lived by the rhythm of looms and whistles.
By 1880, under new owner John L. Ross, the mill hit its stride. Employing around 60 workers, Ross oversaw a formidable operation: 104 forty-inch looms and 6,000 spindles worked in tandem to produce over 25,000 yards of cotton cloth per week. Ross ran a tight ship, steering the business through the volatile years that followed until its sale in 1899 to A.G. Bishop, a New York-based industrialist. But by the early 20th century, the once-thriving mill had gone quiet. By 1920, the machines had stopped turning.
That could have been the end of Chestnut Hill Mill’s story. But in 1925, the structure found new life under a new name.
Enter the Acme Cotton Company.
Formed by entrepreneurs F.W. Buchman and Herman Schnaitlacher, Acme Cotton Company reimagined the old mill not as a textile plant for consumer goods but as a manufacturing site dedicated to medical supplies, specifically, cotton bandages and surgical dressings. In a country inching toward modernization and, unknowingly, on the brink of global conflict, this pivot proved visionary.
The 1930s and ’40s were transformative years. Acme poured resources into improving the mill’s infrastructure. Despite the economic pressure of the Great Depression, the company expanded, its workforce hovering between 100 and 199 employees through the latter half of the decade. During the Second World War, Acme became an indispensable supplier to the U.S. military. Its cotton was no longer destined for shirts and dresses, but for triage kits and field hospitals. In 1945, the company’s contribution was formally recognized with the prestigious Army-Navy ‘E’ Award for excellence in wartime production, a symbol of patriotic industry awarded to fewer than 5 percent of eligible companies.
Acme continued to operate the mill into the early 1970s, but the writing was on the wall. A new era demanded new facilities.
In 1975, the firm announced ambitious plans: a sprawling 175,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art manufacturing complex to be built in the Killingly Industrial Park, just off Lake Road. With a price tag of $4 million and room for 350 employees, the project marked a dramatic departure from the mill’s gritty, water-powered past. By 1978, the new facility was complete, and the old mill, stoic and suddenly obsolete, was left to the silence.
It stood vacant for decades, its legacy suspended between demolition and rebirth. Ownership passed to Shennecock Realty, LLC, a firm that began floating redevelopment proposals in the late 2010s. The property even saw a glimmer of reinvention with a single townhouse mockup placed in the parking lot, a curious architectural placeholder for a dream not yet realized.
Then came March 2019.
A fire tore through the structure in a single night, leaving behind scorched brick walls and the blackened memory of what once was. The original 1933 block somehow withstood the inferno, standing defiant like an old veteran in a ghost town. That lone wall, stubborn and raw, remains a silent witness to the mill’s story, a tale that stretches from the cotton booms of the 19th century through the wartime urgency of the 1940s, right into the hushed ruins of the 21st century.
Over the years, the mill went by many names: Acme Cotton Company, Acme Cotton Products, Acme Mill, Acme Textile and Cotton Mill. Each moniker reflected the aspirations of its time, the shifting tides of industry and identity.
The Anatomy of Industry: Mapping the Acme Cotton Company Plant
Tucked into a quiet bend along Bailey Hill Road in Killingly, Connecticut, the remains of the Acme Cotton Company complex tell a story not only of American manufacturing but of architectural evolution across more than a century. Though now hollowed by time and fire, the plant once stood as a patchwork of expansion and ambition, thirteen primary blocks stitched together across decades of adaptation.
The complex occupies the west side of Bailey Hill Road, just south of its junction with Bear Hill Road. Directly across from it, Whetstone Brook is held back by a 520-foot-long dam of stone and earth, forming the modest but potent Acme Pond, the mill’s original heartbeat. From there, the plant’s millrace snakes under Bailey Hill Road and beneath the northern edge of the mill through a graceful arched culvert carved in brownstone. On the other side, the tailrace reemerges, bending southwest past a series of forgotten factories and mill sites that once pulsed with the same energy.
At the heart of the complex, the oldest block of the plant still clings to its 19th-century origins. Built in 1846, this four-story stone structure, measuring 100 by 40 feet, reflects the muscular simplicity of early American industrial design. Its low-pitched side-gabled roof and uniform twelve-bay façade are classic features of the era. Thick stone sills anchor metal-sash hopper windows, more recent replacements for what were likely once double-hung wooden frames. The sense of balance in the architecture, even in its ruin, speaks to a time when function and form still found common ground.
Sometime in the early 20th century, this original building was lengthened by forty feet to the south through a brick addition that mimicked its scale and proportion. The expansion linked the 19th-century core to a larger, more modern block constructed in 1940, a red brick, three-story structure measuring 152 by 40 feet. It stands on a raised concrete basement and features multi-pane metal sash windows beneath a flat roofline, emblematic of mid-century industrial pragmatism.
That year, 1940, marked a turning point for the plant. In addition to the main expansion, two more red brick blocks were constructed on the southwestern edge of the complex: one a three-story, 141-by-38-foot wing, the other a two-story, broader building measuring 148 by 60 feet. The repetition of materials, red brick, steel frame, and concrete base established a visual and structural consistency that persisted across most subsequent additions.
Throughout the 1930s and into the 1970s, the mill continued to expand outward in calculated bursts. Around 1933, a series of auxiliary structures sprang up along the northern perimeter of the original stone mill. These included a two-story red brick shipping and storage building with a distinctive stepped parapet; a two-story stone storage block; and another utilitarian red brick addition. Together, these formed a continuous footprint of approximately 40 by 180 feet, all outfitted with flat roofs and metal-sash windows designed for function, not ornament.
To the southeast, a red brick office block added around 1940 introduced a rare flourish of architectural character. Measuring 45 by 15 feet, the two-story structure featured a prominent bowfront, an unusual choice for a mill building. Its central entrance was flanked by two first-floor windows and topped by three more on the second, offering a dignified frontispiece to the working plant.
As decades passed and manufacturing methods shifted, the complex grew increasingly eclectic. By the time of its closure in the late 1970s, the western half of the plant was dotted with various one- and three-story structures of indeterminate age. Built sometime between 1934 and 1975, these blocks were pieced together from red brick, steel framing, and concrete block. Their flat roofs and workhorse facades hinted at an era more concerned with utility than legacy.
The Unfinished Promise of Redevelopment
By the summer of 2018, hope stirred again among the weathered brick walls of the old Acme Cotton Company site. The sprawling mill, originally constructed in 1890 as part of the site's later expansions, was acquired by Shennecock Realty of Hartford through a foreclosure process, with grand ambitions to repurpose the long-abandoned complex into modern residential housing. According to town assessor records, the plan was bold: four sections of the aging mill were slated for demolition, while two others were to be rehabilitated into a mixed-use space combining condominiums and ground-floor retail.
For a town like Killingly, this wasn’t just another development project, it was a potential lifeline, an opportunity to breathe new life into a historic structure that had long straddled the line between relic and liability. The plans even hinted at preserving one of the more dramatic architectural features: the building segment suspended over the water. It was envisioned as the possible centerpiece of a restaurant or other commercial venture, an echo of the mill’s legacy as both a literal and figurative hub of the community.
But that vision never materialized.
The March 2019 fire consumed much of what remained of the mill. Investigators combed the smoldering ruins, but no individual or cause could be definitively identified. The blaze was officially classified as “undetermined.” What was certain, however, was the devastation: whatever forward motion had been gathering behind the scenes evaporated overnight in a storm of flame, smoke, and structural collapse.
Since then, the site has languished. The foundation still stands, scarred but defiant, a skeletal remnant of a redevelopment dream paused mid-sentence. As of June 2025, the property remains vacant. Time has crept in again, settling dust and silence over what once promised to be a vibrant second act. Whether those plans will be revived, or if the site will quietly fade into memory like so many other post-industrial spaces, is still uncertain.
Source(s):
1. Mills located on Chestnut Hill, Killingly Historical & Genealogical Society
2. Killingly looks to UConn students to help secure mill rehab funding. March 1, 2023. Norwich Bulletin
3. Brian, Heather. "2 Mill Fires Under Investigation in East Killingly, South Windham". April 1, 2019, NBC Connecticut
4. Killingly State Representatives Visit Site of Recent Mill Fire to Offer Their Support. Connecticut House Republicans
5. WTNH News 8. (n.d.). Multiple companies extinguish blaze at the old Acme Mill in Killingly. Retrieved May 7, 2025, from https://www.wtnh.com/news/multiple-companies-extinguish-blaze-at-the-old-acme-mill-in-killingly/
6. Bouras, J. (2023, November 16). Massive fire engulfs old mill building in Killingly. WJAR. Retrieved May 7, 2025, from https://turnto10.com/news/local/mill-building-in-killingly-connecticut-old-mill-fire-massive-flames-ballouville-road-nov-16-2023
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