Gloversville Continental Mills
After the Fire: What Remains of Gloversville Continental Mills
A Field of Bricks
The bricks were everywhere.
Not stacked, not standing. Just scattered across the ground like something vast had simply let go. What used to be Mill No. 3 of the former Gloversville-Continental Mills now spread out before me like a field of rubble, stretching from Beaver Street all the way back to the Cayadutta Creek bank. Thousands of bricks, the same ones that had held this building upright through more than a century of American manufacturing history, lay in random heaps with nowhere left to go.
In one corner, pressed against a sealed-off wall, sat what remained of steel beams, HVAC machinery, and other miscellaneous load-bearing beams and the remains of 40 historical knitting machines. The fire had taken everything soft about them. What was left were twisted red-brown skeletons of rust and charred metal, piled on top of each other like they had tried to hold on and failed. Standing there in the early summer weather, looking at them, I thought about the hands that had run those machines. The people who had shown up every morning, tied on their aprons, and fed yarn through the same mechanical motions for years.
Two partial shells of what remained of the building still stood nearby. Inside them, spools of yarn and boxes of wood shavings, likely used for packaging, sat untouched, as if someone had just stepped out for lunch and never come back. I moved through the site trying to take it all in and, in my distraction, completely missed the soot-blackened staircase in the far corner. It led to an overhead walkway that once connected Mill No. 3 to the St. Regis building across the street, which is still intact on the other side. I only realized the mistake later, whilst editing the pictures you view now. A long day of rubble and regret.
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| Undated photo of the former Gloversville Knitting Company. |
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| If not for the fire, this present-day photo would be a perfect illustration of 1890s craftsmanship, solid architecture, and the longevity of the mill complex unchanged throughout the 128 years it stood untarnished. |
The Men Who Built It: Lucius Littauer and the Gloversville Knitting Co.
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| As you can see, the Mill No. 3 complex is not standing in the 1912 Sanborn Map Company survey. |
To understand what burned here, you have to go back to where it all started.
In August 1895, when the city of Gloversville was just five years old, a group of local businessmen signed their names to a certificate of incorporation and set something in motion that would outlast most of them by decades. The company they founded, the Gloversville Knitting Company, had a straightforward purpose: to manufacture and sell all kinds of wearing apparel made wholly or partly of knit goods. Among the signers were names that would become fixtures of Fulton County life, including Lucius N. Littauer, James S. Burr, Frank Burton, Seth C. Burton, Edward C. Collins, Henry C. Day, D. S. Decker, Eugene Harrington, Edward S. Parkhurst, George M. Place, Charles W. Rose, Alvah J. Zimmer, and Erastus Darling.
Littauer was the most prominent name on that list, and his family story reads like a compressed version of American immigrant ambition. His father, Nathan Littauer, had come over from Breslau, Germany, in 1846, settled in Gloversville, and built a glove mill from the ground up. Nathan turned peddling into manufacturing. His son Lucius turned manufacturing into an empire. Lucius was a Harvard man, entering at 15 and famously rooming with a young Theodore Roosevelt before either of them became anything close to notable. After graduation, he briefly coached Harvard's football team before the pull of home brought him back to Fulton County.
The new company wasted no time. A location at Beaver Street was secured, and by 1896 the machinery was running, and the first woolen gloves and mittens were coming off the line. That product never stopped. Through ownership changes, economic downturns, and two world wars, the plant kept making gloves and mittens without interruption.
The operation grew far beyond its original footprint. A branch knitting plant ran for years in Oneonta before being consolidated into Schenectady in 1923. By 1927, the company had pushed into an entirely new product category, knitted coatings, with some pride, a new industry for Gloversville. By the time that company history was printed, sometime around 1940, the Gloversville plant covered 120,000 square feet of floor space and employed 315 people on site, with another 142 working in Schenectady. However, the Gloversville Knitting Company ceased its operations in 1985. It is unknown what occurred to halt its operation 89 years after its initial operation. Hopefully, I will get my FOIA request fulfilled to fill in that historical time gap.
To supply that scale of production, the company spun its own yarn, drawing fiber from across the globe: alpaca from Peru, wool from Chile, Argentina, Australia, and Wales, and mohair from Texas and South Africa. The finished goods included woolen gloves, overcoatings and topcoatings for men, sport coatings for women, cotton string gloves, worsted gloves, and French Angora Rabbit Hair gloves and mittens.
Gloversville, a small city in Fulton County, was at the center of the American glove and textile industry for most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The mill on Beaver Street was not just part of that story. In many ways, it was the story. Over the following decades, the facility passed through different hands and identities, eventually operating as Gloversville-Continental Mills and later housing St. Regis Sportswear, Ltd. aka St. Regis Knitting Mill, a purveyor of knitting kits and accessories, as another operation that ran inside the former mill building.
Then came the night of February 11, 2024.
The Night the Mill Burned
The fire started in the western portion of the former mill complex, the section separated from the rest of the property by Beaver Street. It burned for more than 12 hours. By the time firefighters got it under control, the storage wing used by St. Regis Corporation to house clothing material for government uniforms was gone, along with those 40 knitting machines as old as the 128-year-old building. The eastern portion of the complex, where St. Regis ran its active knitting operations, survived without damage. The distinction mattered to the workers. It did not do much for the machines and inventory swallowed by the flames on the other side.
The site has been owned since 2017 by the Schenectady-based Leave It To Beaver St. Association. What their plans are for what remains, I could not tell you standing there in the rubble. What I could tell you is that the building is not coming back. By now, the demolition crew has probably cleaned up the former knitting mill after tidying up the final dregs of the former Cayadutta Tanning Company.
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| Boxes and boxes of yarn inventory. |
127 Acres of Reckoning: Gloversville's Long Road Back
Gloversville is no stranger to this kind of loss, and, to the city's credit, it has not stood still.
Armed with a $1.5 million demolition fund, local officials have been working their way through a grim list of blighted properties: the former Fownes Brothers Glove Factory on South Main Street, the former Zimmer Glove building on South Arlington Street, the Cayadutta Tannery on Harrison Street, the former Taylor Made Factory on West 9th Avenue, a property on Hill Street, and now the Continental Mill site. Each demolition clears space, but it also erases something. Another building that once meant payroll and purpose for families across Fulton County.
The scale of what remains to be addressed is hard to wrap your head around. The city has identified at least 168 abandoned, dilapidated, or vacant industrial sites spread across 47 brownfield parcels. Altogether, those properties account for roughly 127 acres inside city limits. That is not a few eyesores. That is a structural wound running through the heart of a small city still trying to figure out what comes next after manufacturing left and never came back.
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| In the right-side corner was a leaking water main connection. |
Were you or a family member employed at this legendary Gloversville textile complex — whether under Littauer Bros., Gloversville-Continental Mills, or St. Regis Sportswear? Do you have photographs of the knitting machines before the fire, or memories of the Beaver Street mill when it was still the heartbeat of America's glove-making capital?
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