Knoxville Milling Company history

The factory was located along First Creek and featured dams that were destroyed in 1838.

The man responsible for the Lily White brand was James Allen Smith, born in Elberton, Georgia, in 1850, the youngest of ten children.

While there he was able to save up enough money to go into business for himself when he relocated to Knoxville in 1873.

Knoxville Woolen Mills, the city’s first major textile manufacturer, was founded in 1884.

In November 1885, Brookside Mills was founded and opened in North Knoxville.

In 1888 Smith merged Knoxville City Mills with his grain company to create J. Allen Smith & Company and assumed the presidency.

Standard Knitting Mill has called Washington Avenue home since the company was founded in 1900.

By 1902, Brookside passed Knoxville Woolen Mills to become the city’s largest employer.

By 1905, J. Allen Smith & Company was one of the largest milling operations in all of the South, generating about $2 million in annual sales.

Smith ran the mill that produced White Lily flour until his death in 1920, and along the way he also served as the president or director of banks and other concerns.

By the time of C. Powell Smith’s death in 1944, the company flour mill was able to produce more than 300,000 pounds of flour a day, a far cry from the early days when daily production fell short of 20,000 pounds.

Travelers along I-40 near downtown Knoxville cannot miss the only remaining structure associated with Standard Knitting Mill (circa 1945). For many years the neglected site has been a feature on the annual Knox Heritage list of endangered historic properties.

To keep up with demand, the company opened a new facility in Knoxville in 1952.

In 1953 Kansas-born Willard Francis Toevs, a General Mills veteran, joined J. Allen Smith as an assistant sales manager for the White Lily brand and began to work his way up through the ranks.

Brookside Mills, one of the city’s largest employers at one time closed, in 1956.

“Seventy Years of Service to J. Allen Smith & Co.,” Ties, March 1959.

By 1965 he became president and for the next fifteen years he led the company through a period of transition while continuing to add product lines and maintaining the reputation of White Lily flour in the South.

In 1972 he helped to engineer the sale of J. Allen Smith to the Flour and Bakery Supplies Group of Holly Farms Corporation for $3.3 million.

After graduating from the University of Georgia, Danton worked as a sales representative for General Foods before going to Martha White in 1974.

A 1978 edition of "America's Textiles" magazine housed in the Knox News archives detailed the flow of material at Standard Knitting Mill, which included more than 35 steps including fiber inspection, combing, cone winding, sewing and shrinkage control.

Delta Apparel was created when Royal Manufacturing and Standard Knitting Mills merged their knitted apparel operations in September 1988, according to a press release in the Knox News archives.

The tradition started during World War I, having a period of hiatus until World War II. The tradition continued until Standard closed in 1989.

About six months later a deal was struck to sell the company to San Francisco-based Windmill Corporation, but because of Federal Trade Commission concerns the sale was not completed until March 1991.

In early 1995 the company found a new corporate home when it was bought by Pioneer Flour Mills of San Antonio, known legally as C.H. Guenther & Sons, which boasted a heritage even older than White Lily.

A year later, in 2003, White Lily received the kind of publicity it could do without, however.

In the fall of 2006 The J.M. Smucker Company agreed to buy the brand.