Cone Mills Corporation

Cone Mills Corporation was a world leader in textile manufacturing of corduroy, flannel, denim and other cotton fabrics for most of the 20th century. The company was based in Greensboro, North Carolina and its mills were mostly in North and South Carolina. The company was known as the world's largest producer of denim. It was disestablished in 2004.

The Cone family history begins in 1845 when Herman Kahn (1828–1897), a Jewish-German immigrant, and his sister’s family left their home in Bavaria, Germany for a new life in the United States. Herman changed the spelling of his last name from Kahn to "Cone" almost immediately upon arrival in the United States to become more American.

Herman Cone and his brother-in-law Jacob Adler started a dry goods business in the German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutch town of Jonesboro, Tennessee. Cone & Adler sold the usual items like groceries, hats, boots, and shoes. An exception to this was that they also sold ready-to-wear clothing, unusual in the antebellum South where most clothing was made at home.

Herman met Helen Guggenheimer (1838–1898) in one of his business traveling trips to Lynchburg, Virginia in the early part of the 1850s. She was also from Germany and was Jewish. In 1856, when Helen was eighteen, they got married. Their first child was Moses H. Cone, born in 1857, founder of Proximity Manufacturing Company (original name for the Cone Mills enterprises). Their next was Ceasar, born in 1859, the co-founder.