The historic former Victory Mills factory building in the village of Victory near Schuylerville in Saratoga County was destroyed in a massive fire on Saturday. Multiple fire departments responded to the scene which was fully engulfed in flames around 2:30 pm.
It took more than three hours to get the blaze under control. The 230,000 square foot, five-story former mill at 42 Gates Avenue was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In a post on Facebook, Saratoga Town Supervisor Ian Murray called the fire “devastating.” “To understand the weight of this moment,” he wrote “the mill is more than just a building. It’s part of the very foundation of Victory.”
Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo said a 14-year-old will be charged with arson, but provided no other details. He is expected to be referred to family court.
The mill was historically and architecturally significant as a rare surviving example of early twentieth century industrial construction in the village of Victory.
Construction of the oldest part of the mill (only ruins remain) began in the mid-nineteenth century, and building destroyed Saturday was completed in 1918. Although the walls were concrete, the interior was constructed of large wooden timbers, with wood floors and ceilings.
According to a report on the mill issued in 2019:
“The building represents the height of industrial development in the village, and was the culmination of the Saratoga Victory Manufacturing Company’s milling operations that began onsite almost 75 years earlier. The mill was the reason for the name, settlement, incorporation, growth and prosperity of the village.
“It dominated the local economy and subsequent manufacturing operations onsite remained a major employer in the area well into late twentieth century. The building is a significant example of a ‘daylight factory,’ a cast concrete building with reinforcing members – designed to be practical, strong, durable and fire resistant.”
The report was issued amid plans to redevelop and convert the building into 186 residential rental units – that plan never came to fruition. (You can read more about it here).
History of Victory Mills
Located directly adjacent to the strategic settlement of Schuylerville, the village of Victory on the Hudson River tributary Fish Creek (among New York’s States’ smallest villages, containing only about 600 residents) is historically situated on the vast landholdings of the Schuyler family. Nominal development of the surrounding area began in the first decade of the eighteenth century, but the more permanent peace after the American Revolution allowed the area to become more than a simple frontier.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the influence of the Industrial Revolution precipitated settlements in the region based mainly on water power; mill locations created manufacturing communities. Victory was built on such a manufacturing pedigree, and the settlement owed its very existence to the creation of the mill.
According to historian Nathaniel Sylvester: “The enterprise of the Victory Manufacturing Company has built up this thriving village. It derives its name wholly from the fancy of the company, who inserted it in the title of their organization in allusion to the victory of General Gates, won in their immediate vicinity.”
Investors from New England began investigating the area around Fish Creek in the 1840s and, in 1846, three Bostonians, Enoch Mudge, David Nevins and Jared Coffin, incorporated the Saratoga Victory Manufacturing Company. The company constructed a three-story factory building and began successful textile milling operations, apparently experiencing rapid growth.
In 1850, barely five years after opening, the mill employed 365 workers running 309 looms whose 12,500 spindles were producing 1.8 million yards of cloth annually. By 1857, the mill was employing 426 employees, almost forty percent of whom were children, running 445 looms which produced over 3.5 million yards of cloth for the year.
The decades following the Civil War saw more growth as well, even when tempered with labor issues and a shifting economy. The mill produced 4,487,190 of yards of cloth in 1877, and the 1880 Compendium of the Tenth Census noted that the mills contained 611 looms, running 29,000 spindles which produced over 6 million yards of cloth per year.
A strike of the mule boys later that decade, in 1887, resulted in a shut down at the mill locking out 600 employees and an economic downturn forced a close-down of the plant in 1893, putting 800 people out of work briefly.
As the mill grew, so did the settlement. The village was incorporated on April 16, 1849, shortly after the original mill was constructed. The company provided for the social and religious needs of its employees, building row housing and a church for its workers, and even donating the land to the village for a cemetery — sometimes colloquially known as the “factory cemetery.”
The company-owned Victory Community House had public baths, a restaurant, a library, a bowling alley, a barber shop and a large common room. The village epitomized the term mill town. The twentieth century brought a change in ownership and an expansion of the operations at Victory Mills.
In 1910 the American Manufacturing Company purchased the mills, and in 1918 the company constructed the five-story poured concrete building destroyed on Saturday to house the expanded undertakings.
The American Manufacturing Company was a large-scale manufacturer of rope and bagging and cordage, headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. Established ca. l890 in the Greenpoint area (the northernmost extremity of Brooklyn), by 1913 the company had grown to the second largest employer in Brooklyn — the fifth largest in New York City.
The success of the company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was reflected in the physical expansion of their Greenpoint complex and the acquisition of Victory Mills farther north. The Greenpoint complex began with a single two-story brick mill in 1891, and a second mill was added only six years later in 1897 along with a series of five warehouses.
It was the 1897 buildings that began the American Manufacturing Company’s association with William Higginson. Higginson was a principal architect of the firm Angell and Higginson, and an 1897 five-story brick jute mill and at least one of the warehouses at the Greenpoint complex have been firmly attributed to his designs.
The firm of Angell and Higginson was dissolved by 1899, but William Higginson and his son Clarence would continue working the American Manufacturing Company throughout its expansions in the 1900s and especially the 1910s.
World War I brought government contracts, new construction, and new AMC operations, including the manufacturing of oakum, a twisted jute fiber used in wooden ship caulking, but the company appears to have experienced a downturn in the post-war period.
Several primary sources document labor troubles at the American Manufacturing Company’s operations throughout its history, including two particularly vicious incidents in 1910 at the Brooklyn plant.
In April, striking workers rioted, and 500-1000 female workers, fighting with “the fury of wildcats” fought with police who used revolvers and clubs to quell the incident; fifty-five people were arrested, and the Magistrate of Greenpoint Court threatened to send the workers to a place in which “Siberia [would] look like a summer resort.”
Despite this warning, tensions and riots continued to occur — a month later, a shooting attack on eight “loyal” firm employees wounded two men, one fatally so. The lure of cheaper labor resulted in the moving of bagging operations to India in 1921 and the company threatened to move all of its operations to England in 1923 for the same reason.
The Victory Mills complex would not be immune to the plight of its parent corporation — the company moved the major part of the Victory milling operations to AlbertsviUe and Gunthersville, Alabama in 1928. The General Manager of the new Alabama plants cited the reasons for the move as “the abundance of cheap, white labor” lower wages, a lack of unionism and fewer restrictions on working conditions and hours were also cited.
A Federal Writer’s Project guide to New York summed up the effect of the factory’s loss in its entry for the village of Victory:
“VICTORY MILLS is a ghost town. Cotton Mills, 29 in number, established here in 1846, furnished employment for the village and countryside. In 1929 the owners closed the mills and shipped 328 carloads of machinery to Alabama. The huge mills and the company houses stand vacant by the side of the road.”
In 1939-40 the American Manufacmring Company lost a case in the US Supreme Court over workers’ union rights, and by the mid 1950s, even the Greenpoint complex was no longer involved in active manufacturing.
After the move to Alabama, the recently destroyed plant at Victory Mills was vacant until 1937 when the United Board and Carton Corporation purchased it. UB&C folding-carton manufacturing operations continued at the plant until 1972 when the company was sold to Wheelabrator-Frye Inc.
The plant came under the control Wheelabrator-Frye’s Graphic Communication Group, the A.L. Garber Company. A.L. Garber diversified operations at the plant, installing
specialized printing presses, windowing machines and die cutters at the former textile factory.
The revamped production processes were accompanied by internal rehabilitation at Victory Mills, including new offices, a new entrance, a new canteen lunchroom, improved lighting, fresh paint and a thorough overall cleaning.
The plant changed hands again in 1977 and 1983, being bought by the Clevepak Corporation and the Victory Specialty Packaging Company, respectively. By 2009, the Victory Specialty Packaging Company has ceased operations at the plant and sold the building.
Illustrations, from above: Victory Mills fire, May 31, 2025 (Fort Edward Fire Department); Ruins of the mill after the first (WRGB); full Victory Mills complex in the nineteenth century; Victory Mill aerial view, 2019; and before the fire.
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