L'Aluminium Français & Narrows Dam
Badin, Stanly County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
L'aluminium Francais. French company in 1913 began Narrows Dam and town named for Adrien Badin, president Southern Aluminum, a subsidiary. Office stood 1/2 mi. N.W.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
In 1913 a French firm, L'Aluminium Français, launched an ambitious hydroelectric and aluminum venture on the Yadkin River, damming the Narrows and laying out a company town. The town took the name of Adrien Badin, president of the American subsidiary, Southern Aluminum. The First World War disrupted French investment, and the works were soon sold to the American aluminum giant that would run them for generations.
Why it matters
Badin is a rare North Carolina example of a European-financed company town, showing how global capital and hydroelectric power reshaped the rural Piedmont in the early industrial age.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Adrien Badin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Plank Road
Asheboro, NC
This stretch of street once carried the Fayetteville-to-Salem plank road, a 129-mile timber-surfaced toll highway built between 1849 and 1854. Passing through Randolph County, it linked the Cape Fear trade to the Moravian settlements of the north-central Piedmont, letting loaded wagons roll over sawn boards instead of miring in clay.
Tyson & Jones Buggy Company
Carthage, NC
Founded by Thomas B. Tyson and W. T. Jones, the Tyson & Jones buggy factory made Carthage a Southern center of horse-drawn vehicle manufacturing. From the 1850s into the 1920s the firm sold buggies across the South, turning out as many as 3,000 a year at its peak before the automobile ended the trade.
Plank Road
Carthage, NC
In the years before the Civil War, North Carolina invested heavily in "plank roads" — highways surfaced with sawn timber to lift wagons out of the Piedmont mud. The Fayetteville-to-Salem line ran some 129 miles and was the longest of its kind in the state, a toll road built between 1849 and 1854 to move farm goods and manufactured wares between the Cape Fear market and the Moravian towns of the interior.
North Carolina Railroad Company Shops
Burlington, NC
In 1857 the North Carolina Railroad built its maintenance and repair shops here, and the town that grew up around them took the name Company Shops — later renamed Burlington. The shops operated through the Civil War before closing in 1866.