To step onto the factory floor at Wm. J. Mills & Co. — the Greenport canvas makers and the East End’s oldest family business — is to step into a bygone era of American manufacturing, one built on quality, precision, workmanship and durability.
There are long cutting tables, rolls of fabric, patterns, jigs, and people doing specialized work by hand, the way it’s been taught, refined and handed down for generations. Many employees here have spent decades at the same benches and tables.
In interviews this week, the Mills family, now six generations in, talks about keeping the business going since 1880 with the same understated tone they bring to the work itself. They tend to talk about craft, schedules and problem-solving. Asked about legacy, with their 150th anniversary approaching, they speak in practical terms.
For Bob Mills II, legacy is measured in seasons.
“Summer generally starts for us around March 1,” he said, because that’s when customers begin calling about awnings and marine canvas. “You start feeling the pressure of stuff that you had to get done ahead of the season,” he said.
Even before peak season, he added, it’s hard to shut the business off.
“I’m thinking about the business 24 hours a day … it never goes away.”
The birth of Wm. J. Mills & Co.
The company’s history begins with William J. Mills, a Scottish sailmaker who arrived in Greenport in 1880 from Hempstead Harbor, bought a small sail loft and started Wm. J. Mills & Company. In the early decades, the work was centered on sailmaking in a waterfront village built on commercial fishing and shipbuilding.
In 1921, the company diversified, anticipating that engines would continue replacing sails on commercial boats. The family continued to build sails for yachts, but expanded into canvas awnings. That same year, the company established Cedar Island Oyster Company, part of a broader oyster boom in Greenport.
After World War I, founder William’s son Robert L. Mills returned from active duty as a captain of a submarine chaser and ran a trio of oyster boats.
By the late 1940s, Cedar Island Oyster Company had been sold to General Foods, and Robert returned to the sail loft. Sails still mattered, even in an age of mechanization: serving as stabilizers in bad weather, providing extra speed and functioning as a safety measure if engines failed.
Alongside that marine work, the company grew into an awning maker for residential and commercial customers on Long Island’s East End, a second line of business that became essential as the waterfront economy changed.
‘Flexible’
Bob Mills II’s own entry into the business came early.
“With the risk of putting my father in jail,” he joked, he started working in the family business at “probably 11 or younger,” first emptying garbage cans at the company’s former location on the corner of Front and Main Street.
One of his clearest memories is a job that combined repetition, precision and motivation.
“My father had designed a clip that hooked onto the rub rail of the Whalers … to hang old covers on,” he said, referring to Boston Whalers. For three and a half decades beginning in the early 1960s, the company was the sole canvas manufacturer for Boston Whalers.
“He ordered … 5,000 of them, and the [company] changed the rub rail, so the clip had to be changed.”
The fix landed on him.
“I was paid a penny a piece to re bend the clips,” he said. “I’d walk downtown … set up on a stool … and I would re bend 100 of them at a time, make my dollar, and go buy my Bazooka bubble gum.”
He credits the company’s survival to flexibility.
“You have to be flexible in any kind of business, especially in this business, because it changes all the time,” Mills II said. “It’s constantly changing. And the economy, the environment is always changing.”
When asked about Wm. J. Mills & Co.’s legendary employee retention, he returned to practical terms.
“We try to treat our employees as family,” he said. “When they need something we’re very amenable to their needs, as well as them being amenable to our needs. It’s a working relationship.”
That retention matters because the work is so specialized. Inside the current facility, where the company moved in 1986, much of the production now runs through computer-aided design, but the output still depends on trained hands.
During a tour, Robert Mills III showed a reporter how the team turns three-dimensional problems into two-dimensional patterns.
“We plot everything in AutoCAD, and then it goes into cut work software,” he said, describing how designs are converted into flat patterns for a plotter-cutter table that marks and cuts the cloth. The plotter-cutter table is a computerized machine with a precision-guided blade to cut various fabrics.
In the CAD department, employee Mike Heuschele described how he turns shapes into fabric patterns.
“Working with fabric is all about finding the plane that the fabric wants to lay in, and then finding the change in plane, and then creating a seam there.”
About 21 years ago, Heuschele came in part time after a fire forced the company to redraw and replace lost canopy work, and never left.
‘Men of the cloth’
The company’s mix today is broad: custom marine canvas, repairs, residential awnings and seasonal services like cleaning canvas. Mills II said the company services roughly 600 to 700 seasonal customers each year, mostly on the East End.
They’ll be erecting the canvas awning at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club this spring ahead of the 126th U.S. Open in June.
Crews take down fabric awnings in the fall, inspect them, flag repairs and cleaning needs, store them for winter, and reinstall them in spring. The younger Mills said the business keeps crews employed in winter with cleaning and waterproofing work.
That winter work has also changed with the materials industry. Mills III said the company works with environmentally-minded soap and waterproofing, developed to be free of PFAS and other “forever chemicals.”
The cleaning itself remains manual: canvas is laid out, washed by hand, then hung to dry. The process doubles as quality control, because the crew can spot repairs that need to be handled before spring installations begin.
Inside the shop, the company has continued bringing more jobs in-house, including welding, to control scheduling, quality and turnaround when outside shops are booked.
For all the technology — CAD stations, pattern libraries and newer tools like photogrammetry — the Mills family still sees its legacy business in old trade terms.
“We always say we’re ‘men of the cloth’,” Mills II said with a grin. “It’s in our blood, like it or not.”
The ‘most incredible story’
Outside the shop, that tradition of legacy craftsmanship has drawn attention from historians.
“These guys really deserve so much attention,” said Kate Katin, curator of the Long Island Collection at Mystic Seaport Museum. “They’re the oldest sailmaking family in America.”
She said that through generations the Mills family have not only been respected sailmakers but also have been key players in a larger network of local families that shaped the North Fork’s shellfishing economy, maritime trades and local culture.
“Long Island is a place of incredible innovation and incredibly resourceful communities, and the Mills family — their legacy, their history — it’s a wonderful example of what makes Long Island so unique,” she said.
Over the past 18 months, Katin has been working on a two-year grant project funded by the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation to identify, organize and make accessible the museum’s increasingly rich set of Long Island–related archives.
“I think the Mills have been the most incredible story.”
She said that after the Mills family “opened up their entire world” of historical memorabilia to support her work, her research uncovered new documentation and connections that even the family didn’t fully know. The Connecticut museum’s holdings now include Mills family historical sail plans and archival material tied to the oyster business.
Katin said that while the Mills records are still coming into sharper focus through ongoing grant research work, the family’s North Fork history continues to point outward: into other industries, other families and other community institutions.
“The more I dig into it, the more I just can’t believe how interwoven everything is with them,” she said.
She has traced the Mills name through multiple Long Island sail loft businesses and found records suggesting the family’s sailmaking presence predates the company’s 1880 founding date, including a Mills sailmaker in Port Jefferson as early as 1861.
Last weekend, Katin went ice scootering here on the North Fork with William J. Mills III, Bob’s brother, who goes by Jamie. After all her research into the family, she described seeing the Mills label on the sails.
“That craftsmanship — the dedication, the attention to detail — is just unbelievable.”