Château du Parc et manufacture de drap du château du Parc

English translation

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History

Located at the centre of a region where the woollen vocation was ancient and important, the cloth mill of the château du Parc is one of the most characteristic examples of the evolution from the traditional mill to the modern factory. It has the particular distinction of having preserved, juxtaposed on the same block, on the banks of the Indre, the architectural evidence of its transformation. In 1751, a cloth merchant from Lodève established in the former medieval château du Parc, part of the royal domain, a privileged mill for the manufacture of military cloth. The history of the enterprise and the preserved buildings show that, from its creation, the mill was the subject of a considered overall design. Installed on a highly suitable hydraulic site, its vast workshops, with simple and regular arrangement, specifically designed for cloth-making activity, testified to the desire to establish a concentrated and functional work organization and to monitor the quality of manufacture. It represented a step towards the concentrated mill, a compromise between bringing together under the same roof the processes of production and maintaining many rural craftsmen working from home. Run by entrepreneurs, some of whom came from the major centres of fine cloth manufacture in the Midi and the Ardennes, this mill adopted, on a more modest scale, a similar approach to that of the important cloth-making centres of the kingdom. The enterprise often experienced difficulties. Its purchase in 1856 by Pierre Balsan, a native of Lodève, transformed the face of the enterprise. He had constructed between 1860 and 1867, a new factory of six hectares, to the west of the first, where he successfully maintained the traditional production of military cloth. The use of the steam engine allowed for large-scale establishments where vast and light industrial buildings, of low storey height, were distributed according to a rigorously symmetrical plan, imposed by productive logic and technical constraints. The buildings are characteristic of the manufacturing architecture of the early industrial age. They reconcile aesthetics, functionality and technical innovations. The perspective was centred on the chimney and the machine room, at the heart of the establishment, one of the earliest expressions of triumphalism in 19th-century industrial architecture. The spread of metal construction, the multiplication of sheds linked to the growth of the enterprise, accentuated its factory character, without diminishing the ambition of the transition mill of the Second Empire. The factory long numbered among the most modern and most important in France. It greatly influenced the urbanization of the western part of the city, by creating individual houses for workers, schools and streets organized according to an orthogonal composition, to connect these facilities and dwellings to the establishment. The decline of its traditional activity, carded cloth, and its conversion to the production of non-woven materials led to a progressive reduction of the property and its fragmentation. The closure of the factory in 1991 resulted in the desertion of a large part of the block.