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You might think as I did that Burlington was named for Burlington Industries, the textile giant that disappeared not too long ago. After all, the company was founded there in 1923. But Burlington was Burlington before Burlington Industries existed.

How do I know? I’ve just read “Burlington” (Arcadia Publishing: Charleston, S.C.; 2009, 127 pages, paperback, $21.99) by Don Bolden, retired editor of the Burlington Times-News.

Burlington was first Company Stores. That’s the name the North Carolina Railroad gave its maintenance shops that opened in Alamance County in the mid-1850s. Alamance was the midpoint of a railroad that ran from Goldsboro to Charlotte. A town grew around the shops. The shops closed in 1886. The town survived on a new and growing textile industry. Eventually, it billed itself as “the hosiery capital of the South.”

So, who or what was Burlington named for? That’s anybody’s guess. When the railroad pulled out, a committee formed to rename the town. A number of names were proposed, Bolden writes, including Carolinadelphia. I can understand how that one didn’t get out of committee. It’s too bad we don’t know who proposed it. They would probably have said they were misquoted or their suggestion had been taken out of context. Anyway, Burlington became Burlington in 1887. We’ll just have to accept it.

Bolden has not written a history. He’s put together a picture book of black and white photographs from the early 1900s to, oh, maybe 1993. That’s when Burlington observed the 100th anniversary of its charter. As you would expect, the quality of the photographs varies, but overall, they aren’t bad. Each photograph has a caption of varying length.

Surprisingly for pictures probably culled from the newspaper’s library, there is only one car wreck. There are no photographs of the riot over school integration that happened in the 1960s. No bank robbers, drug dealers, kidnappers or murderers stare out at you.

The offerings are tame and institutional: businesses, churches, houses, mills, posed schoolchildren, sports teams, and Kiwanis Club members. Oh, there is one picture of Duncan Bryan, a grocer and farmer, at the newspaper office in 1947. Wearing a suit, tie and hat, he’s showing off turnips the size of rutabagas. He grew them. This book is Burlington with shoes polished.

Photographs of streets in the 30s, 40s and 50s – the premall days – show a bustling downtown of grocers, dress shops, cafes, tailors, department stores, car dealerships, Sinclair, and ESSO stations. But the captions for many of the streetscapes contain a sentence similar to this one on page 111: “All of this block at right and most of the one at left were demolished in the 1970s.” What were they thinking? My guess: malls.

LabCorp, a homegrown company that’s now the second largest testing laboratory in the country, came to the rescue. It occupies downtown and is the largest employer in Alamance. Well, not all of downtown. Zack’s, the hot dog place, is still there.

Burlington almost ran out of water in 1954. A city reservoir opened in 1957, then another in 1970. Now, Bolden writes, “Burlington has one of the best water supplies in North Carolina and is the envy of other communities across the state.”

Good for Burlington is what I say.