Helmshore Mills are two mills built on the River Ogden in Helmshore, Lancashire. Higher Mill was built in 1789 for William Turner, and Whitaker's Mill was built in the 1820s by the Turner family. In their early life they alternated between working wool and cotton. By 1920 they were working shoddy as condensor mule mills; and equipment has been preserved and is still used. The mills closed in 1967 and they were taken over by the Higher Mills Trust, whose trustees included historian and author Chris Aspin and politician Dr Rhodes Boyson, who maintained it as a museum. The mills are said to the most original and best-preserved examples of both cotton spinning and woollen fulling left in the country that are still operational.

Following the withdrawal of its grant from Lancashire County Council, the museum closed to the public on 30 September 2016 for an indefinite period. However, the museum remained open for pre-booked school visits. In April 2018 the council announced that the museums would reopen to the general public for three days a week between April and November.

Helmshore Mills lie within Helmshore, a village in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire. The village is 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Haslingden, broadly between the A56 and the B6235, approximately 16 miles (26 km) north of Manchester, and 3 miles (4.8 km) from the M65 motorway. Helmshore straddles the River Ogden, a tributary of the River Irwell. The village developed around the seven cotton and wool mills.

The Turner family had already been involved in textiles before the mills were built. Three of the six family members made their living from wool in Martholme, and three brothers from cotton in Blackburn. In February 1789, they paid £725 for land for a mill. The family built Higher Mill on a greenfield site in the parish of Musbury as a woollen fulling mill, but by 1789, three members of the family had dropped out of the enterprise. It was the son of one of these original six, a William Turner (1793–1852), who built the larger wool carding and spinning mill in the 1820s. The wool went to Middle Mill on Holcombe Road for weaving, then returned to Higher Mill for fulling and finishing. Turner instructed in his will that the mill should be sold on his death, which occurred in 1852. This mill was destroyed by fire in 1857, and was rebuilt in 1860 by Edward Turner.

At some point after the end of the American Civil War and the return of cotton imports to Lancashire, the rebuilt mill started spinning cotton. When the mill was rebuilt, it was equipped almost but not completely by Messrs Walker & Hacking of Bury with machinery for processing raw cotton through to fine cotton spinning and (unlike in later years) weaving with power looms built by Dickenson of Blackburn. Due to later reconfigurations of the site, it is almost impossible now to see any evidence of this layout.

In the 1920s, the mill was bought by L.Whitaker & Sons who installed cotton condensing equipment and the mill continued in that business until November 1978. Higher Mill came to be operated by Lawrence Whittaker in 1875 still using Turner's machinery, and his descendants continued to run it as a fulling mill until June 1967. The two families may have been distantly related, but by the 1920s the Whittakers were a well-known local family while the L. Whitaker & Sons group no longer had any Whitakers working for them and were owned and run by the Hardman family. The freehold of both mills in the Helmshore Mills Estate was bought by Lawrence Whittaker's family.

When Rossall Whittaker died in 1971 leaving no male heirs, Higher Mill was saved by local enthusiasts who recognised its significance and had it scheduled as an Ancient monument, and bought it through a trust. Platt International, whose site was also in Helmshore, owned a significant collection of historic textile machines and agreed that they should be located in Higher Mill. The task of running a museum and maintaining the buildings put pressure on the trust, so in 1975 Lancashire County Council stepped in, taking a 99-year lease. Whitaker's Mill became vacant in 1978 and Lancashire County Council, seeing the advantages of having control of the two mills, bought the condensor mill. This allowed them to also purchase the Platt collection in 1985, keeping the site intact and forming a comprehensive museum of the Lancashire textile industry. The expertise, knowledge and experience of the site staff and Lancashire Museums Service is used by other sites including NT Quarry Bank Mill at Styal and the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.

The museum divides its collections into three themed areas, representing the wool story, the cotton story and the spinning floor.