South Carolina

South Carolina's first cotton mill was reportedly a small water-powered spinning works near Stateburg in 1790, and several antebellum mills, some using enslaved labor, followed along the fall line. William Gregg, who had revived the Vaucluse mill in the late 1830s, campaigned for Southern industry and won a charter for the Graniteville Manufacturing Company in December 1845; its granite mill began operating in 1849 with a deliberately all-white workforce housed in a planned village, setting a pattern for what came later. The state's industrial era began in earnest in the 1880s, as local and Northern capital built mill villages across Spartanburg, Greenville, and Anderson counties. Springs Mills in Lancaster County and Milliken & Company in Spartanburg became giants of the postwar era. The 1934 General Textile Strike found its most violent expression here: at Honea Path, deputized mill loyalists fired on pickets, killing six on the spot and fatally wounding a seventh. Eleven men were tried and acquitted, and for decades the killings were rarely spoken of; a memorial was not dedicated until 1995. The state's legacy industry contracted sharply between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s; Milliken survives as a major producer of technical textiles and chemicals.