Honea Path will Not Forget Chiquola Mill Massacre
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
People in Honea Path will never forget the Chiquola Mill Massacre of 1934. Seems almost everyone is related to someone or knows someone who continues to pass down memories of those who were there.
The Chiquola Manufacturing Co. in Honea Path was the footprint of the world to many providing the house a family occupied, the store where it bought groceries, the church it attended, the electric light that reached its rooms and, in the lean years of the Great Depression, the difference between a meal on the table and none.
The mill was the organizing force of daily life.
That’s why on Sept. 6, 1934, that arrangement was ruptured with extraordinary violence when roughly 300 textile workers and other labor supporters gathered at Chiquola Mill amid the nationwide textile strike of 1934, hoping to halt production and press for arbitration. By the end of the confrontation, seven people had been killed at the mill, scores were injured and the event had become national news.
Newspapers described it in the hard language of the day. One headline announced, “Seven Killed in Battle at Chiquola Mill.” Reports said that 10 people died in connection with the bloody conflict. The confrontation, newspapers called it, had been “sanguinary” — a word that means bloody, though the plain word did not need much help.
Most of the dead and injured were strikers.
What occurred in Honea Path was a local tragedy, but it was also part of a national labor uprising at a time when mill labor remained dangerous, poorly paid and woven into an economic system that left families deeply dependent on their employers.
The events at Chiquola Mill came in a compressed burst of fear, anger, gunfire and lasting grief.
The mill’s owners and managers were determined to keep production moving as strikers encountered men armed with rifles, shotguns, clubs, tear gas and dynamite. A World War I-era machine gun had been mounted on the mill roof, but thankfully, according to a story preserved in local memory, the weapon jammed saving untold numbers of lives.
Justin Atkin, a Honea Path artist, local historian and owner of The Fiddle and Bow, said the account of the jammed machine gun has long circulated in the community.
“The story is that it jammed. The only way they know it jammed, I guess, is if someone was trying to fire it,” said Atkin said.
“(If not) it could have been a lot worse,” said Atkin.
One striker, who was 17 in 1934, later recalled seeing a man carrying a picket sign fall in front of him, at first thinking the man had stumbled, until he saw a rifle pointed toward the crowd from the mill boss’s office.
Atkin cautions against imagining the event as a prolonged battlefield engagement. Its speed was part of the horror.
“It got out of hand real fast,” he said. “The whole thing didn’t last that very long. You hear it described a lot of ways as a gun battle and this and that. It was very, very quick.”
The people caught in the confrontation included mill workers, strike supporters and members of so-called flying squadrons — groups that traveled to reinforce picket lines and assist workers participating in the wider strike. Although opponents invoked the familiar accusation of “outside agitators,” most of those who took part were local people: mill hands, neighbors, church members and relatives.
The divisions did not fall neatly between strangers. They ran through Honea Path itself.
“There are a lot of families that are still here that were part of it,” said Atkin. “They’re mostly descendants of both sides — the folks that done the shooting and the folks that got shot. They’re your neighbors and your church family members and your family and your friends.”
The conditions that led to the strike are difficult to fully recover from the distance of nearly a century, but Atkin said the work was demanding, hazardous and deeply tied to the survival of entire households.
Workers commonly labored 55 to 60 hours a week. Claude Cannon, one of the workers killed at the mill, received a handwritten Chiquola Manufacturing Co. pay envelope on Sept. 3, 1934, three days before the shooting. Atkin has preserved it.
The envelope lists Cannon’s name, the company, his payroll deductions and his take-home pay: $16.20.
“To think that he held that,” said Atkin. “That was his last pay. Then, in the midst of going to work, or trying to go to work, or whatever was going on that day, he was killed at his place of employment.”
The sum evokes a different industrial world, but not an uncomplicated one. Mills offered wages when farming was uncertain and punishing while providing housing, stores, recreation, churches and a measure of material security that many rural families had not known.
“At one time, Chiquola Mill, they were employing 90 percent of the town,” Atkin said. “You lived in their homes; you bought at their mill stores. They helped build your churches; they helped build your rec centers. They funded community stuff.”
For some families, life in a mill village represented a step out of rural deprivation. Many people arrived from farms where electricity, dependable housing and regular income were far from guaranteed.
“People flocked to the cotton mills,” said Atkin. “A lot of people, that was the first time they had ever seen an electric light bulb.”
But that security came with dependence. If the mill owned the job, house and store, a dispute with the employer could imperil all three. And the mills could be dangerous places to work.
Atkin recalled stories passed down by his grandfather about machinery belts that ran between floors. Workers sometimes kicked a slipping belt back into place. In one such incident, he said, the machinery caught a worker by the foot and carried him upward, killing him in front of other employees.
Even long after the textile industry’s decline, Atkin said, he has known people missing fingers, hands or portions of arms after accidents at cotton mills.
“It was dangerous work,” he said. “Health-wise, it wasn’t good for your health. The overall conditions — it was a tough job.”
The following died in massacre: Claude Cannon, 27; Lee Crawford, 26; Thomas Yarbrough, 54; E.M. “Bill” Knight; Ira Davis, 26; Maxie Peterson, 27; and C.R. Rucker, 39.
In the aftermath of the shooting, 11 men were charged with murder. All 11 were acquitted.
Dan Beacham, the mill superintendent, occupied an unusually powerful position in the town: he was also Honea Path’s mayor and a judge. Witnesses said Beacham shot at protesters. According to accounts of the aftermath, he arrested those witnesses and charged them with perjury.
For the families of the dead, even burial became part of the conflict.
None of Honea Path’s churches would permit funeral services for the victims. The churches, like much of the town, had ties to the mill. The funerals were held in a field.
The surviving strikers were fired and forced from mill-owned houses. They had opposed their employer and then found themselves cut off from the economic structure that governed their wages and their shelter.
The violence did not disappear when the shooting stopped. It settled into the town’s memory, where it remained active but often unspoken.
Atkin’s great-grandparents were among the people present that day. His great-grandmother, Ethel Atkin, held one of the dying men in her arms and fanned him with his hat until he died. His great-grandfather helped retrieve the bodies after the shooting.
When the documentary “The Uprising of ’34” aired in the 1990s, Atkin’s great-grandparents appeared in it as some of the few surviving eyewitnesses. The documentary was controversial enough, Atkin said, that the family had to travel to watch it on North Carolina public television because South Carolina public television would not air it.
“I remember vividly at the time that they were going to air it on TV,” said Atkin. “We had to actually go somewhere that could pick up North Carolina public television because they would not air the video on South Carolina public television, because of the controversy around it.”
Even six decades after the killings, the memories were too painful for his great-grandparents to revisit for long.
“They finally just had to stop,” said Atkin. “They were elderly, and it just tore them up to relive it. That was their friends. That was her family. That was their fellow church members. That was their co-worker that they worked with every day.”
For decades, the massacre was largely absent from Honea Path’s public memory, not exactly forgotten, but passed down in fragments, in family stories and private recollections, in the things people heard in ordinary conversation but rarely assembled into a public account.
But it’s shadow was always looming.
The 1994 documentary, along with the journalistic work of Frank Beacham — the grandson of mill superintendent Dan Beacham — helped bring the story into fuller public view. A stone marker in Dogwood Park now memorializes the workers who lost their lives and livelihoods.
Its installation was meaningful, said Atkin, but not uncomplicated. In the 1990s, surviving participants and their immediate families were still alive, and old loyalties remained raw.
“There was still a lot of controversy in the ’90s,” he said. “There were still a lot of heated emotions.”
Today, most people who witnessed the violence firsthand have died. Atkin knows of one person still living who was present: a woman now in her 90s who was 6 years old on Sept. 6, 1934. She remembers standing in a friend’s yard near the mill with her mother, then running when gunfire began.
The dwindling number of eyewitnesses changes the character of memory. The event belongs increasingly to descendants, researchers, old newspaper clippings, payroll envelopes, cemetery records and the monument in Dogwood Park.
It also belongs to a complicated legacy of reconciliation. Atkin said stories have emerged over the years of people who found ways to live beside, worship with and forgive one another after the shooting.
“One of the guys that shot somebody actually went to church and started going to church with them and ended up apologizing,” Atkin said. The man eventually became a Sunday school teacher for the victim’s daughter. “It’s just a beautiful picture of how they worked it out and forgave each other and kept the community going.”
Honea Path, Atkin said, should not be defined solely by the massacre, even though an internet search can make the tragedy appear to be the town’s first and most enduring identity.
“We’re so much more than that,” he said. “But it’s a part of history.”
The Chiquola killings became part of a larger national reckoning over the 1934 textile strike, during which violence elsewhere claimed the lives of dozens more workers. Public outrage over the upheaval helped build support for federal labor protections, including the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Under Section 7 of that law, employees have the right to organize, join unions and bargain collectively through representatives selected by a majority of workers in an appropriate bargaining unit. The law transformed the legal landscape for organized labor, though it did not erase the resistance unions encountered in the South or elsewhere.
Atkin sees the legacy of the Chiquola strike in protections that can now seem ordinary precisely because they have become so familiar: limits on child labor, the 40-hour workweek, overtime rules and a broader public expectation that a job should not require surrendering every part of a person’s life to an employer.
“A lot of your work-related stuff was a direct result of the mill shooting here,” he said. “We take stuff like a 40-hour workweek and overtime for granted, child labor laws and stuff like that.”
South Carolina’s union membership rate remains among the lowest in the country, at 2.3 percent, reflecting the long and continuing resistance to organized labor in the state. Yet union-represented workers generally have higher annual earnings, stronger health-insurance coverage and greater access to employer-sponsored retirement plans than workers without negotiated collective-bargaining agreements.
The distance between a 1934 pay envelope showing $16.20 and a modern debate over wages, hours and collective bargaining is not as wide as it may appear. The arguments have changed vocabulary, but the underlying questions remain recognizable: Who holds power at work? What does security cost? And what happens when the people who make a place run decide that the terms of their work must change?
As the week that began with Labor Day draws to a close, the Chiquola Mill Massacre remains a difficult answer. It is a story of striking workers and armed resistance, of a town bound tightly to one employer of lives shattered and largely unacknowledged for decades. But it is also a reminder that protections now treated as routine were often won through conflict, sacrifice and the refusal of ordinary workers to accept that hardship was simply the natural order of things.
