Piedmont: A River, and Rich History Run Through It

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The Saluda River does not care about county lines, moving through the Piedmont country with the ancient indifference of water, cutting between Greenville and Anderson counties, passing beneath bridges and beside mill ruins, carrying with it the history of the place that grew because of its very presence.

Piedmont is divided by the river in more than the cartographic sense. It made the community possible, powering the textile mills that turned a rural crossing into an influential industrial town. But the river also split Piedmont in two counties, leaving the community subject to two sets of governments, two tax bases, two sets of priorities and, often, two versions of what should happen next.

“The river made this town and the river has killed this town because of the county lines,” said Chuck Davis, a local historian who has spent years gathering stories, artifacts and records from the community. “It made the mill, but it’s divided the counties and can’t get them to work together.”

Piedmont’s story begins before the brick towers, before the whistle that called workers to the mill, before the company baseball teams and packed basketball gyms. Native Americans and early settlers knew the area as the Big Shoals of the Saluda, a natural crossing and, according to local tradition, a hunting ground, burial ground and dividing area between tribes.

“There weren’t a lot of people here,” Davis said. “This was Indian territory.”

European settlement increased after the Revolutionary War, when land grants brought newcomers into the region, then more people arrived in the 1840s when farming was the central occupation. Around 1850, David Garrison built a grist mill beside the shoals, and the place became known as Garrison Shoals.

Then came Henry Pinckney Hammett.

Hammett, a former Confederate officer and the son-in-law of Greenville textile owner William Bates, recognized the industrial possibility embedded in the river. He purchased the property, chartered the Piedmont Manufacturing Co. in 1874 and renamed the community Piedmont, from the Italian “Piemonte,” which translates “foot of the mountains.”

The timing was not easy. The Panic of 1873 had shaken the national economy, and Southern industrial development remained uncertain. Hammett secured Northern investment, a notable move for a Southern industrialist of the era and opened Piedmont No. 1 in 1876.

The four-story brick mill drew power from the Saluda River and began with 5,000 spindles and 112 looms. It was not merely a factory. It was a model — an ambitious expression of a new industrial South, built where water could be turned into movement and movement into cloth.

“[The mill] was the catalyst of all the southern mills,” Davis said. “The new manufacturing ways of doing things.”

Piedmont No. 1 expanded, and Hammett built Piedmont No. 2 in 1888. The mills were accompanied by a familiar structure of Southern industrial life: employee housing, schools, churches, a library and a company-centered civic system that offered stability while making the mill the center, and in complete command, of almost everything.

The first mill village was developed on the Greenville County side of the river, Davis said. There were four or five streets of houses. As Hammett expanded toward the Anderson County side and developed Mill No. 3, company housing followed.

“They started building the mill villages day one, I think,” Davis said.

By the time Hammett died in 1891, the Piedmont Manufacturing Co. operated 47,000 spindles and 1,300 looms. It had become one of the largest textile operations in the world.

The company’s influence traveled well beyond the Saluda. Piedmont earned a reputation as a “School of Superintendents,” producing textile managers who went on to operate mills across the South. It also became the first mill to export cloth to China in the 1880s, extending its reach from a riverbank in the Upstate to markets on the other side of the world.

Much of the cotton cloth made in Piedmont, Davis said, was sent overseas.

In the early days of the mill village, the clock did not belong to the worker. It belonged to the whistle.

Davis, who grew up listening to older residents recount the habits of the town, said daily life followed a reliable cycle. People rose, went to work, returned home, sat on porches, ate dinner and went to bed. The whistle sounded at different times of day and night, telling workers it was nearly time to report to the mill.

“Everybody went to work, come home, sit on the porch, eat, went to bed, got up when the mill whistle blew,” Davis said.

There were also baseball games, fishing and the simple recreation of living among people who had few reasons to leave town and many reasons to gather.

Piedmont’s sports culture was not incidental to the mill’s life. It was one of the ways the company became a town, and the town became a crowd.

The baseball teams began in the late 19th century and grew into a local spectacle, with mills across the region began recruiting talented players, including semi-professional and professional athletes who could earn more working in a textile mill than they could playing ball elsewhere.

Piedmont had its own share of gifted athletes, attracting crowds large enough to seem implausible now: Davis has seen newspaper accounts of 2,500 to 3,000 people attending games involving Piedmont and Pelzer.

The early baseball field stood near the location of the Sue Cleveland School on Highway 20. Around 1932, when U.S. 29 was being expanded, the stadium had to be removed, and the ballpark was relocated across the river on the Anderson County side, where a new stadium held about 2,000 spectators.

“It was like double- or triple-A baseball now,” Davis said. Then he reconsidered. “Maybe bigger.”

Basketball was just as important, perhaps more so.

“Basketball was the boss down here,” Davis said.

The sport developed in the early 1900s and Piedmont teams included skilled homegrown players and later, like the baseball clubs, recruited college athletes to strengthen their rosters. The teams won state championships, the gymnasium filled with spectators, and the games gave the mill village a public drama that belonged to workers and families as much as it did to the company.

In the 1950s, the athletic director was Earl Wooten, a figure associated with Pelzer before coming to Piedmont. Davis remembered the initial local suspicion: “everybody hated Earl Wooten because he played for Pelzer,” and the conversion that followed once Wooten became part of Piedmont life.

“When he came to Piedmont, everybody loved him,” Davis said. “He was my first coach.”

Davis himself played basketball. He was too young to remember the height of textile ball, but he remembers the later Royal Ambassadors basketball league, when Piedmont hosted a state tournament that filled the gym night after night. Spectators hung from the stage and crowded the walls. The tournament continued for two weeks, except on Sundays and Saturdays.

“It brought a lot of out-of-town people here also,” Davis said.

By the late 1970s, the crowds and leagues had faded. The teams were gone. The mill-supported sports system gave way to a few church leagues and volunteer efforts.

The Piedmont mill village also had its own moral architecture, with churches central to daily life. Mill officials attended them, and workers observed that example. The Methodist church was the first in town, Davis said, though several denominations eventually took root. There are about six churches in Piedmont, he said, a number that seems large until one remembers that mill communities were built not only around shifts and wages but around faith, family and the social rules that made close living possible.

“You didn’t drink in Piedmont or you’d get kicked out,” Davis said.

For those determined to drink, the Piedmont and Northern Railroad (sometimes called the “Poor & Needy”) provided a route to Greenville. Residents could take the P&N train north, spend the evening there and return late at night. The railroad was an escape valve for a town whose moral rules were publicly understood.

Mill life also imposed physical costs. During World War II, many local men left for military service, some before they finished high school. Davis believed Piedmont’s 1947 basketball team might have won another state title if it had not lost three players to the war.

Women continued working in the mills and often carried the burden of maintaining homes and families as well. Davis remembered his aunts, who spent their working lives in the mill, which proved costly.

“All of them had lung disease,” he said.

The line is brief, but it complicates the nostalgia. The mills offered work, housing, sports and a structure for civic life. They also drew labor out of people’s bodies, year after year, in lint-filled rooms and industrial routines that had consequences long after the whistle stopped.

In 1946, J.P. Stevens and Co. bought the Piedmont mills. The corporation modernized the facilities, bringing amenities such as air conditioning. But in the 1950s, it sold the company-owned houses to employees, an important transfer of property that also marked the retreat of the paternalistic mill village.

The company continued supporting teams and the community center for a time, Davis said, while gradually withdrawing. Each year, something was no longer funded. The homes were sold. The company began to give up property and civic responsibilities that residents had assumed would remain part of the community’s structure.

“They started kind of like picking things each year to quit funding,” Davis said. “And it comes down to where they just quit.”

The first Piedmont mill ceased manufacturing operations in 1977. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and named a National Historic Landmark in 1978, a recognition that seemed to acknowledge the magnitude of what the mill had been.

Then, in October 1983, a severe fire destroyed much of the structure. Its landmark designations were removed in 1986.

The surviving towers still rise above the Saluda, ruins of a manufacturing world that once provided work, water power, athletic teams, housing, community identity and, perhaps most importantly, the assumption that someone else would always be responsible for holding the place together.

People believed the mill would take care of Piedmont for the rest of their lives, Davis said, and failed to plan for the time when that ended.

Residents twice considered incorporation, but many older residents resisted. Why create a municipal government, pay taxes and take on public obligations when the mill was there?

“They said, ‘The mill’s going to take care of us,’” Davis said.

It did not.

The mill gave away or sold property. The cemetery became the responsibility of volunteers. The community center passed out of company ownership and eventually became part of the fire district, an arrangement Davis said has worked well. But in the process, the town discovered what many company towns discover too late: an employer can build a civic world, but it can also dismantle one.

The loss was not only economic. It was social and psychological. People went to work elsewhere, including Michelin and other manufacturers. Manufacturing changed. The old certainty that the mill would always be there gave way to a commuter existence in which work, shopping and services increasingly lay beyond Piedmont.

“It was pretty much a boomtown until about 1980,” Davis said.