Jackson, Joseph Jefferson Wofford

By 1916 Brandon Mill had 86,000 spindles and assets worth $1.5 million. With Smith as mill president, New York agents Woodward and Baldwin controlled the mill’s stock and consolidated the mill with nearby Poinsett Mill, forming the Brandon Corporation in 1928.

The fourth largest city in South Carolina, Greenville traces its origins to 1797 when Lemuel Alston, the largest landowner in Greenville County, laid out the “Greenville C. H. Village of Pleasantburg” on either side of Pearis’s wagon road on the east bank of the Reedy River.

Perhaps the greatest triumph for any mill town came in 1936, when the Spartanburg American Legion team won the state’s first national championship in any sport by defeating a Los Angeles team in a five-game series (some twenty thousand fans attended the fifth and deciding game).

Villages often followed a simple pattern, with workers housed in rows of identical single-family houses or, in some cases, duplexes, while higher-ranking managers lived in larger houses closer to the mills in the community centers.