East Florence Historic District

You're in East Florence, a neighborhood that the railroad and the river built. This district grew up in the industrial boom of the eighteen eighties and nineties, when small locally owned shops sprang up to serve a flood of new factory workers. An early cotton mill had stood near here.

Short lived, it was the forerunner of the textile mills, foundries, and the famous Florence Wagon Works that filled this end of town a few decades later. The surviving district holds a tight cluster of working buildings from that age, shops, a bank, a fire station, and the railroad that tied them all together. It's a snapshot of the moment Florence stopped being just a cotton port and became a manufacturing town.