Inman, South Carolina

Inman sits in the Spartanburg County foothills where the Southern Railway once carried cotton mill traffic toward the mountain gaps. The town grew up around a railroad depot, and local historians differ on who its name honors. A mill village grew up here in the early twentieth century around the Inman Mills textile plant, which began operations in nineteen oh one.

The mill provided steady employment for farm families from the surrounding hills and defined the town's social life for generations. Like much of the Carolina Piedmont, Inman spent most of the twentieth century organized around the rhythms of shift work and cotton spinning. The mill itself has been converted to other uses, but the grid of mill houses nearby still marks the footprint of the village.

Today Inman is a small city of about three thousand people at the edge of Spartanburg's growing suburban fringe.