Piedmont Number One: The Mill That Built a Town That Never Was
Near Greenville, South Carolina
Henry Pinckney Hammett picked Garrison Shoals on the Saluda River in eighteen seventy-three and built what would become the largest textile mill in South Carolina. The four-story brick factory, Piedmont Number One, opened in eighteen seventy-six with five thousand spindles and a hundred and twelve looms, powered by the river itself.
A whole town grew up on both sides of the water, company houses, churches, schools. And yet Piedmont was never incorporated as a municipality. It existed entirely as a company town, housing thousands of workers without ever becoming an official place on a map. Enlarged in eighteen eighty and again in nineteen hundred, the mills ran until nineteen seventy-seven. Then in nineteen eighty-three most of the original complex burned to the ground. Today Piedmont Number One is a National Historic Landmark, a ghost of the era when a private company could build a city and call it nothing at all.
