Vardry McBee and the Textile Crescent

The story of how Greenville became the Textile Center of the World is also the story of one river, a handful of ambitious investors, and the people who paid the steepest price to make it all run.

Vardry McBee arrived in eighteen fifteen and began laying the infrastructure of a city: mills, roads, churches, a school. But the real textile explosion came after the Civil War. In eighteen seventy-four, two Boston investors named Samson and Hall came south after a disastrous fire wiped out their northern factory. They saw the Reedy River and the cheap labor supply of the Upcountry and built the Camperdown Mill right at the lower falls. By eighteen eighty, the mill employed two hundred sixty workers and ranked as the second largest in South Carolina. More mills followed quickly: Piedmont, Brandon, Woodside, Judson, American Spinning. By the nineteen twenties, Greenville had nineteen textile mills in and around the city, and the phrase textile center of the world was not boosterism. It was measurable fact.

The mills built entire worlds. Each major operation constructed a mill village around the factory: company housing, a company store, a company school, a company church. The village supplied food, healthcare, and recreation, and in exchange claimed nearly every hour of the worker's life. Residents of these villages were called lintheads, a name that described the cotton fibers that clung to their hair and clothing after a shift. Some wore it with defiance; others felt the sting.

Child labor was standard practice. In nineteen hundred, the United States Census recorded that thirty percent of South Carolina mill hands were between the ages of ten and sixteen. Entire families worked the looms together, because that was how the mills preferred to hire, guaranteeing a captive labor pool and keeping wages low. When offshore manufacturing began undercutting costs in the nineteen fifties and sixties, mill after mill closed. The villages emptied. The city had to decide what it would do with everything the mills had left behind.