West Columbia: The Mill That Changed Everything
Near Columbia, South Carolina
The city across the Congaree River from South Carolina's capital was born in a single day in eighteen ninety-four, when a plant manager threw a switch and made history.
On April fifteenth of that year, Arethas Blood, president of the Columbia Mills Company, started the motors of the new Columbia Duck Mill on the west bank of the river. It was the first textile mill anywhere in the world to run entirely on electric power. The mill went into production that June with three hundred workers making heavy canvas fabric.
A planned village grew up around it almost immediately. By nineteen oh seven, a community that had held just five scattered homes in eighteen ninety-one had grown to more than five thousand people. The mill owned the houses until nineteen fifty-three. The neighborhood was long called Brookland, then New Brookland, because the postal service said there was already a Brookland elsewhere. In nineteen thirty-six the city officially became West Columbia. The core mill village, with its tree-lined streets and frame houses, still stands on the National Register of Historic Places.
