Echoes & Insights: When the whistle blew, and what is rising now in Laurens County’s mill villages

Cotton, spun instead of shipped

By the end of the 19th century, Laurens County had made a decision that would define it for the next hundred years. Rather than continue shipping raw cotton out and watching the profit leave with it, the county would spin its own.

Laurens Cotton Mill was established in 1895. In 1896, Mercer Silas Bailey built the first cotton mill in Clinton. Lydia Mill followed in 1902, and Watts Mill was organized the same year, beginning operations in 1904 on land that had been the Watts plantation. Joanna Mill went up in the eastern part of the county, in a community that had carried the name Goldville. Laurens Glass began turning out bottles in the county seat.

Five cotton mills. Five villages. And around each one, a full world.

A village, not just a workplace

The mills did not simply employ people. They built the places where those people lived their entire lives.

Company housing lined the streets in orderly rows. In Clinton alone, the Bailey mills offered roughly 800 homes to employees who lived, worked, and shopped inside the village. There were company stores, ball fields, churches, and schools. Children of Watts Mill workers attended Watts School until the student population outgrew it, and Ford Junior High was built on Lucas Avenue in 1936 to hold them. Ford Elementary operates in that same original building today.

The villages had their own identities and their own rivalries, and much of that was settled on a baseball diamond. Textile league baseball was serious business in the Upstate. Mills recruited players, fielded competitive teams, and filled the stands on Saturday afternoons with families who had spent the week on the same floor. The Joanna Hornets were one of those teams.

The work itself was hard, and it was constant. When the Second World War came, Watts Mill shifted from handkerchiefs and cottons to parachute fabric. Forty Watts Mill employees were killed in that war, and a monument on the Laurens County courthouse grounds carries their names.

Mill villages remained the economic and social center of Laurens County until well after 1945.

What happens when the whistle stops

Then, over the final decades of the 20th century, it ended. American textile production moved offshore. The mills closed one by one, and the villages built entirely around them were left holding the buildings, the houses, and the ball fields, with nothing to organize them anymore.

Laurens County diversified. Distribution centers, auto parts suppliers, ceramics and advanced manufacturing arrived, and today the county’s industrial base is stronger and more varied than the textile economy ever was. But diversification happened at the county level. The villages themselves absorbed the loss street by street.

That is the part of the story that does not usually get told, and it is where the insights begin.

Insights: The places coming back

Jeff Siegler, an urban planner who founded the civic pride firm Revitalize or Die and wrote Your City Is Sick, argues that the real threat to small communities is not a missing grant or a missing employer. It is apathy, and the slow drift that sets in when people stop tending the place they live. His central claim is simple: place shapes behavior. When surroundings are neglected, residents begin to distance themselves from where they are from. When surroundings are cared for, the relationship repairs itself.

“What we have to keep in mind in a county like Laurens is that while the major employer may have closed its doors, the community assets left behind from that time are what makes the town to feel special and must be protected and maintained, Siegler said. “Our economy has changed, but no matter what local employment looks like, people will always adapt to their surroundings, so it is vital that we tend to them.” 

By that measure, several Laurens County mill communities are doing exactly the right work.

Joanna. The Joanna Project, a nonprofit led by board president Michael Riefsnyder, has spent the last several years restoring the historic Joanna textile mill baseball stadium. The grandstand that once held mill league crowds had been sitting abandoned. Volunteers and contractors demolished and rebuilt the dugouts, upgraded water and electrical infrastructure, pressure washed and painted the bleachers, and renovated the field. Baseball returned this year, with the revived Joanna Hornets, a collegiate summer team named for the original mill club, playing a season that opened over Memorial Day weekend. Plans call for the South Carolina Textile Mill Baseball Museum at the stadium, the first of its kind in the state, with archival photographs, uniforms, and recorded interviews with former players now in their 90s. The organization’s stated purpose goes beyond the ballpark, with proceeds directed back into the community through home improvement projects and local grants. The project’s own framing says it plainly: this is about rebuilding a community, not just a stadium.

Clinton and Bell Street. No building in the county tells a fuller version of this story. Bell Street School, built in 1926 at 301 N. Bell St., was the second school constructed for African American students in Clinton, following the Friendship School founded in 1883 by Friendship AME Church. Within roughly a decade, Bell Street became the first Black high school in Laurens County to earn accreditation, serving the Clinton, Joanna, and Cross Hill communities, including the families of the mill villages. When a new Bell Street High School opened on Peachtree Street in 1960, the original building became an elementary school, renamed Martha Dendy Elementary in honor of principal David Dendy’s mother. It closed in 2008. The Peachtree Street building became a middle school and operated until 2015.

Then it sat empty. In August 2023, after preservation and rehabilitation work, the University of South Carolina Union opened its Laurens location in the 2004 wing of the Bell Street School at 600 Peachtree St. In June 2024, USC Union received a Historic Preservation Stewardship Award at the South Carolina Historic Preservation Awards, recognizing its long term care of the property. A building that educated generations of Laurens County children, closed, and might easily have been lost, is a college campus today.

Wattsville and the Watts Mill site. Laurens County secured a resilience grant of more than $3.7 million to improve wastewater disposal in the Wattsville area, infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines but determines whether a community can grow at all. The Watts Mill property itself has drawn developer interest for a substantial residential project, a reminder that mill land in the middle of a county seat is not dead ground. It is an opportunity waiting on the right plan.

Lydia Mill. In the Lydia Mill community of Clinton, residents planted a white oak in the children’s park last fall. It is a small thing next to a $50 million development proposal. It may also be the more instructive one. Siegler’s argument is that revitalization is not primarily a funding problem, and that the visible, ordinary acts of care are what shift a community’s sense of itself. A tree planted in a park by people who intend to still be there when it provides shade is that argument made local.

What the mills left behind

The mills gave Laurens County more than a payroll. They gave it neighborhoods, ball fields, schools, churches, and a habit of building the whole community around the work rather than merely near it. The buildings that remain, and the ones that have found new purpose, are the physical record of that.

The Laurens County Museum has told this story directly, most recently through a South Carolina State Museum traveling exhibit on the state’s textile heritage, which the museum expanded with artifacts, photographs, and personal items from all five county mills. That is the same instinct at work: hold on to it and pass it on.

“Community revitalization is a lot like getting in shape. Everyone knows how to get in shape, but not everyone wants to make the commitment. It is simple, not easy, and requires a great deal of time and effort, but that’s okay, because we have plenty of both. Also, like getting in shape, it can’t be done externally, said Siegler. “No one from outside is going to save you, so you might as well get started. But here is the fun part, the joy is in the process, seeing the trajectory shift and momentum build, is the fun part. Your town doesn’t have to get fixed over night, but every day it gets better, is a day people love it more.” 

A year ago, this column began with Ann Pamela Cunningham, a Laurens County woman who looked at a ruined Mount Vernon and decided it was worth saving. Twelve installments later, the through line is clear. Laurens County has always had people willing to do the unglamorous work of keeping a place alive for the people who live in it.

That work is not finished, and neither is the story. There is more to tell about this county than one year can hold. The churches and the cemeteries. The one room schools. The people whose names are on the buildings and the ones whose names are not. The next edition of Echoes & Insights will carry that story further, and it will carry it to the people who love this place most, the ones who live here.

Until then, readers are invited to visit the Laurens County Museum, drive the Revolutionary War trail, take a seat in the Joanna grandstand, and look at the county with fresh eyes. The echoes are still here. So are the people willing to listen for them.

Echoes & Insights: The Laurens County Series has been made possible by Arthur State Bank, Presbyterian College, Carolina Health Centers, and Via Health Partners. Readers with a Laurens County story worth preserving are invited to share it with the Laurens County Buzz.