From the windows of the hospital where I was born you can see the mills, their water towers and the red brick of the factory building, and around them, spilling out, the streets of the mill villages. Villages of small, uniform houses built for the mill’s workers. In the absence of industry by the mid-70′s they had faded into decrepitude or strained to remain working class.
The Mills loomed large for my family. My grandparents worked for years in the mills. They had moved from the nowhere towns of the Carolina foothills to the factory town of Greenville. These mills had been sifting down from New England for over a half-century in order to benefit from the cheap, third-world labor of the South. Mills came to dominate the local economy. Greenville would, with reason, eventually declare itself, “The Textile Capital of the World.”
The communities of the mills were etched in the memory of my grandparents as place names and neighborhoods. Mills had provided employment, shelter and community. Even after my grandfather moved to the more affluent eastside, his mind was still oriented to the geography of the mill. My grandfather would refer to Judson or Poe Mill or Woodside as landmarks and placeholders in Greenville ‘s landscape when they had been silent and shuttered for twenty years and more.
This silence was echoed by the “Old” Textile Hall. Built downtown adjacent to the business district for the Southern Textile Exposition in 1917 the Hall had become a vacant monument to Greenville ‘s manufacturing glory and a symbol of its decline. In 1972 they built what was called the “New” Textile Hall. The “New” hall was simply a convention center, lacking in architectural charm as well as authenticity. As the relevance of calling it a “Textile” hall disappeared to the point of embarrassment the city fathers renamed it the Palmetto Exhibition Center.
As a child I was captivated by these relics of the past, these hulks of red brick lined with large, faceless windows standing quietly behind walls of chain-link fence. I could not understand how so much human activity, how the energy and time of so many people could end in silence and dereliction. These buildings had stood at the heart of communities and transformed a small, pleasant burg into an industrial capital. Even after they closed, the brick of these places still radiated a lingering civic pride and identity, an identity formed by what now existed only in the past.
I never saw the inside of a working mill until I visited the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts. There along with the exhibits, they had two machines running. They were machines from the era my grandparents would have been working there. The mill always present at the edges of their stories was suddenly in front of me. Even with only two machines operating, the room was deafening. I could imagine clearly my grandmother as a young woman standing at the loom, cotton stuffed into her ears while she made the same endlessly repetitive motions day after day beside scores of other women, while porters carried things in and out and children kept things swept and cleared away.
At the end of the shift, the mill would empty out. Men head to the bars and billiard halls or perhaps to a Textile League baseball game. My grandfather would speak of how the Lord saved him from pool and drink during his years at the mill. When my family bought a house with a pool table, we discovered my sixty year old grandfather could still run the table on us when he had not played pool in over thirty years. My brothers and I could only imagine the rakish hustler he must have been back on the mill hill.
My grandfather died in the same hospital I was born in. In sight of the mills, the mills that shaped him, shaped a town, shaped a region. Meanwhile, brick chimneys stand silently over the communities they created while the names of the mills continue to fade from their water towers and our memories.
