Piedmont Number One
Piedmont Number One was a red brick textile mill with a low roof design located in Piedmont, South Carolina, near the Saluda River. The four-story building with an L-shaped footprint had three-foot-thick walls, wooden brackets supporting the roof overhang, and housed thousands of spindles and dozens of looms inside.
The factory was built in 1876 by Henry Pickney Hammett and William Bates along the Saluda River and was among the country's largest mills at the time. Hammett continued the project after Bates died, constructed a dam in 1889 for hydropower, and established it as a center of industrial growth in South Carolina after the Civil War.
The name Piedmont Number One came from the construction of a second mill nearby, which led to calling the first one by this designation. The factory formed the center of a worker community where residents from North Carolina lived on streets named after their home places.
The site is located at the south end of Main Street in Piedmont, South Carolina, near the Saluda River. Visitors can walk around the area to explore the former mill grounds and surrounding community spaces that once served the workers and their families.
A dam on the Saluda River was built in 1889, one of the few hydropower systems in the region at that time. This system provided the factory with essential power and made it a technological leader in southern textile production.
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