#50: Charles Pinckney, life in textile mill villages, and a Fort Mill history walking tour
For South Carolina history lovers far and wide! Enjoy weekly SC history and upcoming SC historical events
Dear reader,
Welcome to Newsletter #50 of The South Carolina History Newsletter! I’m so happy you’re here. For those who celebrate, I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend!
Also, I can’t believe it, but today’s post marks the halfway point in my “100 posts in 100 days” experiment in starting the SC History Newsletter! Thank you SO much for joining me on this journey. I’ve learned so much about our beautiful state and it’s been a blast sharing my learning with you. There have also been a handful of you wonderful followers who have given me fantastic topic ideas and feedback along the way — thank you for your support and encouragement!
Let’s welcome some new subscribers below!
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I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, and as always, please feel free to reply to this email with your ideas and suggestions on South Carolina history you’d like to learn more about. I’m only a click away.
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And now, let’s learn some South Carolina history!
Yours truly,
Kate
(Writing from Greenville, SC)
➳ Featured SC History Event
Please enjoy our featured SC History Event below, and click here to visit my SC History Events Calendar that organizes all the upcoming SC history events I have discovered. Please let me know if you’d like to add an event to the calendar! Reply to this email or send me a note at schistorynewsletter@gmail.com.
Tours will be held every 2nd & 4th Saturday, April - October 2024 | “Fort Mill History 101 Walking Tour” | Fort Mill History Museum | Fort Mill, SC | TICKETS: $15
“Are you new to Fort Mill and want to learn more about the history of your town?
Have you ever wondered about the buildings, sculptures and memorials seen around downtown Fort Mill? Or have you lived here forever and want to reminisce about the past? Then the FM History 101 Walking Tour is for YOU! Spend an hour learning about the history of Fort Mill while strolling through our charming downtown. By listening and learning you will get a snapshot into our rich history told by our experienced tour guides. This is a fun and unique way to explore Fort Mill, discover the past, and learn what makes it a special place to call home.”
➳ SC History Fun Facts
I.
Did you know South Carolina Founding Father Charles Pinckney helped argue for the separation of Church and State in the U.S. Constitution?
South Carolina Founding Father, planter, and politician, Charles Pinckney was born in Charleston, South Carolina on October 26, 1757. His father bore the same name and was a wealthy lawyer and planter. His mother was Frances Brewton, the daughter of a goldsmith. The Pinckneys were a well-known and influential Lowcountry family.
In his youth, Charles was tutored privately by David Oliphant, who served in the Common House of Assembly with Charles’ father. Charles excelled under Oliphant, particularly in the sciences of government, philosophy, history, Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish. The Pinckneys had planned for Charles to leave North America in 1773 to study law in England. However, due to the growing unrest in the colonies, his parents decided Charles should stay at home and study law at his father’s office. This proved to be a wise decision as the American Revolution began 2 years later. Despite the war, Charles continued his law education, which was completed in 1779 when he was 21 years old.
At the young age of 21, Charles started his career in public service and was elected to South Carolina’s General Assembly. He also received a lieutenant's commission in the Charleston Militia. He served at the fall of Charleston, where he was taken prisoner by the British in May 1780 and released the next year. His father was also taken prisoner but reluctantly gave an oath to the Crown, thus saving the family’s property from being confiscated. Charles Jr. would be released in Philadelphia and stayed in the north until the war’s end, returning to South Carolina in 1783.
Shortly after his return home, Pinckney was selected as a South Carolina representative to the Fifth Continental Congress (1784-87). He was one of the youngest to attend and was critical of The Articles of Confederation — speaking out that they were “not working well as a system of government.” Charles was one of the four delegates from South Carolina to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.
Scholars today can “attribute nearly 28 clauses to Pinckney’s ideas.” One of his contributions to the Constitution can be seen in Clause 3 of Article 6, which outlined the separation of church and state:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Another, more controversial contribution of Pinckney (and all of South Carolina) was that he stood firm against any anti-slavery clause in the Constitution. Pinckney even went as far as creating his own draft of the Constitution, but the document was unfortunately lost.
The year 1788 was an exciting year for Charles Pinckney. He represented the South Carolina’s convention to ratify the Constitution. He also married Mary Eleanor Laurens, the daughter of wealthy Charleston merchant and president of the Second Continental Congress, Henry Laurens. The combination of the two family’s wealth aided Charles well in his public service career and lifestyle. The couple would have 3 children.
In the following two decades, Charles served in various public service roles: 4 non-consecutive terms as South Carolina’s governor, 3 terms in the General Assembly, and 1 term in the United States Senate.
After supporting Thomas Jefferson in the Presidential election of 1800, Jefferson offered Charles the post as representative of the United States in Spain. He agreed and served abroad from 1801 to 1805, helping “smooth relations with Spain,” as well as working on the Louisiana purchase from France in 1803.
Upon his return to South Carolina, Charles was in the state’s General Assembly and then his fourth and final term as governor. Again, he returned to the General Assembly after his term, serving until 1813, when he retired briefly until convinced to run for the Charleston district seat in the Sixteenth Congress, which he served from 1819-1821. During this Congress, the Missouri Compromise was passed, which he opposed. Being a slave owner himself, Pinckney “stated that only slavery could divide the Union.”
Upon completion of his term, Charles fully retired from public life. He spent his remaining years writing about his travels and political life. He died on October 29, 1824, in Charleston at age 67.
Pinckney's Snee Farm plantation is maintained today as The Charles Pinckney National Historic Site. The nearby Charles Pinckney Elementary School in Mount Pleasant is named for him. His son, Henry L. Pinckney was a U.S. Representative from South Carolina, and mayor of Charleston. His daughter married Robert Young Hayne, who became a U.S. Representative, mayor of Charleston, and governor of South Carolina. Pinckney was also a Freemason and a member of Solomon’s Lodge No. 1 in Charleston.
II.
Let’s explore what life was like in South Carolina’s textile “mill villages”!
Mirroring the Lowell textile mills in New England, early South Carolina textile entrepreneurs built not only factories but frequently also entire villages, such as “Piedmont in Greenville County, Clifton and Pacolet in Spartanburg County, and Graniteville and Langley in Aiken County.” To ensure a steady supply of labor, “employment contracts were signed with whole families” rather than with individuals, and the mill villages were central to this effort to retain employees. Mill owners had to ensure quality housing and other amenities in order to attract and retain workers to the often isolated location of early mills. When mill villages were at their peak in the early 1900s, it has been estimated that as much as “one-sixth of South Carolina’s white population lived and worked in them.”
From the South Carolina Encyclopedia page:
Villages often followed a simple pattern, with workers housed in rows of identical single-family houses or, in some cases, duplexes, while higher-ranking managers lived in larger houses closer to the mills in the community centers. Black employees were housed in separate alleys, often on the other side of the mills from their white counterparts. In addition to housing, mills usually built churches and schools, and they sometimes provided electric lights and other amenities. Many mills retained company stores that sold on credit, and workers were sometimes paid in credits redeemable only at the company stores. Mills provided structured recreation as well, with baseball and softball teams providing a sense of community to boost employee morale.
Famous major league baseball player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was raised in the Brandon Mill village in Greenville, South Carolina. Starting age 7, he began working in the mill as a little boy, and as he grew up, he started playing for mill village baseball teams.
A man named John Marshal Daniel, who grew up in Appleton Mill Village in Anderson, SC remembers life at the mull, including the excitement of the baseball leagues:
The pay was very minimum, but everything was cheap. I go back when hotdogs was a nickel, drinks were six cents, cigarettes was 20 cents a pack, and on and on I could go. But the main interest, especially among men, was ball. Oh, it was competitive. Those mill hills. I mean, highly competitive, and they were some outstanding ball players. It wasn't nothing unusual that I could name a few that left the textile mill hill here, and they went straight to the Big Leagues. Of course, back then, they didn't have farm clubs. I could name a few that went. It was very good. Very competitive. And on Saturday, especially baseball, I remember one particular Saturday there at Appleton, they said there's 3000 people there in a particular ball field. I don’t know what else you want.
Mill villages were marketed as, and for the most part were, wholesome places. Though some mill villages gained a reputation for “crime, disorder, drunkenness, and other vices.” While Mill workers were proud of their work, they were sometimes referred to as “lintheads,” which became a derogatory term. Mill owners worked to counter this reputation through “intensive public relations campaigns.” Pelzer and other mill villages prohibited saloons, imposed curfews, and even banned dogs in an effort to appear cleaner and more desirable.
While on the outside, the practice of providing housing, churches, company stores, and recreational facilities in Mill Villages seemed generous and convenient, these plans were often “couched in the humanitarian language of paternalism” and were aimed at “forestalling any attraction workers might have toward organizing unions or engaging in other political activities.”
As technology made it possible for mills to locate farther from water-powered sites and closer to an existing labor supply, mills began to be established near major towns. With this shift, there was fear that the rural people recruited as mill workers might “disturb” town life. Mill owners continued to promote the mills as places of “positive good that could bring culture, education, and religion to the uncultured, uneducated, and unchurched rural folk.”
Meanwhile, politicians in smaller towns such as Clinton, Abbeville, and Newberry competed for the opportunity to build mills, regarding such investment as a “virtual guarantee of prosperity” which they compared to the lucrative antebellum cotton industry. In the town of Clinton, one of its leading citizens W. P. Jacobs asserted that the successful opening of the mill there was “proof of God’s favor and the town’s righteousness.”
In the 1920s, the mill village model began to decline when mill superintendents began to gain more productivity our of fewer workers, called the “stretch out.” Additionally, there was less funding for Mill Village community improvements and housing, and thus, facilities began to deteriorate. The “stretch-out” and a series of bitter strikes undermined workers’ acceptance of existing conditions and exposed the shortcomings of the highly publicized paternalism of mill owners.
Mill villages continued to decline once the automobile became more affordable, making it easier for workers to commute and to change jobs if working conditions deteriorated. Tougher child labor laws also undermined the custom of hiring entire families to work. Many small mills were bought out by larger competitors who didn’t provide the same care and attention to the needs of the mill village community life unless it “affected the bottom line.”
To keep their workers close and invested, many mill owners tried to pivot and sell their mill houses to their current worker occupants — sometimes given first option to purchase at a slight discount from market value. Workers with a reputation for complaining or working to unionize were told that they would not be offered the chance to buy one of the mill homes, and most white mill neighborhoods remained all-white until federal intervention in the 1960s.
As the villages were sold off and institutions supported by the mills declined, the sense of community that was so central in the early years, all but disappeared. The neighborhood stores, parks, schools, churches, and mill league baseball leagues disappeared, leaving behind only the “physical artifacts of the mill village: rows of identical houses surrounding, in many cases, a silent and empty mill building.”
While there are many mill buildings across the state that are abandoned and in disrepair, others are seeing a new light as luxury apartments, recreation and event centers, and more. In 2008, South Carolina began to incentivize the rehabilitation and development of these sites by passage of the South Carolina Textiles Communities Revitalization Act. The Act provides for a “tax credit of twenty-five percent of qualified rehabilitation expenses for abandoned textile mill sites meeting statutory requirements.”
It is exciting to watch as these mills — beautiful relics of the past and a reminder of the formerly powerful economic engine of the state — are being reimagined in a 21st century South Carolina. We will conclude with this hopeful example of a mill revitalization at Woodside Mill in Greenville, SC below:
➳ Quote from an SC historical figure
I.
“As a child, I remember even when I was very small, being on the mill village was just really a fun time for me. Everyone lived in all the little houses all nearby, so we had a lot of friends around, and I would play every day from sun-up to sun-down unless I had to go in to eat. I had lots and lots of friends. We had a town pool that was just a block away, and the members of the Chiquola Manufacturing Company, or the workers there, they could get a pass for the whole year. So every sunny day, no matter what day it was, if I had time, I would go to that pool, and, oh, I had so much fun. It was a large pool. There was a lot of kids that I knew there, so I would go there every day. Being on the mill village, I loved living right in front of the mill because it was always running, except for one week of the year, and that week it was so quiet, I could actually hear crickets and other things that I don't normally hear, so that whole week I didn't sleep very well because that would just lull me to sleep every night. And just seeing the people, just seeing them go in and out of the doors and sitting on those large steps that they had. Eating their lunch. Leaving for one shift to the other. It was just always busy. It was just a fun time there. I just loved living on the mill village. I loved my neighbors, I loved my friends, and we just had a wonderful life there. I won't ever forget it. It was a special time in my life.”
—2019 interview with Beverly Keasler Crawford who grew up on Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, SC
Sources used in today’s newsletter:
Recollections: Life in South Carolina Mill Villages (clemson.edu)
These 23 Rare Photos Show South Carolina's Cotton Milling History Like Never Before
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