William Gregg 1800 – 1867

William Gregg, jeweler, watchsmith, champion of industry, and founder of the Graniteville Company, was known as the father of Southern cotton manufacturing.

Gregg was born February 2, 1800, in western Virginia, the son of William and Elizabeth Webb Gregg. His mother died when he was 4 years old, and he was reared by a neighbor woman until he was about 10. He was then sent to live with an uncle, Jacob Gregg, a successful watch and spinning-machine maker in Alexandria, Virginia.

A few years later, his uncle established a cotton mill in Georgia, one of the South’s first. The mill did not survive the War of 1812. In 1814, William Gregg was apprenticed to a friend of his uncle’s, a Mr. Blanchard, a watchmaker and silversmith in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1821, Gregg moved to Petersburg, Virginia, to perfect himself in his profession.

Gregg undoubtedly formed a strong friendship with Mr. Blanchard. A decade after leaving his employment, Gregg stopped at the Blanchard’s new home in Louisville, Kentucky, to pay his respects. Sitting at Blanchard’s bench, Gregg made a silver pitcher of the treasured first coins he ever earned. It became an heirloom that was handed down from first son to first son in the Gregg family.

After completing training, he moved to South Carolina and established a jewelry business in Columbia. On a sales trip, he called on Colonel Mathias Jones, who operated a store at Ridge Spring in Edgefield District. There he met Jones’ eldest daughter, Marina, and they were married in 1829.

Gregg was prosperous in Columbia, and during the 1830s, he not only traveled extensively throughout the United States, but he retired with a large amount of discretionary capital. In 1838, he bought an interest in what became Hayden, Gregg and Company, a jewelry and silversmithing firm in Charleston and moved his family to the Lowcountry.

Also in 1838, he bought into the Vaucluse Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in Barnwell District. His experience with Vaucluse taught him two things: first, how cotton manufacturing in the South should not be conducted (the plant was a model of inefficiency), and, second, in his words, “a settled conviction . . . that manufacturing is a business that ought to engage the two Carolinas and Georgia.”

In 1844, William Gregg traveled to New England to inspect its textile districts, and the trip, coupled with the lessons of Vaucluse, prompted him to write a series of essays for the Charleston Courier that would become known as the Essays on Domestic Industry, a visionary call for the active development of mills in the South.

While corporations were not commonplace in those days, shortly after publishing the essays, Gregg and a group of mostly Charlestonians applied for and, in 1845, received a charter from the state Legislature for the Graniteville Manufacturing Company.

The Graniteville Company relied on local people to build the mill as well as operate it, employing farmers, tenant farmers, and the poor at wages commensurate with those paid to Northern mill workers. Granite quarried about a mile from the plant site was used in the construction.

Gregg provided quality housing for his workers, as well as a church and a small library. They received medical care for a small fee. They had gardens and woods from which to harvest timber.
Gregg also created what was perhaps the first compulsory education system in the United States. He built a school for children from 6 to 12 years old, furnished teachers and books, and fined parent workers five cents a day, withheld from their wages, for every day their children were absent from classes.

Gregg was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1856, and he continued to argue passionately for internal industrial development. He believed that there was little reason to look to the expanding West or the industrialized North when so much of the treasures of South Carolina, in his eyes, lay untapped.

Graniteville Manufacturing Company barely survived the Civil War. Immediately after the war ended, Gregg worked diligently toward the continued modernization of his company through travel, research, and the investment of about $120,000 in personal capital for more modern machinery.
In April 1996, Graniteville Company was sold to Avondale Mills, Inc.; it currently operates as Graniteville Fabrics.

The University of South Carolina at Aiken Library features the Gregg–Graniteville Memorial Rooms, which contain The Gregg–Graniteville Collection. The collection has proven of primary value for scholars in Southern economic, social, and labor history for the period 1845 to 1985, as well as for cultural historians of the South as it moved into the 20th century.

William and Marina Gregg were the parents of three children, Mary, William, and James.

Source — South Carolina Business Hall of Fame

Empire in Midland [Horsecreek] Valley by David Foster

Popular history says that the New South was born after the War Between the States, that it was an economic resolution by the defeated South to rise from the financial ashes of defeat and build an economy diversified enough to compete toe to toe with the victorious North. Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady coined the term “The New South” in a famous speech to a New York gentleman’s club in 1886.

But popular history has a way of bending real history. The “New” South, it could be argued, and quite forcefully, got its start in Augusta, Ga., and Graniteville, S.C., between 1845 and 1849, when visionaries in both towns built major cotton mills-mills that competed in yardage produced with most any Northern mill-and closed the economic circle, at least in a small-scale way, that would ultimately lead to the diversified manufacturing economy we enjoy today.

While Augusta’s business community gets most of the credit for that small leap forward, it can be argued that South Carolinian William W. Gregg, founder of the Graniteville Mill, truly got the ball rolling. Today, the original Graniteville Mill is hidden in a vast redbrick industrial complex owned by Avondale Mills. But the mills Gregg pioneered, first in Vaucluse and then in Graniteville, continue to provide jobs to hundreds of Midland Valley workers.

And had it not been for political intrigues and economic opportunism on the part of Augusta business and political leaders, Gregg could very well have built the first major cotton mill here as well.

Notice the term “major cotton mill.” Since the Revolution and, even before, the South had pockets of manufacturing, from cotton to paper to iron products to name a few. But most of the goods turned out were for the local market, some of it cheap, some of it of high quality. The idea of mass output of any Southern factory, however, was pretty much beyond the imagination of the Southern entrepreneur. Manufacturing was just another way to make a living and the South’s planter society, which had built wealth beyond the imagination of most successful Northern manufacturers, not only didn’t like manufacturing but were outspoken enemies of it.

Yet while the planters were doing well, the small cities of the South, and especially commercial towns like Augusta, were not doing so well during the early 1840s. Cotton prices were not only somewhat depressed, but since the 1820s the number of towns that competed for the wholesaling of the cotton crop had grown by a factor of three, with Columbus, Macon and Albany siphoning off the cotton market from once dominant Augusta. So concerned were local business leaders, mostly merchants and bankers, some questioned whether Augusta could survive the downturn as a town, much less a vibrant and proud city.

Meanwhile, over in South Carolina, William W. Gregg had invested in and helped run a small cotton mill in Vaucluse and quickly discovered that, under traditional Southern-style management and capacity, one could not be a successful manufacturer. Gregg was not a manufacturer by trade, but a successful and retired silversmith (he was 39 in 1839) who, at the time, lived much of the year in Charleston. But he could see potential in the cotton trade and, in 1845, he and a group of investors petitioned the South Carolina government for a charter to build a new, bigger factory near Vaucluse that would be run in a Northern manner, with professional managers and well-trained workers that had, for the day, a superior social support system (housing, stores, churches, all provided by the mill).

While Gregg was planning his Graniteville enterprise, Augusta’s canal boosters asked him to come and discuss an even bigger mill on their planned canal. Gregg was beyond just a little interested. He was also one of the few Southerners with meaningful experience in the cotton mill business and had some regional fame with his tract Essays on Domestic Industry, which with his breadth of experience captivated business leaders across the South. His plans in Graniteville called for a half-mile-long millrace from a local millpond to his new mill and mostly his money for the building and capitalization of the mill. The Augusta folks would provide (pretty much free of charge, except for the water he used) hydropower far beyond what his planned millrace could provide, a deep-pockets group of investors to help capitalize and operate the mill and theoretically a much larger pool of potential workers.

And so it came to pass the South Carolina entrepreneur went to Augusta and began selling his services as an already experienced cotton manufacturer, spoke of the problems he faced with a cotton mill, how he was correcting them, what he would do different and how he would operate the new Augusta mill. And the business leaders soaked up every word. Gregg’s informative meetings were not so much sales pitches as consultations and once the Augusta investors had heard enough they also decided that they could hire professional managers, they could provide the proper labor pool, they could provide the social support services for the workers and, well, they could also make all the money from the mill project. So Mr. Gregg’s offer to build and run the new mill was declined and he went back to the Midland Valley to build his own mill.

Had it not been for the negotiations with the Augusta investors, Gregg’s Graniteville Mill would most likely have been the first of the two to be completed and operational. But he put his own mill plans on hold while consulting with the Augusta Mill investors and it was the Augusta Mill that came on-line first.

But once his negotiations ended, Gregg threw all his energy and most of his money into the Graniteville complex. He quarried nearby blue granite seams as his primary building material for the mill itself and at the same time constructed housing for workers. He also decided to run the mill himself, building a home just above the mill site so he could give it day-to-day supervision, not only during construction, but also during the spinning and weaving of cotton products, not to mention the sales of those products nationwide. Whether he continued to practice, even as an avocation, his silver smith trade is not mentioned in the research. He did throw himself with passion into the cotton business, working 12 to 15 hour days on a regular basis.

And he never forgot the “slight” the Augustans had given him-turning down his offer to build and run their mill. It was as if he wanted to show the Augustans a thing or two as much as he wanted to build a successful mill.

It was not an easy task, building a successful cotton mill, but Gregg had the energy the corporate boys in Augusta did not. When problems arose, he was there to fix them personally; in Augusta professional managers answered to a board of directors. Even so, both operations prospered as competitors. By 1860, Graniteville was turning out some 4,000,000 yards of cloth annually, making it a potential prize for Union forces. But Gregg was not doing well financially during the war, with most of his production paid for in Secesh specie. Shortages were rampant and while he looked after his workers best he could, he was often criticized, even in the press, for turning down others in need. Gregg, who had sacrificed so much for his mill, and at times his workers, considered this criticism, and most likely rightly so, the cruelest blow of all.

One goal of Billy Sherman’s well-lighted march through South Carolina was to destroy the Horsecreek Valley mills and, if possible, the Augusta mills as well. Those plans were thwarted by the skirmish at Aiken when Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry defeated a Union cavalry attack. After the war, Gregg had to invest an additional $120,000 in the plant for upgrades, but his vision and energy helped it through the post-war era, though, ironically, he died of pneumonia in 1867 after helping stave off a flood in the millrace.

His company passed under control of his son James, who went on to head up the investment group that built the Enterprise Mill on the Augusta Canal in 1878 (that’s the one with the big Graniteville neon sign on its roof. Makes me think of William the Conqueror). While the old Augusta Mill was demolished as part of an urban renewal project in 1960, both the Graniteville mills have survived-the Graniteville as a working mill and the Enterprise Mill in Augusta as luxury condominiums. William W. Gregg was honored in 1985 by induction into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

An important postscript: One of the black marks on all the Victorian manufacturers was the use of child labor. At the Canal Museum at the Graniteville complex in Augusta you can see the old black-and-white photographs of barefoot children posing either with their machines or in front of the mill itself. W.W. Gregg, however, had a somewhat different vision, enforcing one of the first compulsory education rules in the history of the United States. He built a school for children five through 12 and fined parents five cents a day for every day the children did not attend.

Augusta turned its nose to William W. Gregg. It became, some could argue, a poorer town for it. But out in Horse Creek Valley, it was his vision and energy that set forth a political, economic and, yes, social revolution. It could truly be said that while Henry Grady coined the term “The New South,” William W. Gregg set it in motion.

Source — Augusta Magazine

A History of Graniteville, S.C.

Containing some information on Horse Creek Valley:

In the western section of Aiken County extending from the Savannah River to the city of Aiken, is a section known as the Horsecreek Valley. This section of the county serves as a cradle of South Carolina textile mills, legends, old families, and hard working folks. The Valley extends some twenty miles and houses more than 20,000 people, over 40 churches, and some 20 small independent towns/communities. Each of the small communities, villages, and towns still clings to its identity, although telephone exchanges and a highway network have tied them into an almost single city stretching from Aiken to the Savannah River. The highest point in the Valley is located atop Cemetery Hill near the gravesite of Mr. William Gregg, founder of the Graniteville Company and the industrial titan of the valley.

The Westos and Chickasaw Indians originally inhabited the Horsecreek Valley. The Valley’s legacy dates back either to the tribes of the era or to the brawling era before the War between the States. In December of 1860, when the town of Graniteville was only fifteen years old, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union. At this time in history, the men and boys of Graniteville established company “F” of the 7th Regiment of the Confederate Army and sought to defend their native state. The textile industry located in Graniteville furnished cloth and other materials for Southern military purposes. Because of this war effort, General Sherman ordered the mills destroyed along with a paper mill located nearby. General Kilpatrick was in command of the Union troops. At Aiken, General Joe Wheeler held Sherman’s troops away from Graniteville and thus avoided the destruction of the mills, churches, and homes in the community. Food was scarce during the Civil War, but Mr. William Gregg bartered cloth for food items for his employees, and they fared better than most others in the state. Many people came to the community seeking food and other necessary items, but they were turned away due to the limited supply. Mr. Gregg received criticism from the press and even from the pulpits because he had to turn away many needy persons.

Graniteville became the largest town in the Valley. It was once known by the less lovely, but more descriptive, name of Hardscrabble. Blue granite was quarried from the nearby mines and thus lent the name Granite to the textile mill built in 1843. Mr. William Gregg received a charter in late 1845 and early 1846 giving him the right to build on the land. He built the town, and in 1847 he began constructing the mill and finished it in 1848. The mill has been added to on several occasions. In 1848, there were 300 employees in the mills. The number grew to 660 during World War II. Until the late 1950’s, the company was primarily engaged in making cotton. As the cost of producing cotton began to rise, the company decided to produce knits, synthetics, polyesters, and cotton cloth from the raw fibers. In 1963, when the textile officials saw that mothers were not satisfied with the cloth because they had to iron it, several members helped in perfecting a permanent press fabric.

Mr. William Gregg was born in 1800 in what is now West Virginia. Mr. Gregg went to Columbia, SC, to become a watchmaker, silversmith, and jeweler. Between 1824 and 1836, he managed to build a fortune of about one hundred thousand dollars. Then because of temporary health problems he had to take up residence with his wife’s parents in Edgefield, SC. During this time, he became interested in an old run-down cotton mill in Vaucluse, S.C. He decided to invest money it the mill and undertook its operations. He soon had it running profitably. In 1838, he left the mill and moved to Charleston to form a partnership with an old established jewelry firm and became one of the city’s leading silversmiths. His interest in textiles continued to grow and he visited New England to examine its mills at first hand. In 1845, Gregg obtained a charter from the South Carolina legislature to build the Graniteville Manufacturing Company. He became the builder and first president of the company. Gregg invested his fortune in the mill in order to see it through some very unstable times. Two years after the close of the civil war, William Gregg died. He learned that the dam at Graniteville had broken and he rushed to the scene and waded into the deep waters of the millstream to direct repair operations. During this time, he developed pneumonia and died on September 12, 1867.

Source — Excerpted from “A Brief History of Byrd Elementary,” by J. W. Peacock.

The Langley Mill

This old cotton mill was located in Langley, SC when I was a boy in the forties. On the night of July 3rd, 1946, while the mill was shut down for a week’s vacation, a fire broke out. Much of the wooden interior was of heart pine, and that, coupled with the oil-soaked maple floors and the inventory of raw cotton, yarn and fabric, led to the fire spreading so rapidly that all efforts to extinguish it failed.

I recall how, several miles away in Warrenville at my Grandfather’s house, we sat on the porch and watched the flames in the sky. It was daylight when it should have been dark.

Construction had started on the plant during the late 1850s, but the War of Northern Aggression delayed its completion until around 1870. The people in Langley, Bath, Clearwater, Graniteville, Vaucluse and other towns had for many years looked to this mill and to others in the valley to provide work and food on the table.

For a time, the hearts of Horsecreek Valley and of the 500 families that depended on this mill for livelihood lay broken in the ashes of the Langley Mill.

This is a picture of a limited edition print of the Langley Mill, by artist Mike Jones of Langley. The print was given to me by my daughter Cathi. After the mill had burned for several days, only the smokestack in the background remained standing.

Source — K4DPK

The General Strike of 1934

During the Depression in 1934, hundreds of thousands of Southerner cotton mill workers engaged in a massive strike known as The General Strike of 1934. The mill workers’ defiant stance – and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it – challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. The events of the uprising is detailed in a film by George Stoney, Judith Helfand and Suzanne Rostock entitled THE UPRISING OF ’34.

After three weeks, the strike was stopped … put down with intimidation, national guards and even murder. Many of its leaders were fired, blacklisted, evicted from their homes and ostracized by their communities.

Sixty years later, a dark cloud still hangs over this event. Even in towns where it took place, the uprising of ’34 is spoken of only in whispers, if at all. And for those who do know about it, a mythology has spread which tells only of danger and violence.

Through the voices of people on all sides of the remarkable story and a rare portrait of the dynamics of life in mill communities, THE UPRISING OF ’34 offers a penetrating look at class, race and power in working communities throughout America. The viewer is invited to consider how these issues affect us today. The film raises critical questions about the role of history in our lives and demonstrates how an understanding of history is essential to making democracy work today.

Another film, AFTER 61YEARS OF SILENCE, HONEA PATH REMEMBERS is a five-minute video by Judith Helfand and Lori Castronuovo recording the 1995 dedication of the Workers’ Memorial in Honea (honey-uh) Path, South Carolina. In September of 1934, Honea Path was the site of one of the most violent suppressions of a labor movement in United States history. Seven textile workedrs were killed by special deputies when 45,000 of the state’s 89,000 textile workers went on strike.

More information on THE UPRISING OF ’34

Program Guide to THE UPRISING OF ’34

Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies by Pat Conroy (June, 1973)

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The Horse is a sacred animal in Aiken, South Carolina. The town pays a religious homage to the gracefully-throttled, gently-crouped thoroughbreds that graze in the rich pastures encircling Aiken. For the horse has provided the town with an identity, a signature of affluence, scrawled indelibly on the psyche. In McDonald’s Drive-in, on West Richland Avenue, beneath the golden arches, and the sign that triumphantly proclaims the sale of eleven billion hamburgers, the customer gamely chewing on a burger that once digested will bring McDonald’s one bun closer to the plateau of twelve billion, looks up from his vantage point beneath the plastic and sees subdued, almost tasteful prints of men in silks racing thoroughbreds, steeplechasers clearing barriers, and men astride muscled ponies swinging mallets at a willow ball. In Aiken, even McDonald’s Drive-in makes a ritual genuflection toward the horse. It helps sell hamburgers.

In the 1870’s, Mrs. Lulie Hitchcock lured many of her Long Island friends to winter in Aiken. Mrs. Hitchcock and her friends had a legitimate horsey smell abut them; they also had the pungent odors of many dollar bills to recommend their annexation of the town. So they came south for the winter, these knight templars of capitalism, and the winter woods around Aiken soon thundered with horsemen following the baying of hound packs. The townsmen dubbed them the Winter Colony. Aiken was their benighted fiefdom until the Second World War. The soil of the town was holy with the manure of thoroughbreds; Aiken became famous for its polo matches, fox hunts, trotters, steeplechases, and dog hunts. These were the royal families of America, the bejeweled, irascible inheritors of northern wealth who resurrected Aiken from the tragedy of the Civil War. They discovered the town; this sandy soiled carbuncle where land was cheap, help plentiful, and far from the bitter winters of New York. When the winter colony came to Aiken it was not only a discovery, it was an ordination. They did not simply find Aiken; they invented it. For seventy-five years, thoroughbreds, both man and beast, ruled the town. The rule ended, or at least eroded, with the unexpected arrival of the twentieth century. As the winter people walked along freshly-clipped lawns, splendid in their riding suits, elegant beside their horses, timeless in their disregard for the world outside of stable smells, some eggheaded son of a bitch who probably didn’t know a pastern from a coronet, split the atom. The world and Aiken would never be the same. And all this before McDonald’s had sold a single hamburger.

Aiken is a town of categories. The categories have walls, boundaries, dimensions, and strict, implacable definitions. It is a long climb indeed, out of an Aiken category. People, like horses, find themselves grouped, branded, herded into preordained corrals, and handled according to their bloodlines. A rigorous chain of being exists, although nothing is written down; there is no tablet of laws. But there is.

The members of the winter colony are still the high Brahmin of the town’s society and their rule is unchallenged during the winter season of the Triple Crown. To them, the urine of horses is day old wine more precious than the finest Beaujolais, for it signifies the health of a thoroughbred. Folks will tell you that it is easy to crack into the ornate temples of the winter colony. The mansions that house the wintering crowd are splendid architectural contributions to the town; pillared monuments to dying commitments and the unsullied pursuit of the good life. One of the mansions, Joye Cottage, positioned cheerfully on Whiskey Road and Easy Street has an estimated ninety rooms. In South Carolina ninety rooms usually means an incorporated town, but in Aiken it is known as a cottage. The Pink House flutters with the pinions of exotic tropical birds, and one lady claims she saw on a church tour, a butler cleaning up the droppings of a cockatoo as the bird wandered about the house.

Since the mansions are only used three months out of the year, they sit like abandoned cathedrals for the remainder of the year. Townsmen tend the gardens that bloom behind massive brick walls. The gardens bloom unpraised. Magnolias, lining the dirt roads intersecting the horse district (the legs of thoroughbreds are frail as bone china) flood the town with a sweet perfume foreign to winter colony. The horse people depart in April. They never smell the magnolias of Aiken. Nor do they savor the richness of the summer grass or the ruined gardenias browning in the hot June sun. These things do not occur in the proper season. The horses have already gone north. At Rose Hill, a black gardener plows some ground in the middle of a formal garden and plants beans and a few rows of corn. He can let the garden weed over for now; it is summer and the garden is his.

But in winter, the colony returns. The town fills up with trainers, hot walkers, exercise boys, gadflies, sycophants and jockeys. The horse people speak a different language, a blacksmith’s sanskrit, and the strange incantations of the race tracks murmurs through the streets and the town comes alive in ways it is not alive the rest of the year. The true winter colonists, the owners of the horses, stay away from the townsmen. Theirs is a closed society. They have as much real interest in Aiken as King Herod had in planned parenthood. But they have the mystique and tradition of mythic wealth and extravagant lifestyles behind them, and many a lesser Aikenite would sell his children for horsefeed to wrangle an invitation to a party behind the brick walls during the running of the Triple Crown.

The town adapts itself to the return of the horses. The sports section is stuffed with esoteric data dear to the hearts of horse aficianados. Football and basketball fans steel themselves as they read innumerable essays extolling the hocks, canons, and fetlocks of a promising thoroughbred. Aiken is one of the few towns in America where the Triple Crown does not conjure up a vision of Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, or at least Citation. In Aiken, it means the social event of the year. For the winter colony, it means the intoxicating steeplechase of the Aiken Hunt Meet; it means Polo games on dark green fields; it means horse talk through all the waking hours. It is the celebration of horses in the southern capital of equestrian arts.

But the Triple Crown is not the domain of the Winter Colony; it is under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber and the town have usurped the horses from the winter people. They have sold their town down the river with the horse as their symbol. The Aiken discovered by Lulie Hitchcock, presided over by The Victorian figure of Mrs. C. Oliver Iselin, blessed by Whitneys, Bostwicks, and Posts, visited by Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Ilia Tolstoy, died a little bit during the second world war and dies a little more every year. Old Aikenites began to make their move. The Old Aikenites began at strut.

“If you live in Aiken and don’t buy your clothes at Julia’s, then you’re looked down upon,” a pretty blond from the Aiken campus of the University of South Carolina told me.

“Where do you buy your clothes?” I asked.

“At Julia’s,” she winked.

Old Aikenites are a kind of rarity in the city limits. They are also the proud descendants of those men and women shattered by the south’s Gotterdamurung who looked up to find their salvation in the arrival of the Winter People. Indeed, the winter people supplied an economic boost to the town of Aiken. They even redefined the town in their own image. Now, in this present delineation, it is important to realize that blacks are not members of this critical subgroup. Blacks are just old blacks, not old Aikenites. An old Aikenite is white, and his position in town is anchored in the premist that longevity is the keenest measurement of tenure and directly proportional to the number of ancestors buried in the local cemetery. Among the old Aikenites, one hears the ancient murmur of the tribe. They own the downtown shops; they overwhelm the ranks of the Rotary and Sertoma Clubs, they feel threatened by the hordes that overrun the boundaries of their county. Yet they profit by the coming of the horde.

The old Aikenites are the chosen people, the Israelites; yet they are blessed with one intrinsic humility, one unspoken area of scraping reverence. Because they are from Aiken, they were suckled on the mystique of the winter colony and their first pablum was the recognition that their town harbored kings and queens too grand to associate with mere villagers. Their noses were rubbed in silks, gold brocade, broughmans and battalions of servants, music spilling over forbidden garden walls, polo games, and all the grandiose trappings of America’s ruling family. Horses, wealth, and aristocracy entered the bloodstream of Aiken; this trinity invaded the psyche and mounted the battlements of the town’s ego. The Old Aikenites developed a hunger, and the hunger translated itself into a desire to be made worthy before the horse people. For seventy-five years, the children of Aiken studied the magic horsemen who rode forth from shingled stables, cantered down dirt roads, and disappeared into Hitchcock Woods. For seventy-five years the Old Aikenite has lived in awe of the winter resident. The fruit of his experience has been the development of a social schizophrenia: the Old Aikenite feels inferior to the Winter Colony, but by God, he feels superior to every other bastard that comes into town. It is June in 1973 and the Old Aikenite is hitting his stride.

“I’m old Aiken,” a woman told me outside of Julia’s.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It just means that I’m old Aiken,” she smiled.

But you rise toward the horsey set at your own peril. An Aiken dentis had purchased several thoroughbreds and these horses train in stables emblazoned with the memories of the winter colony. One might think that this social breakthrough would be met with universal applause. No. You would have thought that Martin Luther had purchased stock in the Sistine Chapel. The man was climbing like wisteria, and his climb, unforgivably, was a public one, witnessed by the multitudes who wished they could do exactly the same thing. But his bank account was bright as new dentures, and he was soaring into the circles forbidden local people. The town emitted one long hiss of contempt and envy. A priest of tooth decay had risen and would spend the rest of his life proving himself worthy of the rise.

“I mean real horse people,” the lady said. “Not dentists.”

In 1952, Armageddon headed down Whiskey Road past the mansions and the stables, past the magnolias and the gardens, past the old years and the tired ways. The Atomic Energy Commission had sliced out a huge section of Aiken County for atomic research. The Dupont Company was providing researchers, equipment, and administrators. Overnight, the population of Aiken swelled from a village of seven thousand to a city of thirty thousand. When the dust had cleared, when the town of Ellenton, had gone the way of Troy, when the fences rose, when the guards were posted, when the construction men had left, when the “bum” plant was in full operation, Aiken had a new and large grouping. These were the DuPonters. The were Aiken’s new Negroes, technological Negroes to be sure, but Negroes, nonetheless.

The winter colonists saw the coming of the DuPonters as the death of the Old Aiken, the quaint pine holy town which they had kept time-locked somewhere in the late nineteenth century. They were right. They passed their disapproval down to the Old Aikenites who panicked at the thought of the DuPonters driving the horse people away from Aiken. The horse people had provided jobs and fattened the coffers of many downtown merchants. Aiken could not make it without the horses.

So the DuPonters, uprooted by their company, came into the town welcome as a gonnorrhea epidemic. Many were northerners, unaccustomed to southern ways, and hurt when they found themselves treated like a gathering of lepers on the banks of the Savannah River. Invisible bells rang as they wended their way among the townspeople. “DuPonter” was a dirty word.

The South was as alien to most of the DuPonters as Abyssinia, an unchartered hinterland in the national consciousness. They moved by the thousands into this lyrically beautiful little town that moved slowly in the gelatin of its cranky mythology, riveted to a languor that infected the marrow of the entire region. Up north, they had heard the gospel of southern hospitality. But this was not a prime ingredient in their introduction to Aiken. They would have to serve their time, their purgatorio, disembodied from the Old Aikenites. So the DuPonters dug in. They had to come to live in this town, raise familes, and die in this town. Enough Yankees poured into Aiken after the construction of the Savannah River Project to make it seem like a suburb of Chicago. The DuPont plant was the most important thing to happen to Aiken since Lulie Hitchcock thought it would be a nice place to come for a little polo.

“Where are you going tonight?” a lady asked.

“To a party by some DuPonters,” I answered.

“That makes me nauseous,” she said without smiling.

Old Aikenites will tell you that DuPonters can be goddam irritating, that they do not understand the southern way. Scientists from the DuPont Plant have peeved local shopkeepers by wandering through stores fingering merchandise, and periodically consulting the latest issue of Consumer Reports which hangs out of their back pockets. Others walked the aisles of supermarkets clicking away at pocket calculators each time they put an item in their basket. Haked efficiency offends the southerner perhaps more than anything else, and DuPonters are an efficient group of people. Their occupation of the town lends itself to one profound unsubstantiated statistic: there are more PH.D.’s per capita in Aiken than anywhere else in the United States. What these interlopers brought with them into this sleepy village was an incredible dosage of brainpower. The town’s cumulative I.Q. rose each time a DuPont scientist and his family drove into town. Aiken received into her shaded, flowere, horse sacred midst the gift of brains.

“I don’t like being put into a category,” a DuPonter wife told me. “Old Aikenites are always putting us into a category.”

Though Old Aikenites talk about DuPonters with a weary trace of condescension, a powerful irony exists. It was the coming of the Savannah River Plant that freed the Old Aikenite from the bondage of the winter colony. More than one Old Aikenite made a fortune after the DuPonters arrived. The families of DuPont needed houses, clothing, food, luxuries, automobiles, entertainment and acceptance. Old Aikenites sold them everything but the last item. Acceptance was not marketable. Consumer Reports did not list it. You could not add it up on a pocket calculator; you could not derive its formula by studying the Periodic Chart. The Old Aikenites, patronized by the imperious princes and dowagers of winter colony, were not about to accept the group of people who had routed the winter colony as the most important social force in Aiken County. Instead, they secured their position, circled their wagons, and employing the ancient southern courtesies, the wiley old legacies passed down hand to mouth for generations, they knew they had risen in the rigidly ordered social structure of Aiken and in subtle ways and overt ways they let the DuPonters know that Old Aiken was still Old Aiken, and DuPont was nothing at all. The DuPonters found themselves unhonored liberators. They were exiled in the sign of the horse. In a strange inversion, the Old Aikenites identified with the horse tradition and the horse people and were esthetically offended by the arrival of the DuPonters who built tacky suburban houses and demanded roads widened. But it was the southern boys themselves who benefitted from these demands. Southern boys got rich because some smartass split the atom.

Twenty-one years have passed. DuPonters are active in church affairs, civic groups, charities, school organization, and committees. They have infiltrated where they could. As yet, the southern courtesies have not seduced them completely. Of course, every southerner knows that no one can adopt the full plumage of the old South faster than a transplanted Yankee. But the DuPonters generally have burrowed in following their own personal instincts. They know their place in Aiken’s great chain of being. Some of them have even cracked into the social circle of Old Aikenites and they know that God holds no higher reward for them. Most of the DuPonters, however, have eased into their social limbo with empirical grace, with the consciousness of people who understand the theories of evolution and the town is constantly evolving, shifting, and changing. Slowly, after twenty-one years, a miracle strange as Cana has taken place in a thousand DuPont homes. It is a miracle profound and wonderful, humorous and unsettling, a commentary on the possibility of rebirth and resurrectionin the American dream enacted in the pine and Bermuda grass suburbs heavy with DuPonters. In some of these homes, the children of DuPonters: yes, these new Aikenites, born on Aiken soil, natives of Aiken, their first breath drawn in Aiken, schooled inAiken; yes these children of the twentieth century, of mobile America, of the fission of atoms, of fathers tutored in the mystery of the elemental charts; these children speak, and to the amazement of parents bred in Stoneybrook, Indianapolis, Oak Park, and San Rafael, a softness infects their children’s voices. A “Ya’ll” escapes here and there. The speech of the south, insdidious, airy, proud in its rejection of the letter “R”, possesses their children. It is in a flash of pained recognition for some, amused wonder for others that they realize that they: they: they, the DuPonters, are raising southern children. Their children have received the gift of the tongue. The gift of the soil, the gift of the blood. Southern blood.

“I am not ‘yo mama,’ son. I am ‘your mother,'” a DuPonter mother said to her son. “And quit saying ‘ya’ll’, goddamit.”

The blacks of Aiken seem to lack the essential fury of men and women locked into the severe boundaries of the Old South. Aiken does not have to fear the fire next time, because there has not been a fire the first time. Two blacks proferred theories abut the lack of angry blacks in town: The Winter Colony drained off the most talented blacks and trained them as servants and houseboys; the brightest young blacks are bright enough to realize that Aiken, South Carolina is not the town where their talents will be most appreciated. Blacks are still following the drinking gourd north and into the big cities.

“Who is the black man that blacks look to as their leader in Aiken? Whos is the black that the white men fear?” I asked a black woman on Park Street.

“Let me think,” she answered. “There must be somebody. What hotel are you staying at? I’ll call you if I think of anybody.”

Erskine Caldwell wrote about Horse Creek Valley in God’s Little Acre. The valley is the nasty little secret of Aiken County. It is a series o f depressing mill towns that cluster along the polluted edges of Horse Creek, a blighted ribbon of water that serves as a large intestine between the towns of North Augusta and Aiken. In this valley, the textile industry of South Carolina had its birth. For twenty miles America has a savage and well preserved vision of what was wrong with the industrial revolution. Along Highway 421 the towns of Vaucluse, Graniteville, Warrenville, Bath, Langley, and Clearwater, and a dozen or more sad offshoot communities blend into each other. Each town has as much visual uniqueness as a chinese checker. The towns are unincorporated. Baptist and fundamentalist chruches line the main road in staggering numbers jockeying for position with sad, off-brand gas stations. When a gas station goes broke, it is quickly taken over as a Baptist Church of the most paleolithic theological orientation. A man can buy a lot of gas and do a lot of praying in Horse Creek Valley and this makes remarkably good sense: both gasoline and prayer are two sure exeunts from the Valley. But whether you leave the Valley by Chevrolet or in a casket provided by J.M. Posey and Sons, it is best to prepare. A statistic common in the Valley declares that there are more Baptist churches per square mile in the Valley than any place on earth. But the truly memorable statistic is one that a stranger fastens to and causes all men to reflect on the nature of God and men in Horse Creek Valley. The Valley had the highest unsolved murder rate in the country.

The valley shelters a grim and fiercely proud native. Often, a boy who enters the textile mill at Graniteville had a father who worked the same shift, a grandfather, and possibly a great grandfather. The mill is in his blood; its weaves and bobbins are an ingrained heritage. History had trapped him. It takes an uncommon man to fight against a destiny of cotton cloth and graveyard shifts.

“The Valley breeds the craziest bastards in the world,” an Aiken businessman told me.

“One of the big problems I have in counselling girls in the Valley is incest. That’s right, incest,” said a teacher’s aide.

“I love the Valley and the people of the Valley,” said an Aiken florist. “I’m from the Valley.”

“Best damn people inthe world live in the Valley. I ought to know. I’ve lived there fifty-five years,” a man from Warrenville said.

“What are you goin’ to the Valley for? You’re not gonna find anything about Aiken in the Valley.”

Jerry Swing, my high school basketball coach ten years ago, sits in the library of Langley-Bath-Clearwater High School and talks about his experiences as a school principal in the Valley. Talking with him is Ethel Woodruff, the school’s librarian, and Nathaniel Irvin, a black psychology teacher. They are defensive about the kids they teach and angry over the kneejerk fear and prejudice summoned from the glands of Aikenites when the Valley is mentioned.

“I came from a mill town myself, Pat. You didn’t know that when I coached you, but you didn’t know a lot of things back then. I had to fight my way out of a mill town and fight my way through college. That’s why I love these kids and why I identify with them,” Jerry said.

“The Valley kids got an inferiority complex a mile wide,” Ethel Woodruff adds. “They gotta fight against things that an Aiken kid never even dreamed of. Why, I’ve seen the mill kids come into school year after year having had nothin’ for breakfast except a moon pie and a Pepsi-Cola. Now I ask ya. What kind of breakfast is a moon pie and a Pepsi-Cola?’

“It’s getting better though,” Jerry spoke up again. “The Valley kids are coming up for air. They’ll scratch for it.”

“One great problem in the Valley is how early these girls in the high school become pregnant and get married,” Mr. Irvin said.

“That’s just the way of the Valley,” Ms. Woodruff said. “That’s just the way its always been.”

“Nowadays we marry ’em, then teach ’em,” Jerry said, smiling. “We’re the only high school I know of that has to have a midwife at graduation.”

“The mill snaps up a lot of our students before they can finish high school. They’ve been snappin’ ’em up for a hundred years,” said Mr. Irvin.

“How did integration go in the Valley?” I asked the group.

Ms. Woodruff was the first to answer. “The Valley had very little problem with integration. It’s ironic, too, because the Valley used to have one of the most active Ku Klux Klans in the state. I think the reason for it is this: you have problems with integration in a pseudo-sophisticated neighborhood, but not in the Valley.”

“I agree,” Jerry said. “I think the kids said, ‘We ain’t got that much. We got less to lose. Black people are much more like we are than those other rich white people. Look! There’s the niggers from the Valley and the ol’ white lintheads [mill-workers] from the Valley, but really, all of us are just kids from the Valley.”

Mr. Irvin quickly said, “I do a little preachin’ on the side when I’m not teachin’. A couple of years ago two of my white students came up to me and asked me if I’d marry ’em. A few weeks later I showed up at the girl’s house, met her parents and bound these two children in the eyes of the Lord. Where else in Aiken County would I be invited into a white home to perform a weeding ceremony. Nowhere but right here in the Valley.”

“I think the important thing now, Pat, is this. What can we do as teachers to help those kids from the Valley think they’re as good as the kids from Aiken and North Augusta?” Jerry said soberly, his sad, blue eyes, the eyes of an old coach, burning with the question.

“I get sick of Aiken sometimes,” Ms. Woodruff snapped. “I’ve always liked people better than polo ponies.”

A religion as deeply rooted as Christianity rules the mill-haunted roads of the Valley. This faith, an echoing gospel etched in the blood of the American labor movement, is a truculent, feral hatred of labor unions. It lies as deep in the consciousness of the Valley as the kaolin mined in the hills above Horse Creek. Over the years, a vast propaganda campaign has convinced the mill workers of the Valley that unions are synonymous with godlessness, communism, and loss of jobs. Union organizers in the twenties entered a hostile viper’s nest when they tried to organize the Valley. The mill owners prevailed. The Mill is a father and his mutely obedient children live in the long rows of shotgun houses, each house a reflection of the next house; each village a chimerical walk through a hall of mirrors where there are no grotesque images, no distortion of features, but only the chilling repetition of a false start, and evil conception. The houses stretch like rosary beads for twenty miles. And somehow, in this cloacal anachronism back to the days of sweatshops and milltowns, you realized that the people of Horse Creek Valley are at war with a terrible enemy: the people of Horse Creek Valley. Politically, they are suicidal. Each town, whether it is Vaucluse, Langley, or Warrenville would revolt if someone tried to bind the entire valley into one political unit; each town is as discrete and independent as a European principality. The only organization they have is The Mill. The Mill cares for them, feeds them, entertains them, takes care of their sick, and is always ready to perform fatherly duties if emergencies arise. No one can convince the people of the Valley that the reason they are so buried in this miasma of hopelessness is directly due to the benign shepherding of the Mill. No one has told these people along the sad highway that the Mill is guilty of high crimes, unforgiveable crimes, crimes for which they would fiercely deny responsibility. But that is irrelevant. Until the Valley produces a leader who grew up in the mill town boxes, who sweated under a loom, and who is angry at the system that manufactured the human wreckage who have been bred like cattle to man the assembly line and educated in schools owned by the mills, until this man arises, the people of the Valley will continue political pterodactyls like Strom Thurmond, will continue to salivate blood at the mention of unions, and continue to isolate themselves in tribes along one of the saddest roads in America. The unions will eventually have to come to Horse Creek Valley to break up the iron traditions of servitude to the mill, but right now, if Jesus Christ himself walked into Horse Creek Valley as a union organizer, he would be lucky to escape with something as mild as a crucifixion.

“What are you going to write about Aiken, you simple ass?” the pretty wife of a DuPonter asked me.

The southerner must come soon to some hard decisions. What in the South is worth preserving? What deserves protection” What qualities of southern life are holy parts of the region whose absence would change the very nature of the region? What does it mean to be a southerner in June of 1973? What will it mean to southern children in twenty years?

The South was warned. For decades, crabbed, old prophets fulminated against the encroachment of industry. These men wrote passionately, but they wrote too late. The destiny of the South was bound to industry and all the essays in the world would not change this. The essays were the last gasps before the deluge.

Aiken is a perfect crucible for study of industry transforming a small town into an important industrial center. Besides the Savannah River Plant, Aiken County shelters Owens-Corning Fiberglass, Pyle National, Warner Brothers, the textile companies of the Valley, and Kimberly-Clark is building. Despite its continued fixation with horses, the town is becoming top-heavy with industry. It is in the process of shedding its small town skin: Aiken is going all the way. One of the prettiest towns in America has succumbed to the seduction of quick money. In full knowledge of her zealotry, Aiken has embraced vulgarity and like the way it feels.

Leading out of Aiken is Richland Avenue that turns at some arbitrary point into the Old Augusta highway. Aiken chose this road as her capitulation to the gods of plastic; Richland was dubbed here street of shame. Driving down Richland, one sees the old town of Aiken dying at the end of a magnificent canopy of trees. Columns disappear. The bright flowers of June give off a last, desperate perfume. Then it begins.

America’s great enemy of esthetics is the chain store. Aiken and America are in danger of leaving a bleak contribution to mankind if we are to be judged by future civilizations on what is excavated from our present one. The judgements levied upon our era will come from what artifacts? The plastic icon of Colonel Sanders will be our Collosus of Rhodes; the McDonalds’ arch our flying buttress; the Winn-Dixie Supermarket our Parthenon. Going down Richland, past the gas station, the shopping centers, the irridescent, glossy stores that serve man but serve him quickly, one sees on both sides of the road the cathedrals of plastic rising up one story, dehumanizing monuments to fast foods. In America, there must be efficiency, speed, technological awareness even in what we eat. We are in America, things are fast, ugly, chromium-plated, neon-lighted, brightly colored; we are ablaze in plastic, buffeted by hamburgers on the wing, pizza taking the curve and life coming down the homestretch. We move into the center of the dead land crowding into Richland Avenue and we say we say in one loud collective assent: This is America. This is fast. This is good. But – This is also Aiken, South Carolina.

Once the South had to ward off the assaults of the Philistines. No more. Now the Philistines says y’all come, can deliver a spontaneous defense of collard greens and belongs to the Sons of Confederacy. The Philistine is as southern as redeye gravy. He is the face staring back at our mirror. He carries our briefcase. He signs our names to forms that ignite the bulldozers, hire the contractors, and clear the pine.

Perhaps the Jaycee factor has overwhelmed us. The South reels under the invasion of those indefatigueable, bright-eyed, buttoned-down, fashionably coifed, up and coming, go getting boys out of K. A. who would sell their ancestral burial plot if K-Mart came up with the right price. They would move grandpa’s bones so the world could be made safer for a Hardee burger. In a euphemism of the age, they call themselves developers and have visions of driveways, barbecue sets, patios, four bedroom modern colonials, and Bermuda grass whenever they gaze at an uncut forest. They have their poetry. They name their suburbs Fox Chase, Kalmia Hills, Virginia Acres, Westwood, and Silver Bluff Estates. You will never find a development named Hog Intestines or Gopher Guts. Developers use words; words are the pimps that push the plastic and the patios. They are overrunning Aiken. The are remaing the South into the image of everywhere else. The are the Hun.

Aiken thunders with discordant echoes of itself. Aiken needs a loosening up, a gathering together of its energies; Aiken needs to define itself, to set the boundaries to form its goals. It is a town of such exquisite beauty and matchless color that it deserves the help of townsmen who love her. Winter colonists, blacks, Old Aikenites, the Valley people, DuPonters, each with their own unique destinies bound to this lovely, beleagured town. For better or worse, these are the people who will live their lives out beneath the magnolias and the McDonalds’ arch. This is where they will die. For all of them, Aiken is holy ground.