The Southern Conference is the fourth oldest conference in the nation, opening play in 1921.
Such history deserves to be housed in a place just as historical, which is why the SoCon decided to move into digs that date back prior to their conception.
The Southern Conference presently sets up shop ? no pun intended ? in the renovated Beaumont Mill in its newly adopted home of Spartanburg, SC.
The mill sits on the banks of Chinquapin Creek and some of the brick work on the tremendous building dates as far back as 1888, although the mill itself was not used until the start of the 1890’s.
When the mill was opened it housed 3,072 spindles, 640 twisters and 40 bag looms.
J.H. Sloan, the original president of the mill, told the Charleston (SC) newspaper shortly after its opening that his mission was to bring “renewed prosperity and life to Spartanburg.”
Originally, Beaumont Mill amassed a one-story high building and was located adjacent to the Richmond and Danville Railroad that later became the Southern Railroad.
The main products that the mill produced during its inception were carpet wraps, seamless bags (for corn and grain) and wrapping twines for domestic market. All of the products were made using cotton waste from nearby mills.
The mill was not only a place that its workers clocked in and left, as it also became a mill village community of 15 homes along North Liberty Street in Spartanburg.
Almost 20 years after its commencement, the mill had more than quadrupled its spindles to 12,360 in 1907. It also now used the more advanced automatic looms, placing 252 of the machines in the mill.
Beaumont Mill Village community as it is still presently known today included 142 homes in the village by 1920 as well.
It produced a variety of products over its years, including the much-needed cotton-duck product during World War II, and eventually came under the umbrella of the Spartan Mills industry, employing more than 1,200 people before closing its doors in 1999.
It was partially dismantled in 2002.
There is much more to the Beaumont Mill and the men and women surrounding the industry in Spartanburg. The history of the mill era in Spartanburg is a rich one and contains a historical precipice that deserves to be told.
The Commencement of the Textile Mill in Spartanburg
Spartanburg Country was formed in 1785.
The name was formulated from a militia regiment who called themselves the Spartans during the early years of the American Revolution.
About four years after its founding enough settlers had moved into the area, warranting the construction of a courthouse and jail.
The first textile mill in the United States was established in the 1790’s by Samuel Slater in Rhode Island and the first mill in the Spartanburg area did not open its doors until 1816. It was situated on the Tyger River.
Spartanburg became prosperous in obtaining mills because of the river due to its three branches, which flowed north, south and through the middle. Even more important was the fact that the three branches flowed parallel to each other just a few miles apart.
The sudden boom of mills in the area known then as the Spartanburg district allowed the area to skyrocket in population from 12,122 people to 16,989 from 1800 to 1820.
The town of Spartanburg itself was not too big during this time though, as only 300 or so individuals called the area home by the 1830’s.
Nevertheless, with the construction of a bevy of mills in the area, Spartanburg became a major center of industry in the Southeast, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution.
The Industrial Age Begins
Just like most of the South in the 1870’s, Spartanburg was ravaged from the Civil War and suffered from the pitfalls of war against one another and reconstruction policies.
Still, with so many textile mills in the area and railroads making their way to the area, Spartanburg enjoyed some prosperity by the dawning of the new century in 1900.
Everything could be traced to the railroads, especially when a line was completed between Spartanburg and Columbia, harking a time for new beginnings in the Upstate region.
In fact, by 1910 Spartanburg could ship and receive from anywhere.
The commercial center of the Piedmont region at the time, Spartanburg used cotton to make its name.
Cotton was used for myriad different purposes, but was most often worked on through a spindle.
A spindle being a small, steel rod, usually about 14 inches, where a bobbin was placed. When the bobbin - a polished wooden spool where yarn is wound - resolves at great speed it gives the yarn a unique twist.
More cotton was being grown in Spartanburg after the Civil War than ever before and new technology allotted for less skilled people to be hired, hurting the higher experienced ones and eventually leading to erosion in the area.
The Spartanburg investors put their dynasties right next to where the cotton grew and saved money by placing their mills in the Spartanburg district by not having to ship the cotton almost 1,000 miles north to the New England area to be processed.
Before the erosion and the usage of people for less than ideal wages, Spartanburg was the most industrialized region in the southern piedmont region as 30-percent of all spindles in South Carolina were in Spartanburg.
By 1901, Spartanburg County procured more mills than any other county in the Palmetto state.
Spartanburg was not an anomaly. There were 21 million spindles in the United States in 1901 with 6 million coming from the South. Broken down even further, 1.8 million of those were in South Carolina and 550,000 of those were placed in the Spartanburg district.
The New England area was the industry leader, accounting for 13 million of the 21 million spindles in America.
The South soon usurped New England for the crown, surpassing the region for number of spindles by 1921, which had a great deal to due with the fact that Spartanburg built 37 mills between 1880 and 1910.
Mill Life
It is no secret that many southern people grew up in mill families and that the mill life was less than ideal.
The numbers speak for themselves.
The pay was not good and the hours were extremely long. That may not sound like much, as many assume that it is not that much different today. That may be true, but take these numbers into consideration.
The first law governing textile industry production set the maximum work week at 66 hours in 1892. In 1907, that was debunked to 60 hours and then was lowered once again to 55 hours for specific jobs in the textile industry by 1922.
After 1992, mills in full production ran two 10-hour shifts, five days and a five-hour shift on the sixth day, which was almost always Saturday.
Piece workers during this time were paid by production not hours.
With such low pay and seemingly no quality of life, children in the Upstate region of South Carolina were forced to work to help garner wages for their families and some started as early as nine years old.
The pay for most was secondary to the aforementioned quality of life factor, as textile workers were subjected to many harmful and dangerous things. For example, the textile workers could not escape things such as the accumulated cotton fluff that gave rise to the derisive term linthead, nor the constant roar of the machinery that often seriously damaged their hearing for the remainder of their lives.
In response to the tense times, SoCon institution Wofford College through their literary magazine in 1936 published a poem describing textile workers as poor, illiterate, ignorant and degraded, articulating through one person’s opinion that these mill workers were a part of a special caste of individuals.
This student that wrote the poems had spent time observing at the Beaumont Mill, but mill workers were in disbelief of his assertions and up until the mill’s closing in the latter part of the 1900’s they were still outraged by the man’s meanderings.
World War II
Just before the beginnings of World War II, Spartanburg County employed their highest number of workers ever at the time, as 15,000 textile workers called Spartanburg home.
But with the second installment of the world’s war shortly thereafter the facility became one of the first to receive government orders to become a defense facility. In the summer of 1941, Beaumont Mill began the conversion thusly. The Army ran the mill until the end of the war.
The plant capacity doubled and payroll rose from 750 to 1430.
With such audacious numbers the plant added 135 new homes.
The community became somewhat self-serving in all facets. Management organized carpools to bring in new workers from the country and there was even a company publication.
Jobs changed by gender due to most of the men in the area off fighting for their country. Women began to run almost half of the jobs in the plants in the area.
The job done by the women during this time period was critical to the overall success of the war, as evidenced by the fact that the products being produced were a necessity during this time.
The plant employees during this time won five Army-Navy “E” awards for their work and production of heavy cotton-duck fabric that was needed by the armed forces during their time in World War II.
Beaumont had a quota of millions of yard of “duck” to make for the fighting fronts since the fabric was a battle casualty and needed to replaced.
“Duck” was mainly used for GI back packs, ammo belts and rafts during the Second World War.
Civil Rights
In 1961, blacks were still not employed by mills. In fact, segregation laws were so strict in South Carolina it was a violation for black and white workers to pass each other on the staircase.
A Civil Rights group made Spartanburg County the first battleground for the fight to segregate the Southern Textile Plants since a new federal law in the United States had just been implemented to prevent discrimination by defense contractors.
Around this same period of time in 1961, African-Americans in Spartanburg County began visiting personnel departments with some even filling out job applications.
These same individuals, with the help of the NAACP, filed the nation’s first discrimination complaints and brought federal security to most major mills in Spartanburg, including Beaumont and Milliken.
Civil Rights at the Beaumont Mill during this time period was not limited to minorities.
In fact, one of the landmark cases in American Constitutional Law has integral ties to the Beaumont Mill.
The case was argued on April 24, 1963 before Supreme Court of the United States and dealt with the fundamental first amendment rights of the free exercise of religion.
The case, Sherbert v. Verner, was once a precedent, but will always be known as a “landmark.”
The case was brought forth by Adell Hopes Sherbert, a veteran millhand who worked at the Beaumont division of Spartan Mills.
Sherbert was fired on June 28, 1959 for not working a Saturday shift.
Not working on Saturday’s had become commonplace for Sherbert as a consequence of Beaumont implementing a sixth day to the work week to increase productivity.
Sherbert had declined to work on the Saturday’s because she was a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The denomination’s doctrine designate Saturday as the Sabbath as reference to Jesus’ observance of the day as a Jew.
After getting fired, Sherbert filed suit with the South Carolina Employment Security Commission looking to garner back wages. The claim was denied by the examiner for the commission and thusly Sherbert too her case to the Court of Common Pleas for Spartanburg County for a judicial review of the decision by the SCESC.
Once again Sherbert fell. Judge J. Woodrow Lewis asserted through his decision-making process that by not working on Saturday she had made herself unavailable for work and should not be able to garnish lost wages concurrently.
The case then found its way to the Supreme Court of South Carolina. The principal defendant designated on the documents was the SCESC president Charlie Verner.
The appeal was rejected on May 16, 1962.
Sherbert applied to the Supreme Court and on June 17, 1963, the United States’ highest court decided that the denial of unemployment compensation to Sherbert restricted the free exercise of her religion.
Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, writing for the 7-2 majority, answered South Carolina’s Security Employment’s Commission delimitations by noting that, “only the gravest abuses ... give occasion for permissible limitation.”
The so-called Sherbert test would be the constitutional precedent for 25 years before the Rehnquist court in the case of Smith v. Employment Division rejected the thought process.
Nevertheless, it remains the standard for those that embraced Sherbert’s ideals and want to see the “Sherbert Test” as the standard once again to which the federal, state and locality governments must adhere to in enacting statutes that restrict the free exercise of religion.
Mill Tycoons
There were many men that made a considerable fortune from the mill industry in Spartanburg, including the extremely famed Milliken clan and the late Edgar Converse, whom all girls school, Converse College, takes its moniker from to this day.
Converse began his empire in 1880 with the opening of the Clifton Manufacturing Company and continued to own mills throughout the area for years to come.
The Milliken dynasty in Spartanburg has continued to this day, but commenced when famed Roger Milliken’s grandfather, a former potato farmer from Maine, invested $10,000 in local textile businessmen Captain John Montgomery’s Pacolet River Mill.
After his initial investment, Seth Milliken became one of the directors of Spartan Mills in 1880, the same year the Beaumont Mill was brought to fruition.
Seth accumulated quite a fortune during the time period, but passed away in 1916, leaving the business to his son, Gerrish.
Gerrish ran the multi-million dollar company at the time until 1947 when he fell victim to a fatal heart attack on the golf course at Southampton in Long Island, thrusting then 32-year-old Roger into the reins of the company.
The man known affectionately as “Big Red” moved the family business from the North, where Gerrish had run the company, to Spartanburg.
A Yale-educated man, Milliken is intensely private and is a staunch opponent of economic globalization even launching the very familiar “Crafted with Pride in the U.S.A.” advertising campaign that paved the way for the “Made in the U.S.A.” label on American-made clothes.
Milliken and Co., through the visionary eyes of Roger Milliken, has become one of the most successful privately held companies of all-time and has led Milliken to amass a healthy personal fortune that is estimated to be worth over $1 billion.
The money is secondary to what Milliken has brought to the American economy, as his privately-held company has 1,900 patents. The patents have helped to result in the largest textile research center in the world.
The Milliken Company does everything from make tennis balls soft to give Jell-O pudding its creamy smoothness.
Sports and the Textile Industry
The Southern Conference obviously has a history in sports, but the textile industry does as well.
Since most people in the Spartanburg area were mill workers at one point sports were intricately tied to their daily work.
There were textile tournaments pitting mills against one another across the state.
Even “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Greenville, SC native and famed member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, played textile baseball in South Carolina before and after moving on to the major leagues.
The perennial textile tournament was in basketball. The tournament started in 1921 and was a by-cursor of L.P. Hollis, the YMCA secretary at Greenville’s famed Monaghan Mill, going to Springfield, MA, and talking with the creator of basketball, Dr. James Naismith.
By 1929, results were telegraphed and broadcast worldwide.
The games were played in Textile Hall in Greenville and were privy to some stellar games over the course of the years, including the 1965 Open Division semifinal, which provided the greatest game in tournament history and one of the greatest games in South Carolina basketball history.
The game featured Mikro out of Charlotte and the Greenville Old Pros.
Mikro recruited University of North Carolina All-American and ACC Player of the Year Billy Cunningham and the Old Pros countered with Fred Hetzel, who was an All-American and the SoCon Player of the Year for Davidson.
Cunningham lit up the scoreboards on the night, scoring 39 points as Mikro pulled away for a 112-78 win.
Hetzel was not the only SoCon player to suit up in the famed tourney, as Western Carolina’s Henry Logan played for Sunshine Cleaners and led the Columbia, SC squad to the open division title in 1966.