Piedmont

Piedmont. . When Henry Pinckney Hammett (1822-1891), bought the property for his cotton mill, the area was named Piedmont, “Foot of the Mountains”. On April 30, 1873, subscribers met at Greenville to organize the Piedmont Manufacturing Company. Hammett was elected president of the new firm, which would incorporate a year later with $200,000 in capital stock. Hammett was one of the first postwar mill presidents in South Carolina to adopt the large-scale New England model of factory production. A charter was obtained. Construction on mill No. 1 was finished and operations began in March, 1876, with 5,000 spindles and 112 looms. Under Hammett’s leadership, a second mill was added in 1878, then a third in 1890. By 1892 the Piedmont Manufacturing Company operated 47,000 spindles and 1,300 looms with a mill village population of three thousand. China represented an important market for the company’s cloth sheeting from the late 1880s through the 1930s. In addition to factory work, Hammett presided over a substantial mill village community including a school, town hall, churches, and a hotel. As did most mill executives, Hammett opposed any unionization efforts. When the Knights of Labor began to organize at Piedmont in 1886, he ordered the mill superintendent to fire any worker who joined the union. He also joined other mill presidents in resisting child labor legislation in 1890. After his death the Beattie family from Greenville took over operations and ran the mills until 1946 when J.P. Stevens and Co. Inc. took over. The Piedmont Plants operated continuously until 1964, when Stevens built the modern Estes Plant about two miles away. Mr. Hammett’s original building burned in 1983 and the Anderson County plant was completely torn down by 1995. . This historical marker is in Greenville in Greenville County South Carolina