diverse interests. It is of course true that these same forces operated afterwards, but in the earlier time there was no response to a public enthusiasm or a social demand creating a magnet that drew into the industry men who otherwise would never have entered it, certainly not as entrepreneurs.

In connection with the Schenck mill there was operated a plant turning out iron products.[41] Cotton factories conjoined with gins and saw mills are not unknown in the South even today, but in whatever instance this occurs there is indicated a lack of specialization.

The marketing and consumption of the output of the old mills is a matter of broad interest. The statement which serves, perhaps, to indicate most nearly a genuinely commercial character in this regard, is that of Mr. Clark growing out of his reference to the establishment of General David R. Williams, near Society Hill, Darlington County, South Carolina. It was on his plantation, and was water-driven. "... in 1828 he was turning his cotton crop, of 200 bales annually, into what was said to be the best yarn in the United States. He marketed part of his output in New York and wove part of it into negro cloth for home use.... Twenty years later the factory was still shipping yarn to New York, and also making cotton bagging for the neighboring plantations.... By the middle of the century their (small Southern mills such as this) product is said to have controlled the Northern yarn market. This market they were able to enter because they had been supported through infancy by the local demand for yarn for homespun weaving—a support they did not entirely dispense with until after the war. Yarn was traded by the mills for homespun linen warp, and woven with that warp into strong cloth for country use. The family weavers who did this work were paid for their labor in cotton yarn."[42] Other evidence hardly supports a belief that the Southern mills of this period took so large a part in supplying the yarn market of the country; on the other hand, local consumption and the link with domestic industry, which even in the quotation above goes side by side with the wider sales, was prevalent. How closely these old mills were joined with the countryside is seen in the fact that into their coarse, homely fabrics went hand-spun linen warp. The domestic character was ingrained. Of the Rocky Mount Mill in North Carolina it is said that "For some years prior to and during the Civil War, the mill was a general supply station for warps which the women of the South wove into cloth on the old hand looms. A few of the braver women who were left at home with only the feminine portion of their families or the sons too young to fight, sometimes made trips alone many miles through the country to get warps for themselves and neighboring families." So beneficial did this old habit prove during the war that a cavalry troop of six hundred federals was sent up from New Bern in 1863 and burned the mill.[43] Mr. Thompson says of this same mill that until 1851 slaves and a few free negroes were worked in it. This distinguishing difference of the old mills from those of the great period, when the labor of negroes was far from the thoughts of the builders and managers, will be dwelt upon in another place. Here again is noted the fact that the mill supplied coarse yarns for neighborhood consumption, and it is said moreover that making only twelve to fifteen hundred pounds of 4s to 12s daily, the mill could not get a steady market for its wares.[44]

It is reported of the first independent venture of Francis Fries, at Salem, North Carolina, in woolen manufacture, that it "was but a small one, consisting of a set of cards for making rolls from the wool raised by neighboring farmers. This mill also contained a small dyeing and fulling plant for coloring and finishing the cloth woven by the farmers' wives and daughters."[45] A large cotton manufacturer says that he recalls only three mills operating in Spartanburg county before the war; there were Bivingsville and two very small plants, one of them on the Tyger River spinning yarns on half a dozen frames, people driving from twenty to twenty-five miles to the door of the mill to get the product, although it was sold too in the stores.[46]

The Batesville factory was built with about 1000 spindles. Before the Columbia and Greenville railroad came to Greenville about 1852, the product of the mill was 8s to 12s in ten-pound "bunches" covered with blue paper. The yarn in this form passed current almost like money. The mill marketed it over the mountains in North Carolina and in Tennessee, as far as Russellville, "mountain schooners" with six-mile teams being used for the purpose. The wagons used to bring back whatever they could to constitute a return load; usually it was meat, all of that article consumed about Greenville coming, it is said, from North Carolina. Sometimes rags were brought back. In this way yarns were sometimes taken as far as a hundred and fifty miles.[47]

A banker who is intimately connected with the textile industry in one of the oldest industrial communities in the South and who is a member of a family to which many writers are quick to point as founders of cotton manufacture in the South through agency of conspicuous participation in the business since the early thirties, said: "The mills built after the war were not the result of pre-bellum mills. This is trying to ascribe one cause for a condition which probably had many causes. The industrial awakening in the South was a natural reaction from the war and reconstruction. Before the war there was first the domestic industry proper. Then came such small mills about Winston-Salem as Cedar Falls and Franklinsville. These little mills were themselves, however, hardly more than domestic manufactures. When, after the war, competition came from the North and from the larger Southern mills, the little mills which had operated before and had survived the war lost their advantage, which consisted in the possession of the local field. They had been able to barter for the small quantities of local raw cotton which they used. The standard of exchange, the par, was one yard of three-yard sheeting for a pound of raw cotton, which was a third of a pound, made into cloth, for a pound in the raw state. But this was a retail and not strictly a manufacturing profit.... The old Winston mill, established in 1840, finished the wool product spun by the country housewives. This mill also supplied carded wool for domestic manufacture. The ante-bellum domestic-factory system did not produce the post-bellum