Publisher's Synopsis
"York County's first textile mill, the Rock Hill Cotton Factory, opened its doors in 1881. For the next one hundred years, the textile industry dominated the Carolina Piedmont. Hundreds of thousands of people worked in the cotton mills of York, Chester, Lancaster, Union, Spartanburg, Gaston, Mecklenburg, and other surrounding counties. Here in York County, many of my friends' parents worked at Cannon Mill, Huntley, Springs, "the Bleachery," and "the Celanese," and many of my classmates went on to work in those same textile mills after high school. But by the first decade of the twenty-first century, most of those plants had closed, and the products that they once proudly manufactured were now being made in Asia or Mexico. The Celanese Celriver Plant was one of the last to go, and its closing, along with that of Springs Industries' few remaining plants, signaled the end of an era for the Carolina Piedmont. This book is an attempt to pres
