Reedy River Factory
1820
The South preferred to send its raw cotton to New England for spinning and weaving when Vardry McBee and his Mill Right John Adams built this Dam at Conestee to power a paper wood and cotton mill.
The mill supplied the news print for the papers of Greenville, Spartanburg, and Charlotte. When J.W. Grady and David O. Hawthorne took over the mill in
1862
they worked around the clock to make uniforms for the Confederate Army. The Reedy River Plant was replaced by the Conestee Cotton Mill in 1898, running 12,000 spindles and 370 looms. It employed 225 persons, many of them grade school age.
Marker is on Conestee Road, on the right when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
