Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
Greenville started 1929 sure of itself. On New Year’s Day the Greenville News praised the city’s “march of progress.” However, by June, businessman G. Heyward Mahon Jr. warned that leading citizens had “lost faith in our city.” The trouble had been building for years.
The banks showed it first. The Bank of Commerce had failed in 1926. In June 1929, the Chamber of Commerce was taken to court for missing interest payments on its own building. That October, depositors lined up to pull their money out of Woodside National Bank, and Peoples State Bank took it over. Peoples State closed in January 1932. Examiners first estimated that depositors would get back 18 cents on the dollar.
At Poe Mill, management laid off 61 people. It cut the pay of the ones who stayed, then gave each of them more machines to run. Poe was not unusual. Greenville’s mills sold cloth all over the country, and by September 1929 few buyers were ordering. Nearly every mill in the county cut production, and some ran only three days a week. Camperdown No. 2 went bankrupt in 1930. The American Cigar Company shut its East Court Street plant and put about 200 people out of work.
Families who lost work had few places to go. The Greenville Welfare Service ran an employment exchange, a sewing room and a wood yard. Some of its work projects paid in groceries. By February 1932 it had helped 1,152 families. Dunean Mill gave families a small grocery allowance each week and expected the money back out of wages once work picked up.
Black Greenvillians had it worse. Most had been kept out of employment at the mills. They were last in line for whatever work and relief was left.
Charity and mill credit could not cover the need. Federal money could. New Deal programs paid Greenville workers to build the Greenville Paris Mountain State Park, the federal post office on East Washington Street, and the Table Rock watershed. Those wages carried families through the worst years, and most of what they built is still in use.
The 1920s boosters measured Greenville by its new buildings and its mill payrolls. Those payrolls lasted only as long as buyers in other states kept ordering cloth. When the orders stopped, a family on Poe Mill hill had no savings in a sound bank and no local government able to help. The help that finally came was paid for in Washington.
Next: How New Deal dollars rebuilt Greenville and changed what its people expected from government.
Russell Stall is a Greenville native, former at-large Greenville City Council member, and certified city planner. He serves as executive director of the Greenville County Historical Society. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
