On a high sandy hill of long-leaf pine and scrub oak marking the rim of South Carolina's Appalachian piedmont as it begins its descent into the tidewater delta, there stands in the middle of a small clearing a 14 foot white marble shaft dedicated to the memory of William Gregg, 1800-1867. The monument was unveiled on June 14, 1926 on this spot in honor of one of America's earliest guerilla fighters for industrial capitalism in the heart of the Ante-Bellum South. Three hundred feet below and less than a mile down the winding road from Kalmia Hill, so named for the mountain laurel that once covered its slopes, lies the town of Graniteville, William Gregg’s single-handed industrial revolution to which he gave his life.

"There used to be an expression in this town. Graniteville Company used to say we raise our own help around here. We've got four, five and six generation families in this town who have never worked for another company. Phinizy Timmerman, the president, was raised right there on the street in Graniteville. Jerry Johnson, the vice-president, was raised right there on the street in Graniteville. They call him Jerry. They call Phinney, Phinney. They respect him as president. They say Mr. Timmerman this, Mr. Timmerman that, because they respect him for his position. There never has been a stranger in the management group here at Graniteville.

"It is only necessary to build a manufacturing village of shanties, in a healthy location in any part of the State, to have crowds of these poor people around you, seeking employment at half the compensation given to operatives at the North…who, if too lazy to work themselves, might be induced to place their children in a situation in which they would be educated and reared in industrious habits." William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry (1845)

Ollie Whittle’s face breaks into a laugh like a set of china dropped from a second floor window. She leans forward in her green porch rocker with its cushion of scrap foam and throws out her arms to Raymond with a shriek that carries out past his Dodge van onto the four-lane called Gregg Highway that cuts its way like a sutured incision through this black appendage to Graniteville's factory enclave of gleaming white row houses.

James J, Gregg, the son of William Gregg the founder of Graniteville, was eleven years old when he first took the eight hour journey with his mother from their home in Charleston up into the piedmont hills to the site of his father's new factory. It was March of 1847 and the South Carolina Railroad from Charleston to Hamburg had recently opened a new depot, even though it would be almost another two years before the factory could begin production. And, as the railroad only came to within a mile of the site, the tiny new station with its freshly painted sign silhouetted against the woods seemed almost to have snagged itself like some brightly colored leaf caught momentarily in the downstream rush of a creek.

First there were the pauper children. "Indentured parish apprentices" they were called, indentured from as early as five years old, sometimes even four, until the age of twenty-one. In lots of fifty to a hundred like cattle they were negotiated from the quaint picturesque Dickensian workhouses of 18^th century London to the remote factory towns of the north of England, where they disappeared from the public record. As Paul Mantoux, one of the early scholars of the industrial revolution, has put it, "The only extenuating circumstances in the painful events which we have now to recount as shortly as we can, was that forced child labour was no new evil."

Start from the river at Augusta, the Savannah with its slow churning delta batter of tidewater mud and mosquito larvae, and cross it into South Carolina. You'll find yourself at the mouth of a small creek that for twelve miles has cut a deep valley into the surrounding Appalachian plateau. Horse Creek Valley or simply the Valley as it's known to its more than 20,000 inhabitants is, like the Merrimack Valley in New England, one of this country's early industrial cradles, spawning grounds for a new system of production that was by the turn of the century to have transformed and shaped an entire nation.