SOUTH CAROLINA HALL OF FAME
Teacher Guide
William Gregg
South Carolina Social Studies Standards
William Gregg
The New Nation - Cotton Becomes King
Standard 3-4: The Student will demonstrate an understanding of life in the antebellum
period, the causes and effects of the Civil War, and the impact of Reconstruction in South
Carolina.
Topics include: Antebellum period, lack of industry/diversification, dominance of agriculture,
Graniteville, textile manufacturing, mill village
3-4.2 - Summarize the development of slavery in antebellum South Carolina, including the
invention of the cotton gin and the subsequent expansion of and economic dependence on
slavery.
3-4.4 - Summarize the course of the Civil War in South Carolina, including the Secession
Convention, the firing on Fort Sumter, the Union blockade of Charleston, the significance of the
Hunley submarine, the exploits of Robert Smalls, and General William T. Sherman's march
through the state.
3-4.5 - Explain how the destruction caused by the Civil War affected the economy and daily
lives of South Carolinians, including the scarcity of food, clothing, and living essentials and the
continuing racial tensions.
Standard 3-5: The student will demonstrate an understanding of the major developments in
South Carolina in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.
3-5.1 - Summarize the social and economic impact of developments in agriculture, industry and
technology, including the creation of Jim Crow laws, and the rise and fall of textile markets, and
expansion of the railroad.
Standard 4-6: The student will demonstrate an understanding of the causes, the course, and
the effects of the American Civil War.
4-6.1 - Explain the significant economic and geographic differences between the North and
South.
Standard 8-4: The student will demonstrate an understanding of the multiple events that led
to the Civil War.
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8-4.1 - Explain the importance of agriculture in antebellum South Carolina, including the
plantation system and the impact of the cotton gin on all social classes.
Standard 8-5: The student will understand the impact of Reconstruction, industrialization,
and Progressivism on society and politics in South Carolina in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
8-5.5 - Compare industrial development in South Carolina to industrialization in the rest of the
United States, including the expansion of railroads, the development of phosphate and textile
industries, and immigration.
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Biographies
William Gregg
William Gregg was born in Monongalia County, West Virginia in 1800. William’s mother died when he
was four years old, and his uncle Jacob Gregg took him in. William’s uncle made both watches and
textile spinning machinery. What may have seemed like two entirely different skill types were, in fact, a
perfect match for the young William Gregg.
As an adult, William made his fortune in Charleston from his success as a watchmaker, a silversmith, an
importer, and from his inheritance. He wrote a series of articles that appeared in the Charleston Courier.
These articles outlined ways in which men of business in the South could invest in manufacturing. Gregg
wrote about his belief that the area should stop depending on plantation agriculture as the only means
of commerce. These articles eventually were consolidated into a pamphlet called Essays on Domestic
Industry and made Gregg the leading advocate for industrialization.
A MOVE FROM CHARLESTON
It was his personal involvement with a Vaucluse
mill, less than three miles from downtown Aiken,
that spurred him to move from Charleston and
begin work on his most deeply held dream of
helping poor, southern people prosper in a
structured mill village.
By the time Gregg made Aiken his permanent
home in 1845, he was quite wealthy. He was ready
to prove that his ardent belief in rescuing the
economy of the South from a reliance on
plantation agriculture could become a reality.
Many people who didn’t own their own land found
it difficult to provide for themselves and their
families. These people often could not read or
write, and they had no specific skills other than
working on other people’s farms. The Graniteville
Manufacturing Company Mill and village were
constructed on the banks of Horse Creek – then
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Edgefield County and today, Aiken County – six miles from the City of Aiken. Gregg’s project was named
“Graniteville” because the main material used to construct it was granite mined from a local quarry.
Graniteville had a huge cotton mill at the center of the town. Gregg had houses built that were
affordable for the workers to rent and that were maintained by the company. There were village doctors
to take care of illness. Parents were responsible, as employees of the mills, to make sure their children
attended the school in the village. Many children of that era were forced to work by the age of eight or
nine, but Gregg’s “compulsatory school” meant that parents could not work for the mill unless they
made sure their children attended school regularly. Shortly after the mill opened in 1849, with the
village in place, Graniteville became one of the most successful textile factories in the southern United
States.
HIGHEST HILL IN TOWN
While Gregg watched so many of his personal theories of industrialization thrive, he made his home up
the hill from Graniteville in a house called “Kalmia.” It was built on the summit of the highest hill in the
town of Aiken on which hundreds of Kalmia bushes grew. His large house stood on the corner of what
today is Richland and Summit. The house was one of the first in town to have “illuminating gas” that
provided light, rather than just candles or oil lamps.
Above all other interests, William Gregg enjoyed gardening. And as a very energetic man on the
forefront of the Industrial Revolution, he approached gardening with the same enthusiasm as he did
everything else in his life. In 1857, he planted 2,000 peach trees in front of his house on the 100 acres on
which it stood. Gregg regularly attended meetings with Governor James Hammond at the Beech Island
Farmer’s Club to confer with other growers and apply what he’d learned to make his crop flourish. He
also got advice from his good friend Henry William Ravenel, the famous botanist who lived and did his
research in Aiken.
Gregg wanted his peach orchard to demonstrate the success that could be accomplished by South
Carolina farmers, and soon he began shipping his fruit, each peach individually wrapped and packed, by
night train from the nearby Kalmia Station. The peaches traveled to Charleston, where they were
transferred to a steamer ship and taken directly to New York City. People there bought the fruit as soon
as it arrived. Gregg’s Aiken-grown peaches had the reputation in New York as being the freshest peaches
available. A mere three days elapsed between the time the peaches were picked off the tree in Aiken
and when they could be eaten 800 miles away.
Right before the start of the Civil War, Gregg planted 6,000 more peach trees on terraces that sloped to
the east behind his house. Entries from his personal diary show that he mostly grew the Tillotson variety
of peach. He also mentions that he “grafted Chinese peaches.” All told, Gregg had a combined orchard
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of 8,500 trees. He was the first commercial peach farmer in South Carolina, as well as the “Father of the
Southern Textile Industry.”
So less than two hundred years ago, on land that today hosts hundreds of private homes as well as
businesses such as Walmart, Aiken Regional Medical Centers and the University of South Carolina Aiken,
thousands of peach trees once stood, supplying fruit to both local and national consumers.
Biography from http://www.aikenregional.com/community-information/aiken-history/william-
gregg-and-aiken%E2%80%99s-first-peaches\
William Gregg, jeweler, watchsmith, champion of industry, and founder of the Graniteville Company,
was known as the father of Southern cotton manufacturing.
Gregg was born February 2, 1800, in western Virginia, the son of William and Elizabeth Webb Gregg. His
mother died when he was 4 years old, and he was reared by a neighbor woman until he was about 10.
He was then sent to live with an uncle, Jacob Gregg, a successful watch and spinning-machine maker in
Alexandria, Virginia.
A few years later, his uncle established a cotton mill in Georgia, one of the South's first. The mill did not
survive the War of 1812. In 1814, William Gregg was apprenticed to a friend of his uncle's, a Mr.
Blanchard, a watchmaker and silversmith in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1821, Gregg moved to Petersburg,
Virginia, to perfect himself in his profession.
Gregg undoubtedly formed a strong friendship with Mr. Blanchard. A decade after leaving his
employment, Gregg stopped at the Blanchard's new home in Louisville, Kentucky, to pay his respects.
Sitting at Blanchard's bench, Gregg made a silver pitcher of the treasured first coins he ever earned. It
became an heirloom that was handed down from first son to first son in the Gregg family.
After completing training, he moved to South Carolina and established a jewelry business in Columbia.
On a sales trip, he called on Colonel Mathias Jones, who operated a store at Ridge Spring in Edgefield
District. There he met Jones' eldest daughter, Marina, and they were married in 1829.
Gregg was prosperous in Columbia, and during the 1830s, he not only traveled extensively throughout
the United States, but he retired with a large amount of discretionary capital. In 1838, he bought an
interest in what became Hayden, Gregg and Company, a jewelry and silversmithing firm in Charleston
and moved his family to the Lowcountry.
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Also in 1838, he bought into the Vaucluse Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in Barnwell District. His
experience with Vaucluse taught him two things: first, how cotton manufacturing in the South should
not be conducted (the plant was a model of inefficiency), and, second, in his words, "a settled conviction
. . . that manufacturing is a business that ought to engage the two Carolinas and Georgia."
In 1844, William Gregg traveled to New England to inspect its textile districts, and the trip, coupled with
the lessons of Vaucluse, prompted him to write a series of essays for the Charleston Courier that would
become known as the Essays on Domestic Industry, a visionary call for the active development of mills in
the South.
While corporations were not commonplace in those days, shortly after publishing the essays, Gregg and
a group of mostly Charlestonians applied for and, in 1845, received a charter from the state Legislature
for the Graniteville Manufacturing Company.
The Graniteville Company relied on local people to build the mill as well as operate it, employing
farmers, tenant farmers, and the poor at wages commensurate with those paid to Northern mill
workers. Granite quarried about a mile from the plant site was used in the construction.
Gregg provided quality housing for his workers, as well as a church and a small library. They received
medical care for a small fee. They had gardens and woods from which to harvest timber.
Gregg also created what was perhaps the first compulsory education system in the United States. He
built a school for children from 6 to 12 years old, furnished teachers and books, and fined parent
workers five cents a day, withheld from their wages, for every day their children were absent from
classes.
Gregg was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1856, and he continued to argue
passionately for internal industrial development. He believed that there was little reason to look to the
expanding West or the industrialized North when so much of the treasures of South Carolina, in his eyes,
lay untapped.
Graniteville Manufacturing Company barely survived the Civil War. Immediately after the war ended,
Gregg worked diligently toward the continued modernization of his company through travel, research,
and the investment of about $120,000 in personal capital for more modern machinery.
In April 1996, Graniteville Company was sold to Avondale Mills, Inc.; it currently operates as Graniteville
Fabrics.
The University of South Carolina–Aiken Library features the Gregg–Graniteville Memorial Rooms, which
contain The Gregg–Graniteville Collection. The collection has proven of primary value for scholars in
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Southern economic, social, and labor history for the period 1845 to 1985, as well as for cultural
historians of the South as it moved into the 20th century.
William and Marina Gregg were the parents of three children, Mary, William, and James.
Gregg died on September 13, 1867.
He was inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame in 1985.
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Timeline
William Gregg
1800 William Gregg was born February 2, 1800, in western Virginia, the son of William and
Elizabeth Webb Gregg. His mother died when he was 4 years old, and he was reared by a
neighbor woman until he was about 10.
1810 William, now ten years old, goes to live with an uncle, Jacob Gregg, a successful watch
and spinning-machine maker in Alexandria, Virginia.
1814 William Gregg was apprenticed to a friend of his uncle's, a Mr. Blanchard, a watchmaker
and silversmith in Lexington, Kentucky.
1821 Gregg moved to Petersburg, Virginia, to perfect himself in his profession.
1829 After completing training, he moved to South Carolina and established a jewelry
business in Columbia. On a sales trip, he called on Colonel Mathias Jones, who operated a store
at Ridge Spring in Edgefield District. There he met Jones' eldest daughter, Marina, and they
were married in 1829. William and Marina Gregg were the parents of three children, Mary,
William, and James.
1830 – 1838 Gregg was prosperous in Columbia in the 1830’s. In 1838, he bought an interest in
what became Hayden, Gregg and Company, a jewelry and silversmithing firm in Charleston and
moved his family to the Low country.
1838 Also in 1838, he bought into the Vaucluse Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in
Barnwell District.
1844 In 1844, William Gregg traveled to New England to inspect its textile districts, and the trip,
coupled with the lessons of Vaucluse, prompted him to write a series of essays for the
Charleston Courier that would become known as the Essays on Domestic Industry, a visionary
call for the active development of mills in the South.
1845 Gregg and a group of mostly Charlestonians applied for, and received a charter from the
state Legislature for the Graniteville Manufacturing Company.
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About Graniteville Manufacturing Company
The Graniteville Company relied on local people to build the mill as well as operate it,
employing farmers, tenant farmers, and the poor at wages commensurate with those paid to
Northern mill workers. Granite quarried about a mile from the plant site was used in the
construction.
Gregg provided quality housing for his workers, as well as a church and a small library. They
received medical care for a small fee. They had gardens and woods from which to harvest
timber.
Gregg also created what was perhaps the first compulsory education system in the United
States. He built a school for children from 6 to 12 years old, furnished teachers and books, and
fined parent workers five cents a day, withheld from their wages, for every day their children
were absent from classes.
1856 Gregg was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1856. Graniteville
Manufacturing Company barely survived the Civil War. Immediately after the war ended, Gregg
worked diligently toward the continued modernization of his company through travel, research,
and the investment of about $120,000 in personal capital for more modern machinery.
1867 Gregg died on September 13, 1867.
1985 He was inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame in 1985.
1996 In April 1996, Graniteville Company was sold to Avondale Mills, Inc.; it currently operates
as Graniteville Fabrics.
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Images
William Gregg
William Gregg
http://www.aikenregional.com/community-information/aikenhistory/william-gregg-and-aiken%E2%80%99s-first-peaches
William Gregg (Industrialist)
http://www.knowitall.org/legacy/laureates/William%20Gregg.html
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William Gregg (Industrialist)
http://www.arete-designs.com/southernprimer/greggmill.html
William Gregg, founder of Graniteville Manufacturing Company.
http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/search/collection/ggpaiken/page/1
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Marina Gregg – Wife of William Gregg
Original Granite Mill (1845).
Photographed in the 1940′s.
William Gregg, the founder of Graniteville Mill and the "father of the
textile industry" in the South, and Marina Jones, daughter of
Matthias Jones. Their children were William, James, and Mary; my
guess is that William is in back, James is on left, and Mary in the
middle. William was killed in the Civil War.
http://anygreenplace.com/greggjones.html
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http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/26149
http://www.s9.com/Biography/Gregg-William
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Credits
South Carolina Social Studies Standard Correlations were provided by Lisa Ray
The purpose of the South Carolina Hall of Fame is to recognize and honor both contemporary
and past citizens who have made outstanding contributions to South Carolina's heritage and
progress.
Funding for Knowitall.org was provided by the S. C. General Assembly through the K-12
Technology Initiative.
Visit scetv.org/education for more educational resources.
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