Monaghan Mill

About this property

Monaghan Mill, now the Lofts of Greenville, is a former textile mill (1900–2001) in Greenville, South Carolina, that in the early 21st century was converted into loft apartments. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Monaghan Mill was founded by Lewis Wardlaw Parker (1865–1916) and his cousin, Thomas Fleming Parker (1860–1926). Lewis Parker was born in Abbeville, South Carolina, and graduated from the College of South Carolina in 1885, and from its law school two years later. After teaching in Columbia, he practiced law in Greenville and there became president of the Bank of Greer. Thomas Fleming Parker was born in Charleston and attended the College of Charleston before moving to Greenville, where his father held shares in a group of cotton mills. Because the Bank of Greer was the receiver for the Victor Manufacturing Company, in 1897, Lewis Parker reorganized it as well as the Whaley Mills of Columbia. In February 1900, Parker and his cousin Thomas organized Monaghan Mill and named it for County Monaghan, the birthplace of their grandfather Thomas Fleming. The Rhode Island firm of Lockwood, Greene & Co. built the mill, which opened in 1902 on 325 acres on the west side of Greenville near the Reedy River. The mill was capitalized at $450,000 and had 35,000 spindles. Monaghan was successful from the beginning, producing "print cloths, fancy dress goods and shirtings," and "shade cloth." By 1907, Monaghan had increased its spindles to 60,000 and the capital in stock alone had increased to $700,000. The surge in textile manufacturing drew workers from other states and Europe to Greenville. For instance, Monaghan employed fifty Belgian immigrants, who lived at one of the mill's boarding houses. In 1911, the Parker cousins merged the Victor and Whaley Mills, which they already owned, with the Olympia, Richland, Granby, and Capital City Mills of Columbia, and the Appalache Mills of Greer, to form the Parker Cotton Mills Company, which was capitalized at $15 million and operated over a million spindles, more than any other contemporary U.S. textile firm. The company collapsed in 1914 because of a lack of capital during a cotton panic that occurred at the outbreak of World War I. Lewis resigned the presidency of the company and practiced law until his death from cancer in 1916. Thomas eventually retired. The first successful cotton mill merger did not occur for another twenty years. In 1917, the former Parker mills were reorganized into the Victor-Monaghan Group, and were sold in 1946 to J. P. Stevens and Company. As president of Monaghan, Thomas Parker strove to make the mill a model of paternalistic management. Parker provided a community medical clinic and hired one of the best doctors in the area, as well as a nurse, to staff it. Parker also provided an elementary school, a playground, and a YMCA. The YMCA building alone cost $18,000 (easily ten times that much a century later) and was the first located in a southern mill town. As a director of the YMCA, Parker hired an unusually gifted young man, Lawrence Peter "Pete" Hollis, who eventually became a nationally recognized educator.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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