Bechtler's Mint

Shelby, NC

Born at Shelby in 1882, O. Max Gardner served as governor of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933, steering the state through the depths of the Great Depression, and later became Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and, in 1946, ambassador-designate to Great Britain. He was a central figure in the "Shelby Dynasty" that dominated state politics and its textile economy; his birthplace stands here and his grave lies 300 yards north.

Spartanburg, SC

This monument honors Dexter Edgar Converse, a Vermont-born industrialist who came south and helped make Spartanburg a powerhouse of the New South cotton-mill economy. In 1889 he lent his name and fortune to found the college memorialized here as a place for the higher education of women, at a time when such opportunities were still scarce. The Vermont-to-Carolina arc on the stone captures a familiar Gilded Age story: northern capital and know-how reshaping the postwar Southern landscape, one textile mill and civic institution at a time.

Spartanburg County, SC

Apalache Mill was one of the textile mills that transformed the South Carolina Piedmont in the decades after the Civil War, as cotton manufacturing shifted from New England toward the Southern cotton fields. Around such mills grew whole villages of workers' housing, churches, and company stores. The site is now recognized as a historic district for the part these mills played in the region's industrial past.

Asheville, NC

In July 1916, torrential rains sent catastrophic floods through western North Carolina and the western Piedmont, sweeping away homes, crops, mills, and bridges. Four lives were lost near the main gate of the Biltmore Estate on July 16. The disaster reshaped the region's rivers and its communities in a matter of days.