Mill Village Design

William B. Smith Whaley designed the Olympia Mill Village along with the mill in 1899, placing churches and the mill store close to the mill to create the feel of a small town and planting large shade trees along the roads. For the houses, he departed from the repeated single-house pattern he had used in Granby's village and instead created five house types with three, four, or six rooms, with the larger houses capable of being duplexes. He also ensured that no two adjacent houses shared the same paint color or style; two original colors were green and yellow, and the Olympia Mill School originally had deep yellow wood siding. Houses closest to the mill along Whaley Street served as homes for managers. After the first wave of construction of about 300 mill houses in 1900-1901, the Pacific Mills Company added more management housing along Whaley Street and in the blocks to the south in the late 1910s. These Craftsman style homes differed greatly from the older Olympia Mill houses and stood in a section separate from worker housing, an area workers called Silk Stocking Row or Society Block. The regular worker housing area, on a slight hill, was known as Olympia Mill Hill. The saltbox roof shape of this mill house was the same form Whaley had used in the Granby Mill Village after seeing that roof type while living in New England, and he may have used this unusual design to put his mark on the villages he designed in Columbia.

Olympia, South Carolina · United States