In 1820, when the South preferred to send its raw cotton to New England for spinning and weaving, Vardry McBee and his mill right John Adams built a dam at Conestee to power a paper, wood, and cotton mill. The mill supplied newsprint for the newspapers of Greenville, Spartanburg, and Charlotte. When J.W. Grady and David O. Hawthorne took over the mill in 1862, they worked around the clock to make uniforms for the Confederate Army. The Reedy River plant was replaced by the Conestee Cotton Mill in 1898, running 12,000 spindles and 370 looms. It employed 225 persons, many of them grade school age.