Francis Winslow Poe established Poe Mill in 1896 on sixty acres in Greenville, South Carolina, known as Governor’s Hill. The mill was built beside the main line of the Southern Railroad and the White Oak branch of the Reedy River. J.E. Sirrine laid out the mill and village on his first assignment for Lockwood, Greene, and Company, and local contractor Jacob O. Cagle built the 432,000-square-foot brick mill “for posterity.” It began with 10,000 spindles and 400 workers, and by 1911 had expanded to 70,352 spindles, 1,700 looms, and 800 workers. A company store, school, first a Union church and later separate Baptist and Methodist churches, and four- and six-room saltbox-style houses were built for the mill village. The company store sold discounted coal for heating, while wood was used for cooking. By mid-1920, a baseball field and swimming pool stood across Buncombe Road from the village, and Poe athletic teams from children to adults took part in Greenville-area textile leagues and the annual Southern textile Basketball Tournaments. The mill was unique in the Greenville area for having two smokestacks serving the same plant. The Poe family owned it until 1947, when it was sold to the Ely Walker Company, then in 1954 to Burlington Industries, which operated it until it closed in 1977. Poe Mill burned in 2003, and only the two smokestacks remain.