Piedmont took its name, meaning “Foot of the Mountains,” when Henry Pinckney Hammett bought the property for his cotton mill. On April 30, 1873, subscribers met at Greenville to organize the Piedmont Manufacturing Company, and Hammett was elected president of the new firm, which incorporated a year later with $200,000 in capital stock. Hammett was one of the first postwar mill presidents in South Carolina to adopt the large-scale New England model of factory production. After a charter was obtained, construction on mill No. 1 was finished and operations began in March, 1876, with 5,000 spindles and 112 looms. Under Hammett’s leadership, a second mill was added in 1878 and a third in 1890. By 1892 the company operated 47,000 spindles and 1,300 looms, with a mill village population of three thousand. From the late 1880s through the 1930s, China was an important market for the company’s cloth sheeting. Hammett also presided over a substantial mill village community that included a school, town hall, churches, and a hotel. Like most mill executives, he opposed unionization, ordering in 1886 that any worker who joined the Knights of Labor be fired, and he joined other mill presidents in resisting child labor legislation in 1890. After his death, the Beattie family of Greenville ran the mills until 1946, when J.P. Stevens and Co. Inc. took over. The Piedmont plants operated continuously until 1964, when Stevens built the modern Estes Plant about two miles away. Hammett’s original building burned in 1983, and the Anderson County plant was completely torn down by 1995.