At Glencoe, a water-powered cotton mill in a remote location, the owners provided housing and community facilities as part of a planned mill village meant to attract workers, encourage families to stay, and promote productivity and stability, while also giving the company greater control over workers and their families. The Holts founded Glencoe on principles associated with mill developer Daniel A. Tompkins, and the village came to be regarded as a progressive manufacturing enterprise with an especially attractive and well-run community. James Holt and his son Robert took a personal interest in its operation, and the company provided a lodge hall, chapel, baseball field, and school to support a healthy and orderly community. In the 1880s, James Holt required village children to attend school for several years before they could work in the mill. In Glencoe’s early years, as at most Piedmont cotton mills, women and children made up most of the workforce; of 133 mill workers in 1890, more than two-thirds were women and children, and about a quarter of village households were headed by women, many of them widows with children. By 1924, men held more than two-thirds of the mill jobs and only two children worked there, a shift brought about by child labor laws, state education rules, and agricultural depressions that pushed more men from farms into manufacturing and brought entire families to the village. The village was laid out with the mill beside the river, with the company store, office, and superintendent’s residence nearby, the more elaborate homes of the manager and owner set a little apart, and rows of modest workers’ houses lining two streets up the hill. Reflecting the idea of a rural setting, the village included good-sized yards and individual and common garden plots. Houses ranged from one-story to one-and-a-half-story and two-story dwellings with three to six rooms, and most had front porches while many had separate kitchens in back. Families used outdoor privies, shared wells between two to four families, tended vegetable gardens, and often kept a cow or chickens, and at one time the mill supplied electricity to the houses during certain morning and evening hours. For residents, the village was a close-knit community in which people often cared for one another like a family, and despite long, hard workdays they found enjoyment in church events, baseball, fishing, and hunting, even as the Holts forbade union organizations and closely watched residents’ activities to preserve a stable working situation.