In 1927 Horatio Nelson Slater III, the great grandson of Samuel Slater, who built the first textile mill in America in 1790, purchased 466 acres in northern Greenville County to build a textile mill and village. The village included 140 homes, a general store, barber shop, post office, medical clinic, boarding house, and fire department. In 1934 Slater Hall was constructed and served as a school, movie theater, basketball gym, and meeting place for the Baptist and Methodist churches. The property also included a swimming pool, tennis courts, a children’s playground, a nine-hole golf course, and three lots set aside for the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, and the Church of God. Community life centered heavily on textile basketball and baseball, and Slater’s teams excelled, with the women’s team winning ten Southern Textile Basketball tournament championships. In 1946 the mill was sold to J.P. Stevens and Company. By then it had expanded to 185,000 square feet and housed over 1,200 looms, and by 1990 the plant was a 400,000-square-foot complex. At its peak, the mill employed 1,200 workers. Slater began as a cotton mill but later changed to fiberglass and other synthetics, producing the main material for the space suits used in the first moon landing in 1969 and for space shuttle components. It became known as “The Mill that Went to the Moon,” and the name “Slater” and the date “1790” on its brick smokestack recalled its connection to Samuel Slater and the beginnings of textiles in America.