Lockhart was founded with the completion of the first Lockhart Mill in 1894, and a booming turn-of-the-century textile industry quickly expanded both the mill and the town, which reached a population of 1,400 by 1907. As the community grew, the mill company built support buildings and structures for operatives and their families, including mill houses, a personnel office, schools, a clinic, a swimming pool, a company store called the Community Cash, and a pedestrian bridge over the mill race. Although many traces of the once thriving mill town have disappeared, modest mill houses remain, including the earliest brick homes along Canal Road in an area called The Flat and later wood-frame and clapboard houses. By the early 1920s, the newest mill houses stood on a northeastern knoll known as New Hill. Many homes were built for two mill families, with each family occupying one side, parents often sleeping beside a central fireplace on the lower level, children or dependent relatives in a small attic story, and restrooms on a shared back porch; today these houses hold a single family. For a century, the town grew and flourished with the industrial site, and until the late twentieth century Lockhart Mills provided the livelihood for many villagers, shaping the community's identity through the close ties of operatives and their families. Despite the shuttering and razing of Lockhart Mills in 2002, Lockhart's historic neighborly character endures. Churches were established in the village's earliest years for Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, with the oldest surviving church building constructed for the Presbyterian congregation about 1896, a Free Will Baptist building present by about 1905, a First Baptist church erected about 1921, a Methodist church built about 1926-1927, and a Church of God constructed about 1980. Education also grew with the mill: by 1901 the mill had opened its first school for operatives' children, by 1920 Lockhart Mills was one of only four mills in the state with its own accredited high school, and that year the town opened a new high school with a full auditorium, 12 teachers, and 409 students, while educators lived in a converted two-story teacherage. After a fire destroyed the school in 1953, a larger school complex was completed on Lockhart Drive in 1954 and educated children from kindergarten through 12th grade until 2007, when the high school grades were absorbed into Union County High School.