90 years after a deadly labor strike, a textile town may finally be ready to own its history

Remains of the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina. pictured Aug. 27, 2024. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)

HONEA PATH, S.C. – Ninety years after one of South Carolina’s deadliest labor strikes, the remains of the mill where flaring tempers escalated into gunfire that left seven dead are set to come down.

Partial demolitions in the past left remnants of the textile plant that operated for a century at the center of Honea Path, like a ghostly reminder of the Chiquola Mill Massacre many wanted forgotten.

But time has slowly loosened the once-silencing grip the tragedy had on the small Upstate town.

The town recently received a mix of funds — a $2.65 million federal grant for site cleanup plus $1.3 million in state aid for a reclamation project that includes creating walking paths between the site and downtown, rebuilding the mill pond and tearing down long-abandoned mill village homes, Mayor Christopher Burton said.

Amid the Great Depression, textile workers at factories across the South and along the East Coast launched one of the nation’s largest labor strikes, the General Textile Strike, on Labor Day 1934 . In South Carolina, 43,000 women and men joined the protest for better wages, working conditions and an end to child labor, shutting down two-thirds of the state’s 200 textile mills.

Then-Gov. Ibra Blackwood dispatched the National Guard and Highway Patrol with promises to reopen the mills. But in Honea Path, mayor and mill superintendent Dan Beacham took matters into his own hands.

Within three days of the strike beginning, an estimated 300 strikers had gathered at the gates of the Chiquola Mill, joined by supporters from nearby mills and so-called “flying squadrons” of United Textile Workers organizers, forming picket lines to stop strikebreakers from entering.

Inside, newly deputized townspeople and workers were posted at windows and armed with shotguns, rifles and pistols. And Beacham mounted a World War I machine gun to the roof of the four-story mill.

The late “Buck” Shaw was just 17 years old on Sept. 6, 1934, when he met up with fellow workers and started walking toward the mill, according to his son Tommy Shaw: That’s when a man stuck a gun at his father’s side and told him not to move. Shots rang out as those in the mill fired on the crowd.

Closer to the front was Tommy Shaw’s grandfather, Shaw told the SC Daily Gazette. When the melee broke out, someone struck him with a picker stick, a tool used in the mill to send the shuttle carrying thread back and forth across the loom. He limped home, where Tommy Shaw said his grandmother found him bleeding from his head and ushered him inside.

Ruby Roberts, then 6 years old, was standing on the street with her mother outside the mill village’s former hotel, which still stands as an apartment building in the shadows of the former mills’ remaining walls. The two came to see the gathering crowd, Roberts said, and didn’t know what to expect until the shooting started and people scattered.

“Mom and I ran as fast as we could home,” about a block away, Roberts told the SC Daily Gazette.

‘Bloody Thursday’

Ultimately, six workers were shot in the back as they fled. A seventh died the next day of his injuries, and about 30 more were injured in the event dubbed “Bloody Thursday.” Fortunately, the machine gun jammed, likely preventing even greater casualties.

“Wasn’t anybody expecting no trouble, but it happened” Ruth Davis, the daughter of slain mill worker Bill Knight, told a group of documentary film makers about 60 years later.

National outrage over the violence would ultimately aid passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour work week, created the minimum wage and barred child labor.

In recordings for the film “The Uprising of ’34,” Davis said she had been sitting next to her father near a water tank outside the mill while he whittled.

“I’d follow him everywhere he went,” she said.

When he stood up, he was shot, Davis said of her father, who was a weaver and operated a grocery store in town. People carried him into a nearby home. She was with him when he died, leaving a wife and four children without a husband or father.

In the days and decades after Bloody Thursday, the strike and killings remained taboo, not talked about in Honea Path as the mill churned on, remaining the town’s largest employer until its closure in 2003.

“A lot of people didn’t speak to one another for years,” said Shaw, as many of those who did the shooting had once been neighbors and friends with those who were killed and injured.

‘The story has been erased’

The documentary, which premiered in 1995, offered some of the first glimpses of what the few remaining survivors and their descendants saw or were told about that day. On Memorial Day that year, a small granite monument was erected in a Honea Path park to commemorate those who were killed.

It was also around that time that Frank Beacham, the grandson of the mill’s superintendent who organized the gunmen, learned of his grandfather’s role. In his own personal reckoning, the New York-based journalist and author went on to write a pair of books about the tragedy, as well as penning online remembrances each year on the anniversary.

“The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow — not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown,” Beacham wrote in what would end up being his final anniversary post last year .

Beacham died in December 2023.

“The story has been erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it. An instrument of fear was so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children. It formed a lifelong social contract for the entire community’s survival,” the final post went on. “Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the town’s history.”

The mill owned the homes people lived in and the stores where they shopped. Beacham stayed mayor for years, threatening to fire workers if he found out they did not vote for him.

“People were upset but very quiet because they were told if they said anything they’d be fired,” said Roberts, who is now 96 years old.

Roberts and her mother made it home safely that day. Her father had remained home.

Like many of the children of mill workers, including Shaw and Davis, Roberts too would go into the mill for work when she turned 16. She started in the filling room making $10 a week before learning to weave, staying on until she went away to Bible college and was married.

Shaw worked in the spinning room. He told stories of Honea Path residents who had gone into the mill as young as 8 years old, standing on boxes to work.

When inspectors came, the children were hidden away in barrels and covered in cotton, he said. And mothers were expected to return to work shortly after giving birth, only stopping to nurse their infants, carried to the mill yard by the older children.

‘A black eye on the town’

“It’s a black eye on the town and leaders at the time,” Burton told the SC Daily Gazette.

Jimmy Smith, Honea Path’s fire chief, said his grandfather was at the mill that day. He dove under the stairs of the mill office for protection. But for nearly all of his life, he refused to speak of it, calling it “graveyard talk” any time Smith asked him about it.

Then, one day he told Smith, “Let’s go for a ride.” He took Smith to Eastview Cemetery, where many of those involved are buried, and he told Smith what he knew. He died two weeks later.

Burton and Smith told the SC Daily Gazette they’ve noticed more people starting to talk about the strike in the last five years or so. Librarians at the town library said Frank Beacham’s books are checked out more often.

But the event is not part of state history lessons at the local public school. A district spokeswoman said this is because it’s not part of the state-mandated standards.

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‘Never the same town’

As part of the documentary, the late Sue Hill talked about the death of her father, Claude Cannon. Hill told the filmmakers she was only 9 months old at the time. But her mother, Iona Cannon, told Hill how she had begged her husband not to go, worried someone would get killed.

Iona Cannon was home taking care of Hill, who was sick that day, when she heard the gunfire that would make her a widow with six children to raise. She wasn’t the only one. Many had four or more children who were now fatherless.

Hill said the mill forced her mother to pay the back-owed rent on the mill house where they lived. All they offered her was a job with a promise she would never be fired.

“It had to be hard on her,” Hill said in the documentary recordings. “She never remarried. She never did date again … Mom toughed it out. But she had to lead a lonely life.”

All of Cannon’s children would work in the mill at one time or another, Hill said.

“We had no other choice,” she said in the recordings. “There was no other place in Honea Path to work.”

They survived, with unknown neighbors leaving boxes of groceries on the front step some mornings. Her mother worked the overnight shift to keep the family together while one of the other family’s children had to be put into an orphanage.

“It was never the same town anymore,” Hill said in the recordings. “You were kind of afraid to talk because you didn’t know who was for the union and who was against the union, so we pretty well stayed to ourselves and never discussed it among other people … But, um, it’s a small town, and people don’t forget very easy.”

Hill moved to Greenville with her husband in 1958 and did not return to Honea Path.

A fresh start

Today, the town has a population of about 4,000 people. A dozen or so new homes have been built and quickly purchased as growth from nearby Simpsonville trickles south, said the mayor, Burton.

A ball-bearing manufacturer, Timken Company, is now the largest employer, with about 300 workers. And a medical glove plant recently came under new ownership earlier this month. Otherwise, most commute 30 miles or more for work at a transmission manufacturer, a box maker, a pet food plant.

Burton is hopeful that the state and federal money will provide a fresh start for the former mill site , with a senior living facility, walking trails and rebuilding of the old mill pond, as well as sidewalks to tie it to the main downtown.

The town hopes to pick a contractor in the new year. It also has funding to knock down abandoned homes and update century-old sewer systems, largely in the old mill village.

“People over there just want it cleaned up at this point,” Burton said, as the mill ruins have attracted crime and vagrants.

As part of the rebuild, the mayor also wants to move a marker to those who were killed from the park behind city hall to a more prominent place on the mill site, hoping it might prompt the town to own its place in history and the changes that came out of the tragedy despite the hurt it caused.

“I think they’re ready to let this history be known,” Burton said. “I’m ready for the world to know Honea Path is the site of something that really set our country’s labor laws in motion.”

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This report was originally published by SC Daily Gazette , part of the States Newsroom nonprofit news network. Supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity, SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com . Follow SC Daily Gazette on Facebook and X .