The Piedmont Manufacturing baseball team, 1889. Textile mill villages provided opportunities for recreation as well as for work, and most mill communities had their own baseball teams. Mills recruited good players for their teams much as colleges and universities do today. Players were expected to work in the mill--but mill hands remember that by the 1920s, a good player who could bring the mill a victory in the textile mill baseball league would be guaranteed a job that would not interfere with playing ball.
Courtesy of the Greenville County Historical Society.
