The Springs Mill

The Springs Mill, located in Lancaster, South Carolina, was once touted as the "world's largest cotton mill under one roof" with about 5,000 employees who produced 4 million yards of cloth per week. At one time, more than 7,000 looms ran full blast in the plant's 13 spinning rooms.

The company's launch of the Springmaid brand of sheets and apparel fabrics in the late 1940s included a popular advertising campaign designed by Elliott Springs himself. The best-remembered ad featured an American Indian brave lying exhausted in a hammock made of a sheet, with an Indian woman apparently rising from the same hammock. The caption read "A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet." Some called the ads tasteless, but the campaign did focus attention on the Springmaid brand.

The two-story, century-old cotton mill, which sits on 30-plus acres, shut down in September 2003 after the company determined it was obsolete and its design too inefficient to modernize.

KMAC Services dismantled the mill and gave the city of Lancaster two worn-down stoops where mill hands used to sit in front of the plant before the start of their shifts and sharpen their knives.