History
Enterprise Mill was developed by James L. Coleman in 1845 and the building opened in 1848 as a flour mill. Originally, Coleman wanted to build it on his plantation, but the city council of Augusta granted a fund to build a canal to supply power, which would ultimately be the creation of the Augusta Canal. Between 1872 and 1875, the Augusta Canal was enlarged and several industrialists came to the area to build facilities around the canal. Much of the original mill, built in grey granite brick, is still standing today, though the bulk of what is recognizable today as the Enterprise Mill was built in red brick in 1877. Like all the great mills of Augusta, it is built on the Augusta Canal. In 1923 the Graniteville Company acquired the mill and eventually added the large red sign bearing the company name atop the structure. The sign still stands today and is most noticeable at night when it glows bright red.
Though for most of its existence the mill was used for various manufacturing ventures, in 1983 the mill ceased operations and closed its doors. For many years it was assumed that the structure would be demolished, but in the mid-1990s the Mill underwent a massive overhaul and was converted in to apartments and retail and office spaces. The Enterprise Mill stands as today as an example of the revitalization of downtown Augusta that began in the 1990s.
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
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“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)