Brandon Mill was the kind of place that grew faster than its founders had planned for. Designed by Lockwood, Greene and Company of Providence, Rhode Island, the same firm that designed mills all over New England and the South, the building was planned in 1899 and completed in January 1901. The investors named it Brandon, supposedly for a hamlet near Belfast that produced textiles. In its first five years the mill went from 16,000 spindles to 86,000, from 150 employees to 420, from 66 houses in the mill village to 420. The workforce was recruited from Appalachia and other rural corners of the southeastern United States, and most had never lived in a town before. The mill provided everything: a school, a church, a nursery, a community house with showers and a nurse's station. By 1918 even a library was part of the package.

Mill owners across the southern textile belt figured out early in the twentieth century that organized leisure was good for productivity. A mill baseball team gave operatives, the term mill owners used for their workforce, something to do on Saturday afternoons besides drink. It built loyalty. It made workers identify with the company. The owners competed for the best players, sometimes hiring them as nominal mill hands but really paying them to swing a bat. Shoeless Joe was the most famous to come out of the Brandon Mill team. He was not the only one. The Greenville Cotton Mill League, in which Brandon competed, produced players who went on to the major leagues throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The grandstands and the diamond are gone, but on Saturdays in the spring you can still imagine the games.

Even before the Great Depression hit, the southern textile industry was already in trouble. Mills tried to squeeze more work out of fewer hands through what management called the stretch-out, a requirement that each worker tend more machines. In March 1929, 1,200 workers walked off the job at Brandon Mill. They settled in May. The economy kept getting worse. To keep the mill running through the worst of the Depression, August W. Smith, the second president of Brandon, cut hours and pay instead of cutting jobs. That decision built a strange kind of loyalty: when the United Textile Workers of America came to Brandon during the general textile strike of 1934, workers reportedly met them at the gates with picker sticks and rifles and told them to keep going. The mill ran straight through the strike. The same pattern, paternalistic management buying labor peace, played out across the southern textile belt for another generation.

World War II brought a brief boom. Brandon Mill produced duck cloth, medical gauze, and uniform twill for the government. In December 1946 Abney Mills bought Brandon's assets and began selling off the mill village houses to their occupants, which is one of the reasons the neighborhood survived intact long after the mill itself had faded. The 1950s and 60s were profitable for a while. Then offshoring began. By 1969 Brandon was cutting its workforce. In 1977 the mill closed. The main building became a warehouse, then in 2001 a distribution center for Dunlop Sport golf equipment. In 2014 developer Pace Burt bought the property and converted the main building into loft apartments, applying for and receiving National Register of Historic Places status that same year. In 2015 he donated one building in the complex to the Greenville Center for Creative Arts. The lofts opened in 2016. Today, residents look out arched factory windows where spindles once turned, and a few of them know, when they look out toward the patch of grass where the baseball diamond used to be, what happened on that field a century earlier.