Though he does not believe selling agents have taken much stock in North Carolina mills, Mr. Thompson attributes many failures of mills to "slavery to commission houses through which they sell their product." He implies that it was the grip which the agents got on the mill by the loan of running capital that brought the ill effects. At any rate, the commission houses became more deeply interested in the mills as the plants increased in numbers, and profits were hurt by this fact, he believes.[379] This influence continues, thinks a former president of the great Graniteville Mill, who said: "The commission merchants take the very heart out of the mills. The commission houses of New York, Philadelphia and Boston get more out of the mills than the stockholders in the South."[380] While it is true that "most of the mills of the South have succeeded,"[381] there have been, besides some concerns which have stood still, neither making nor losing, a few notable failures. It is the common opinion that failures have been due almost entirely to lack of capital and bad management. Probably these faults and a good many others contributed to the ill success of the old Charleston Manufacturing Company, which began life with such high hopes at the outset of the cotton mill era. If any enterprise was an expression of the motive forces in the South in 1880, this one was. It supplied a potent example to communities all over the South contemplating cotton factories. The property of the Charleston Manufacturing Company was sold under the hammer to the Vesta Cotton Mill Company, which was not more successful with the plant. After standing a year idle, the attempt was made to operate the mill with colored help, and a reorganization of the Vesta Company was had for this purpose. A large proportion of the subscribers to the original company remained in the two reorganizations that followed.[382] In the experiment of negro operatives the old factory was again opening up a vista to the South, for, as it was vainly pointed out to the negro population of Charleston, if the trial of colored operatives in the Vesta Mill had succeeded, plants all over the section would offer employment to negroes.[383] When this third effort to use the plant for a cotton mill came to nought, the machinery was moved to Gainesville, Georgia, and though the top of the new mill was carried away by a cyclone almost as soon as completed, the company is now doing well in its new location.[384] The great, gloomy pile that thrice held so much of the confidence of the South and the best hopes of Charleston still flanks the railway tracks and rears itself above the depot, and seems all very silent in spite of the fact that it is now occupied by tobacco manufacturers.