In the first ten years of its operation, the Laurens Mills were very profitable. Borrowing money to bring its spindleage up to thirty thousand, it expanded to 43,000 spindles on earnings. At the end of the ten-year period there was the plant worth about $800,000; the company owed no money, and the only liability against it was $350,000 of common stock. There was a cash surplus, probably small. For six years it had been paying 12 per cent. annual dividends. The mill was incorporated in 1895.[414] It is not certain that dividend payments were made by this company while it was carrying its debt, but the Anderson Mill, Anderson, South Carolina, paid interest on its indebtedness and 8 per cent. dividends as well.[415] Reference has been made to Mr. Thompson's statement that large profits have frequently enabled mill companies to discharge all obligations before the last subscription-payment was due. He cites the case of an enterprise of $100,000 capitalization, with shares payable in weekly instalments of 50 cents, which after 70 weeks, with only $35 on the share paid up, declared a dividend of 4 per cent. on the capitalization. This plant, which he says is by no means universal, has, besides building large additions from profits always paid 4 or 5 per cent. in dividends each half-year. This is probably the Cabarrus, one of the Cannon mills, at Concord.[416] From Mr. August Kohn was had a valuable estimate of the whole matter of Southern cotton manufactories as investments, assuming, that is, that the mills of his State have been typical in this respect of those of the rest of the section. He said: "If the people of South Carolina had put their money into farm loans at 7 per cent.--the same people and the same money--they would have been better off personally than they are after having invested in cotton mills. There are no failures in real estate mortgages at 7 per cent., but in cotton mill investments, principal and interest has frequently been lost."[417] If this opinion is to be believed, had Mr. Goldsmith taken all the factories of the State, and not "the fifty more important cotton mills of South Carolina," he would have found an annual average dividend for 1905, 1906 and 1907, not of 7.56 per cent., but something below 7 per cent.[418]