It is reported of the first independent venture of Francis Fries, at Salem, North Carolina, in woolen manufacture, that it "was but a small one, consisting of a set of cards for making rolls from the wool raised by neighboring farmers. This mill also contained a small dyeing and fulling plant for coloring and finishing the cloth woven by the farmers' wives and daughters."[45] A large cotton manufacturer says that he recalls only three mills operating in Spartanburg county before the war; there were Bivingsville and two very small plants, one of them on the Tyger River spinning yarns on half a dozen frames, people driving from twenty to twenty-five miles to the door of the mill to get the product, although it was sold too in the stores.[46] The Batesville factory was built with about 1000 spindles. Before the Columbia and Greenville railroad came to Greenville about 1852, the product of the mill was 8s to 12s in ten-pound "bunches" covered with blue paper. The yarn in this form passed current almost like money. The mill marketed it over the mountains in North Carolina and in Tennessee, as far as Russellville, "mountain schooners" with six-mile teams being used for the purpose. The wagons used to bring back whatever they could to constitute a return load; usually it was meat, all of that article consumed about Greenville coming, it is said, from North Carolina. Sometimes rags were brought back. In this way yarns were sometimes taken as far as a hundred and fifty miles.[47] A banker who is intimately connected with the textile industry in one of the oldest industrial communities in the South and who is a member of a family to which many writers are quick to point as founders of cotton manufacture in the South through agency of conspicuous participation in the business since the early thirties, said: "The mills built after the war were not the result of pre-bellum mills. This is trying to ascribe one cause for a condition which probably had many causes. The industrial awakening in the South was a natural reaction from the war and reconstruction. Before the war there was first the domestic industry proper. Then came such small mills about Winston-Salem as Cedar Falls and Franklinsville. These little mills were themselves, however, hardly more than domestic manufactures. When, after the war, competition came from the North and from the larger Southern mills, the little mills which had operated before and had survived the war lost their advantage, which consisted in the possession of the local field. They had been able to barter for the small quantities of local raw cotton which they used. The standard of exchange, the par, was one yard of three-yard sheeting for a pound of raw cotton, which was a third of a pound, made into cloth, for a pound in the raw state. But this was a retail and not strictly a manufacturing profit.... The old Winston mill, established in 1840, finished the wool product spun by the country housewives. This mill also