![]() The village, with its school and churches, was located across the railroad tracks from the rest of the town. In typical fashion, this led to the establishment of a mill village to provide housing for workers. Local investors joined the late nineteenth-century textile boom that swept the upstate by opening the Fountain Inn Cotton Mill in 1898. By the early twentieth century the town had grown to over twenty businesses, including two hotels, a cotton gin, a bank, and a pharmacy. ![]() Within three years the Baptists were joined by the Methodists and the Presbyterians to form the usual church triumvirate of upcountry towns. In 1886 the town had three stores, a school, a Masonic lodge, and a Baptist church. Cannon laid out town lots and Fountain Inn was chartered in December of that year. ![]() Noah Cannon bought a large tract of land south of the inn following the Civil War and opened a store, but no real center existed until after the 1886 arrival of the Charleston and Western Carolina Railroad, which ran between Laurens and Greenville. A post office established in 1832 was given the name Fountain Inn. The name Fountain Inn derives from an early nineteenth-century “inn with a fountain” (a gushing spring) on the post road mid-way between the county seats of Greenville and Laurens. Fountain Inn, formerly a commercial center for southern Greenville County, by the late twentieth century had increasingly become a bedroom community for the burgeoning city of Greenville. (Greenville and Laurens Counties 2020 pop.
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