Says Wikipedia:

Fuller Earle Callaway Sr. (1870–1928) was an American textile manufacturer who was regarded as one of the leading industrial magnates of the Southern United States during the first decades of the 20th Century.

A quote:

Callaway's success as a dry goods merchant provided him with capital of his own. In 1895 he invested in LaGrange's first modern textile manufacturing facility, Dixie Mills.

Callaway later recalled:

It was like the measles in the South in those days. Every town wanted to build a cotton mill.... We did not have much of anything, but we got up a cotton mill; and auctioned off the directorships. Anybody that would take $5,000 worth of stock, we would make a director; and if a widow with a son had $2,000, we would make the son a bookkeeper.... A good many of the laborers took stock in it. We had a great many poor white people with the highest type of morality and religion. They could not produce cotton at five cents a pound against the negro; and these men began to move to town as cotton mill operatives.