Nowadays, if you were to drive down Salem Church Road, chances are you would have no idea that you were driving past a once-thriving community. However, up until the first decade of the 20th Century, Alice was an active community with a cotton mill, a grist mill, sorghum syrup mill, a blacksmith shop, one-room school, and houses.
Alice was named after Tom Atherton's wife. Tom and his brothers, William and James moved to from Manchester, England to New Jersey, and then to Roswell, Georgia in 1840. They established the Roswell Cotton Mills, and in 1847, moved to Pickens County. In the 1860s he and his brothers built the Talking Rock Cotton Factory. The Athertons opened a yarn factory the Shoal Creek Mill, in Waleska in Cherokee County, and finally in 1882 opened Harmony Mills in Alice.
The grist mill in Alice was on the eastern side of Town Creek, just north of the waterfall. Nearby, within a few hundred yards was an operational gold mine. The brothers, masters of engineering that they were, built a 500-foot-long wooden race to bring water to the mill site off the top of the nearby embankment. The water came from near where Highway 515 where a small dam helped to channel the water.
Sadly, Harmony Mills was damaged by a flood and then destroyed by fire in 1897. By 1909, the post office was closed as most of the workers at the site had moved on.
Well researched and one of the ONLY sources for the history of the community. I am a member of the current Salem Church. I have seen several photos of classes of the Salem School (like the one below that belongs to the Hyde family), but this is the only place I have seen a photo of the whole outside of the old Salem School building. My only complaint is that there's not more to read! Thank you for your work.