Mount Vernon Mill No. 3 is a textile denim mill and is located in Trion, Georgia. Trion, which is a very small town in Chattooga County, runs off of Mount Vernon Mill No. 3. Mount Vernon pays about eighty percent of Trion's taxes.[1] It is the largest employer in Chattooga County and has about seven teen hundred employees.
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Mount Vernon Mill No. 3 was the first cotton mill in northwest Georgia. Andrew P. Allgood, Spencer S. Marsh, and Col. W.K. Briers organized the Trion factory on October 12, 1845.[2] In 1912, Benjamin D. Riegel became the new owner of the mill until his death in 1941. In 1913 there was a gym, library, apartments, theater, bowling alley and a hospital built in Trion. During World War 2 Mount Vernon Mill No. 3 produced enough fabric to make ten thousand, five hundred fatigue suits and over seven and a half billion yards for gun patches.[3] In 1971 many different machines where installed to produce denim. Benjamin Riegel's daughter decided to sell her stock to Robert B. Pamplin in 1985 because she thought that he could take care of the company and town like her father did. On February 16, 1990 a flood came and almost ruined the machines but after ten days the mill was running again.
Today the mill has over one million square feet of manufacturing space and produces over two million pounds of cotton and denim each week. The denim is shipped to different locations in the United States and to foreign countries each week.