#TrionMill | AM 1180 Radio

September 21, 2026

From Lamplight To Long Distance: How Electricity And Telephones Changed Chattooga County

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Telephone operators at the Summerville Telephone Company on the final day of operator-assisted telephone service in 1960. Direct dialing began the following day. (Photo courtesy of Ben Bridges/Chattooga Photo History)

For people living in Chattooga County today, flipping a light switch or making a telephone call is so ordinary that little thought is given to either one.

But a little more than a century ago, both represented technologies that were beginning to fundamentally change everyday life.

There was a time when darkness meant lighting an oil lamp, when many homes drew their water from wells, and when making a long-distance telephone call in Chattooga County meant traveling into Summerville and going inside a local store.

The arrival of electricity and the telephone didn’t happen everywhere at once. The technologies spread gradually through mills, businesses and towns before becoming commonplace in homes throughout the county.

And when it came to electricity, Trion was among the first places in Chattooga County to enter the electrical age.

September 7, 2026

by Jimmy Holbrook

When Labor Unrest Turned Deadly In Trion: The Textile Strike Of 1934

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For generations of Chattooga County families, the textile mill at Trion was more than a place to work.

It was at the center of a community.

Families depended on the mill for their livelihoods. Generations worked there, and the history of Trion itself became inseparable from the history of textile manufacturing.

But during the depths of the Great Depression, tensions between textile workers and mill management were growing throughout the South.

In September 1934, those tensions reached Trion.

And on September 5, they turned deadly.

Two men — Deputy Sheriff W. M. “Milton” Hix and strike sympathizer J. B. Blalock — were fatally shot during a confrontation outside the Trion Cotton Mill.

The events in Trion were part of a much larger labor uprising that became known as the General Textile Strike of 1934, one of the largest labor disputes in American history and the largest labor protest the South had seen.