Hub City Bookshop

This old Masonic Temple building is home to Spartanburg’s independent bookstore. Here you can browse the local history titles, including Textile Town, a “people’s history,” with plenty of first-person accounts of mill life and more than 400 photos.

Among the other textile books you can find here are: Common Ties by Katherine Cann, the story of Spartanburg’s Textile Industrial Institute; Southern Workers and the Search for Community by G.C. Waldrep, the story of local mill strikes of the 1930s-1950s; and Mill and Town in South Carolina by Spartanburg native David Carlton, the story of conflicts between mill villagers and the emerging professional classes.

The Masonic Temple, built in 1928, is still in use by members of the Grand Lodge of Ancient Freemasons of South Carolina. The founders of this lodge included many of the men who built the mills throughout Spartanburg County.