The Eagle Manufacturing Company was founded in Columbus, Georgia, by William H. Young in 1851. It operated the Eagle Mills, a textile mill along the Chattahoochee River. During the Civil War, the Eagle Mills produced cloth for Confederate uniforms, as well as other textiles for the Confederate government. Union soldiers burned the mill in 1865 at the very end of the war. Shortly after the war ended, Young rebuilt and dramatically expanded his textile enterprise, now called the Eagle and Phenix Mills. In its heyday in the 1880s, the Eagle and Phenix Mills was the largest textile manufacturing firm in the South, and employed a substantial majority of Columbus’s workforce. The company continued manufacturing textiles until the mills closed in 2002.