'M" is for Milliken & Company

'M" is for Milliken & Company. In 1865 Seth Milliken and his business partner William Deering became successful jobbers of woolen textiles in Portland, Maine. Deering left the partnership in 1869, but the company’s name remained Deering Milliken until 1976 when it became Milliken & Company. By 1920, the company had an interest in forty-two South Carolina textile mills and was the selling agent for southern textile mills. Roger Milliken, the grandson of the founder moved to Spartanburg in 1954. Through the company’s Spartanburg-based Milliken Research Corporation, Milliken & Company has become internationally known as a technologically innovative company. By the twenty-first century Milliken & Company, with operations in six states and twelve foreign countries had become the biggest textile firm in the United State and one of the largest privately owned companies in the world.