In 1902, state lawmakers passed legislation encouraging private investment in cotton mills. This one was constructed that year and was named for John Marshall Stone, the second president of what was then Mississippi A&M College. In 1911, James W. Sanders purchased the facility and made it part of his statewide mill conglomerate. The mill operated until 1962. Three years later, Mississippi State University purchased the structure and remodeled portions of the interior as headquarters for its physical plant department. In 2015, the rehabilitated building opened as a conference center and offices. The two- and three-story brick and heavy-timber mill with abundant windows began as a thirty-bay-wide unit with a four-story front tower containing a stair and water tank. A ten-bay, eastern extension was made c. 1920, producing an L-shaped plan. Five more bays were added to the west by c. 1940. A powerhouse with steam engines once stood to the rear, and Sanders’s mill village spread out to the north until the 1960s.