Historic Greenville

HISTORIC
GREENVILLE
The Story of Greenville & Greenville County
By Judith T. Bainbridge
A publication of the
Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce

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HISTORIC
GREENVILLE
The Story of Greenville & Greenville County
By Judith T. Bainbridge
Commissioned by the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce
Historical Publishing Network
A division of Lammert Incorporated
San Antonio, Texas

✧
General Nathanael Greene, who
successfully conducted a drawn-out
campaign against the British in the
Carolinas, is remembered in the county’s
name and this Main Street statue.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
First Edition
Copyright © 2008 Historical Publishing Network
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to
Historical Publishing Network, 11555 Galm Road, Suite 100, San Antonio, Texas, 78254. Phone (800) 749-0464.
The Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce is not responsible for historical accuracy.
ISBN: 9781893619852
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2008923998
Historic Greenville: The Story of Greenville & Greenville County
author: Judith Bainbridge
cover artist: Betty Brown
contributing writer for “Sharing the Heritage”: Garnette Bane
Historical Publishing Network
president: Ron Lammert
project manager: Joe Bowman
administration: Donna M. Mata, Melissa Quinn, Evelyn Hart
book sales: Dee Steidle
production: Colin Hart, Craig Mitchell, Charles A. Newton, III
Roy Arellano
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
2

CONTENTS
4 CHAPTER I on the frontier
10 CHAPTER II becoming Greenville
16 CHAPTER III founding father
24 CHAPTER IV the 1850s: decade of destruction
32 CHAPTER V war and reconstruction
38 CHAPTER VI becoming the “New South”
48 CHAPTER VII civic progress
58 CHAPTER VIII boom and bust
68 CHAPTER IX war and postwar
78 CHAPTER X revitalization and new directions
88 SHARING THE HERITAGE
163 INDEX
167 SPONSORS
168 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
168 ABOUT THE COVER
✧
Camp Wetherill stretched over hundreds of
acres from the site of modern day Dunbar
Street to the Dunean Mill village. Soldiers
lived in tents, and officers boarded at the
Mansion House.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CONTENTS
3

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
4

CHAPTER I
O N THE F RONTIER
Buffalo, elk, and bison once roamed the southern Appalachians. “Tygers” (panthers), bears, and
wildcats prowled its swamps and wooded thickets. Bordered on the north by the ancient Blue
Ridge Mountains, formed perhaps 350 million years ago, and watered by the Saluda, Reedy, and
Enoree Rivers, and hundreds of creeks, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the 795 square
miles of modern Greenville County were a part of the vast Carolina frontier.
White men had not yet explored its deep forests and grassy prairies. Nor had they attempted to
navigate its narrow streams, bordered by great stands of cane (tall reeds, thus the Reedy River), that
emptied eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. This was the domain of the Cherokees. These oliveskinned
Native Americans, brave, graceful, and dignified, hunted here but lived in permanent
villages—Keowee and Estatoe—further west. They camped along the falls of the Reedy River and
near Cedar Mountain in the summer, though, leaving behind thousands of white flint arrow heads.
Although the Cherokee, an Iroquois people, had lived here for centuries—it had been their
home for at least 800 years, say anthropologists—in more recent times their dominion had been
challenged by the Catawbas, a Siouan tribe, who had moved into the area around modern day Rock
Hill in the 1650s. Soon afterwards, following a battle at Nations Ford near Charlotte, the two
tribes agreed that the region between the Saluda and the Enoree would be shared hunting ground.
These foothills were fine for hunting. The climate was mild and game abundant. Despite the
majestic chestnut, hickory, and sycamore trees, deer and bears could be seen from a great distance
because little undergrowth impeded the view. Following animal tracks, the Cherokees carved out
paths along high dry ridges that led to salt licks and springs where game abounded. (Lickville and
Chick Springs remember the sites.) Those Indian trails would become pioneers’ “waggon roads,”
later the routes of trains, and, often, modern highways.
In the 1700s their lives began to change. White men from the coast, trading for furs and skins,
brought whisky, guns, and smallpox. Whole Indian villages were decimated by disease. By 1764,
according to one British visitor to Keowee, there were only 2,750 warriors and perhaps 13,500
Cherokees in the upcountry. Elk, buffalo, and bison disappeared at about the same time, driven
away by the encroachment of white settlers to the south and east, while deer and bear moved
deeper into the mountains.
The British government, though, needed the tribe as allies against the threatening French and
Spanish. In 1735 five Cherokee chiefs had visited London and given their allegiance to the crown.
That friendship was strategically important during England’s interminable Seven Year’s War with
France, fought on this continent as the French and Indian War. In 1763, when the war ended, King
George III signed a proclamation limiting white settlement to east of the crest of the Appalachians.
The colony’s governors attempted to enforce boundary treaties to forbid white settlement and
maintain peaceful relations with the Indians. Settlers, however, looked covetously at the fertile land
on the frontier and began plantations near (and sometimes beyond) the legal limits.
Those limits were contentious. Surveys (some done by Patrick Calhoun of Long Creek, the
father of John C. Calhoun) and meetings attempted to establish the boundaries of Indian Territory
as well as the border between North and South Carolina. In 1766 a gathering of Cherokee leaders
and government representatives at DeWitt’s Corners near Due West established the boundaries of
the Indian Territory (and the southern boundary of the future county), with the Reedy River
becoming the line between the two states. Until the northern border between the two Carolinas
was surveyed in 1772, North Carolina claimed most of modern day Greenville County.
By that time, though, our first semi-legal white settler, Richard Pearis, had settled by the falls of
the Reedy River. Born in Ireland in 1725 to a family who later emigrated to the Shenandoah Valley
✧
Deep forest, rivers, and the Blue Ridge
Mountains still define the northern part of
the land that settlers in the eighteenth
century made their own.
PHOTOGRAPH BY C. THOMAS WYCHE.
CHAPTER I
5

✧
Above: The “reeds” that gave the Reedy
River its name are really canes
(Arundinaria gigantean), the only
member of the bamboo family native
to South Carolina.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE
of Virginia, Pearis had become an experienced
Indian agent by 1754, when he began
traveling into South Carolina. Over the years
he traded with and gained the trust of the
Cherokees. While his wife remained at home
in Virginia, he became intimate with the
daughter of a local Cherokee chief, who
bore him a son whom he named George. (The
old euphemistic term for the relationship is
“side wife.”)
Because of that relationship and his
friendship with the Cherokees, on July 29,
1769, “fourteen chiefs and Seventy other
Indians” ceded to Pearis twelve square miles
of land between the Reedy and the Saluda
Rivers. Sometime in 1770 he arrived with his
wife, three children, and three wagons loaded
with his household goods and with guns
to trade with the Indians for more
land. Authorities in Charleston were not
pleased; Pearis (or Paris or Parris, depending
on the speller) was not a model citizen.
In fact, Alexander Watts, a Cherokee
interpreter, warned the royal governor about
Pearis, saying “I take him to be a very
dangerous Fellow.”
Friends of that “dangerous fellow” from
Virginia joined him. They included Jacob
Hite, who had collaborated with him in the
Indian trade, and Baylis Earle, who purchased
500 acres of his land. Tradition, not deeds,
says that other families—the Austins at Gilder
Creek, the Dills in the north, for example—
moved into the Indian Territory at about the
same time. When colonial authorities refused
Right: Rainbow Falls near modern day
Camp Greenville was one of many cascades
that made the future county's northern land
among the most beautiful in the South.
PHOTOGRAPH BY C. THOMAS WYCHE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
6

to recognize Pearis’s original deed and his
sales of tracts within it, he and his son George
solved the problem neatly. They convinced
Cherokee chiefs to convey (the same) twelve
square miles plus 57,000 additional acres to
George, as the grandson of a chief. The young
man swore allegiance to King George and,
after reserving 50,000 acres for himself,
promptly (and now lawfully) conveyed the
remainder to his father.
By 1773, then, Pearis could legally claim
his “Great Plains Plantation.” His twelve slaves
cleared a hundred acres near the falls of the
Reedy River and planted fields of grain and
orchards. Pearis built a grist mill at the shoals
(tradition says at the future location of the
Gower and Cox Carriage Factory on the north
side of the river), a trading post at the shallow
ford at Main Street, and a substantial home on
the hill to the east at the modern intersection
of East Court and Spring Streets. The location
was convenient. “Pearis’s waggon road,” the
old Indian path to Keowee, passed nearby.
The falls of the Reedy powered the grist mill.
A bubbling spring was near their home.
But while Pearis was prospering from his
trade with the Cherokees and his dubious
land dealings, colonial politics were becoming
contentious. British officials, feeling intense
financial pressure because of the war with the
French, attempted to pass some of its costs
along to the colonies, which, members of
Parliament argued, had derived benefit from
the war and thus should be taxed to help pay
its costs. Colonists immediately opposed the
new taxes on imported goods like stamps and
tea, arguing “No taxation without
representation.” The British, who for many
years had been more concerned about
continental affairs than about their American
colonies and had, as a result, pursued a policy
of benign neglect, began to flex their muscles.
At the same time, settlers on the South
Carolina up-country frontier were contending
for power and recognition, not with a
parliament three thousand miles away, but
with the General Assembly in Charles Town.
The Low Country merchants and rich
plantation owners who controlled it denied
both representation and courts to the fastgrowing
back country. By the middle of the
1770s, uneasy allegiances had formed along
the frontier, with Loyalists to the crown on
one side and patriots on the other. In the
Ninety Six District, just south of Greenville,
Loyalists (Tories) predominated.
And then there were the Cherokees, whose
boundaries were secured, supposedly, by the
crown, but who faced constant pressures from
whites. Both sides wooed their support in the
looming struggle. As an experienced Indian
trader, Pearis was the natural go-between.
Initially allied with the patriots, when he was
denied the position of Indian Commissioner by
colonists, he switched his allegiance to the
Loyalists and brought the Cherokees with him.
In 1775 and 1776, he incited Cherokee (and
Loyalist) raids on local patriots, with his trading
post on the Reedy River as the staging point.
While the Declaration of Independence
was not signed until July 2, 1776, the
American Revolution began in Massachusetts
in the spring of 1775, and by mid-summer of
that year, the South Carolina back country
was caught up in the struggle, as brothers,
✧
While early settlers would not have used
barbed wire, a nineteenth century invention,
to enclose their land, this view of Table Rock
suggests the coming of the white man into
Indian Territory.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER I
7

✧
A highway marker about seven miles south
of Simpsonville commemorates the only
Revolutionary War battle fought in the
county. The Battle of the Great Cane Brake
was a small but convincing patriot victory.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
8
families, and neighbors fought each other.
Patriots, determined to break the Loyalist
domination in Ninety Six, launched a
campaign in December. They captured Pearis
and several other officers, and, on December
22, 1775, during a raging snow storm, a
patriot troop under Colonel William
Thompson was ordered to attack Tories who
had fled into Indian Territory with guns and
ammunition for the Cherokees.
Marching through the night, they found
the enemy camped at a “Brake of Canes” on
the Reedy River seven miles southwest of
Simpsonville. Loyalists under Patrick
Cunningham were still asleep when
Thompson’s patriot force attacked at dawn.
The Tories, totally surprised, fled for their
lives; Cunningham, without his breeches,
jumped on his horse, shouted that every man
should fend for himself, and dashed away.
The Battle of the Great Cane Brake was a
patriot victory, since only one man was
wounded, and five or six Loyalists were killed
and 130 captured. As the culmination of the
“Snow Campaign” (fifteen inches fell in three
days), it broke Loyalist control in the Ninety
Six District and diverted wagonloads of arms
from the Indians.
The Cherokees, encouraged by Pearis and
other Loyalists, launched a series of attacks on
patriot families along the frontier in the
summer of 1776. They massacred five
members of the Hampton family and Jacob
Hite and his family and forced others to flee to
forts for protection. As a result, patriots under
John Thomas, after a skirmish on the east side
of Paris Mountain, were ordered to burn
Indian villages to the ground and, because it
was the meeting place for the attackers, to
destroy Pearis’s plantation, grist mill, and
trading post. They captured his slaves,
confiscated the goods at his trading post, and
later sold them at auction. The patriot
government of the state claimed his 10,000
acres. Their scorched earth policy was
successful; by August 1776, the Cherokees
had agreed to negotiate with South Carolina’s
patriot-controlled government.
In May 1777 eight Cherokee chiefs met
with South Carolina and Georgia officials at
DeWitt’s Corners. They acknowledged defeat,
agreed to retreat further into the mountains,
and ceded the lands previously reserved for
their use to the government of South Carolina.
The hundreds of square miles between the
Enoree and the Saluda would be open to
settlement if the patriot cause was successful.
That outcome seemed unlikely. In the
North, British troops and Hessian mercenaries
generally won battles but never managed a
total victory. Stalemated in New York and New
England, in 1779 they decided to attack the
South. After capturing General Benjamin
Lincoln’s patriot force and occupying
Charlestown in May 1780, British regulars and
Loyalist militia alike sought military control by
establishing fortified garrisons throughout the
colony, including one at Ninety Six. Ragtag
patriot forces, hungry and unpaid, fought back
from swamps and ambushes while Loyalists
conducted a reign of terror on the frontier to
destroy patriot resistance.
During 1780 and 1781 upcountry settlers
were at the mercy of Loyalists and
“plundering renegades,” often deserters from
either side, who had little regard for human
life. Stories of villains and heroes from those

difficult years were repeated around
Greenville hearths for generations.
They told of “Bloody Bill” Bates, who
terrorized the northern frontier, torturing and
killing former neighbors, and who, years later,
was lynched by a survivor of his atrocities and
buried on the site of Greenville’s modern day
City Hall. They shuddered at the tales of
“Bloody Bill” Cunningham, who pillaged and
looted to the south, spreading a reign of terror
behind him . They remembered the deeds of
Jane Thomas, whose husband, the commander
of the “Spartan Regiment,” was imprisoned at
the fort at Ninety Six. She fled through the
night to warn her son, who had taken over his
father’s command, of a British attack. And of
Dicey Langston, a sixteen-year old who lived
near Laurens, who risked her life in another
night flight to warn her brother and his patriot
troop of an attack by Cunningham’s “Bloody
Scouts.” Because Dicey Langston Springfield
(she later married a young patriot) lived near
Traveler’s Rest after the Revolution, she
became a Greenville heroine.
After a series of defeats culminating in the
patriot loss of Camden, Commander-in-Chief
George Washington sent General Nathanael
Greene to South Carolina. Greene, a Rhode
Island Quaker and a seasoned tactician, was
able to draw British regulars west from their
coastal supply lines. Thanks to patriot
victories led by Daniel Morgan at Kings
Mountain near Charlotte in October 1780 and
at Cowpens in Spartanburg County in January
1781, the patriot cause had a glimmer of
hope. Greene kept retreating through North
Carolina, followed by Cornwallis and his
army, until they finally met the British at
Guilford Courthouse in August 1781.
Cornwallis won—barely—but it was a victory
he couldn’t afford. He returned with a
decimated army to the coast and then
marched to Yorktown in Virginia.
After the American victory there in
October, hostilities were over, but the British
continued to occupy Charleston until
December 14, 1782, when they finally left the
city. Richard Pearis went with them. After his
capture and brief imprisonment, he had
joined Loyalist forces in South Carolina and
then commanded a Tory troop in Florida.
With his home, trading post, and mill
destroyed, he demanded restitution from the
state government, which allowed him £700
sterling for his losses. With other Loyalists, he
settled in the Bahamas after the war, sought
more restitution for his losses, this time from
the British government, and lived to a
prosperous old age on the island of Aruba. His
only legacy to Greenville was his name—
misspelled—on Paris Mountain.
✧
Above: This pleasant and prosperous
eighteenth century “gentleman” was known
in his own time as “Bloody Bill”
Cunningham, a Tory leader who killed and
plundered up-country patriots.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART.
Below: Dicey Langston was a spirited young
woman who alerted her brother to a raid by
a renegade group of Tories and who became
a Greenville heroine. The DAR erected and
cares for this monument in Travelers Rest
on the site of her former home.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER I
9

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
10

CHAPTER II
B ECOMING
G REENVILLE
In 1784, South Carolina was free of British occupation but almost bankrupt. More battles
had been fought in the former colony than any other, and it had endured the longest occupation.
The new state, however, had one obvious asset—land—that could be used to settle the claims
of those who had fought for its freedom or be sold to cover war debts and later provide
tax revenues for the state. The General Assembly agreed to provide 200 acres at no cost to former
militiamen and to make grants of 640 acres, at a cost of £10 for each 100 acres, to other
purchasers. When they officially opened the land office for the former Indian Territory, including
Richard Pearis’s confiscated land, dozens of potential settlers and adventurous speculators were
waiting impatiently, land surveys in hand, to claim property.
Among the first purchasers on May 4, 1784, was Thomas Brandon, a speculator living in Union,
who bought 400 acres on the Reedy River where the future city of Greenville would be located.
The best land, generally along river banks, went fast and early—on that first day 97,036 acres were
spoken for. Within six months, the first plat book was full, recording more than a thousand sales
to future settlers and current speculators. Slightly over six thousand acres went to Revolutionary
War veterans.
But the land they claimed was not yet Greenville. In 1785 the old Ninety Six Judicial
District was separated into six new counties—Abbeville, Edgefield, Laurens, Newberry,
Spartanburg, and Union. The Indian Territory between the Saluda and the Enoree
was divided, with the land northeast of “Pearis’s waggon road” going to “Spartanburgh
county,” while the land southwest of it was annexed to Laurens County. The division was made
to provide courts to the frontier. Most settlers on the former Cherokee hunting grounds
complained, however, that those courts were inconveniently distant. As a result, on March 22,
1786, the General Assembly agreed “That a county shall be established in the new ceded lands, by
the name of Greeneville.” Its boundaries would be the Saluda River to the west, the old Indian
boundary to the south, the Spartanburg County line to the east, and the North Carolina border to
the north.
For whom (or what) was the new county named? Three theories have been proposed. Robert
Mills in 1826 speculated that the name derived from the county’s “remarkably verdant
appearance.” A. S. Smiley, longtime head of the South Carolina Department of Archives and
History, proposed one Isaac Green, who had a mill on the Reedy, as the namesake. James
Richardson in his 1930 History of Greenville County agreed with Mills, and effectively demolished
the argument for Isaac Green, pointing out that he had only lived in the area for six months when
the county was named. The third choice was articulated by statesman John C. Calhoun who,
speaking in Greenville in October 1826, raised his glass in a toast to “the village of Greenville,
picturesque and lovely in its situation, may it so prosper as to be worthy of the memory of him
whose illustrious name it wears.”
Calhoun was referring to Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, and he was surely correct.
The county’s name, like Greene’s, was originally spelled with a middle “e,” a usage that continued
for at least a decade. Greene was indeed illustrious; he was, in fact, so great a hero that after the
war he had been granted large plantations in both Georgia and South Carolina. He was particularly
esteemed along the western frontier. And the Assembly was naming counties for patriots; between
1784 and 1801, for example, Henry Laurens, Thomas Sumter, Peter Horry, Andrew Pickens, and
Francis Marion were all honored.
This new Greeneville County was frontier land, and like the Old West, it was a wild place that
needed law and order. When the pre-revolutionary judicial districts had been divided into counties
✧
Although this map, drawn according to “the
best authorities,” was published in 1796,
nine years after “Greeneville” County was
chartered, it shows only Cherokee
settlements (Keowee, Estatoe) in the former
Indian Territory.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER II
11

✧
Above: Alexander McBeth’s general store on
the Whitehorse Road was one of the few
places in the county where settlers could buy
supplies. His ledger book from the early
1790s records purchases ranging from
cigars (two “choorts”) to hinges, dishes, salt,
and mustard.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: The congregation at Fairview
Presbyterian Church near Fountain Inn was
the first established in the county. Their
current building dates from 1857.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
12
in 1785, each one was given the right to have
nine justices of the peace who heard civil
cases, licensed taverns, supervised roads, and
appointed a clerk of court to administer and
record laws and transactions. Each county
was also authorized to build a courthouse,
jail, pillory, whipping post, and stocks.
Greenville’s first judges were all large
landowners appointed by the General
Assembly. A. V. Huff says in his county history
that in all probability they first met in May
1786 in the parlor of John Ford’s plantation at
Golden Grove Creek. Ford, who was
appointed the senior justice, was a prominent
Baptist layman and Revolutionary War
veteran. Although records are incomplete,
they may well have constructed a makeshift
courtroom on his property. Two years later,
the justices elected Robert Maxwell as the first
sheriff, tax collector, and assessor.
Until 1791 Greenville County’s courts and
sheriff were a part of the Ninety Six Judicial
District; then, for nine years, Greenville and
Pendleton were combined into the
Washington District. In 1800, however, the
General Assembly reorganized the state,
abolishing counties and creating judicial
districts in their place. Greeneville County
became Greenville District. In 1868 a new
state constitution resurrected the old county
term that has been used ever since.
The county grew fast; the first U. S. census
in 1790 counted over six thousand people. A
few, like James Harrison, Robert Maxwell,
and Elias Earle, were wealthy slave owners
who farmed thousands of acres, and who,
for the time, lived luxuriously. Harrison,
the largest slave holder (with 21 slaves) in
the county in 1790, built a large brick sixroom
home he called “Brandon” near the site
of the Battle of the Great Canebrake. He also
owned a nearby general store and trading post
from which he shipped tobacco and deerskins
to Augusta. At Maxwell’s 2,000-acre
plantation near Golden Grove, his family
dined at a mahogany table that boasted 25
spoons and 26 plates, a teapot, and “a case of
bottles.” Elias Earle, who constructed the
Buncombe Road, built his Greenville County
“seat” in 1794 near the Rutherford Road. “The
Poplars” was a two-story, four-room, woodframe
house with massive chimneys on
either end.
Most new settlers weren’t as fortunate.
They lived in one-room log cabins, chinked
with red clay for mortar. They cooked over a
single fireplace. Sometimes a loft, reached by
a rickety ladder, provided space for corn
shuck-mattresses. These subsistence farmers
scratched out a living on the still fertile soil
but produced few cash crops, although many
planted orchards and had stills for home-

ewed corn liquor and fruit cordials. Only
16 percent of Greenville landowners owned
the 606 slaves residing in the county in 1790.
Although they couldn’t afford the luxury of
brandy or rum that could be purchased at
Harrison’s Store or at Alexander McBeth &
Company on the Whitehorse Road, they
might, however, have been able to afford the
stores’ most frequent purchase, a half-pint of
whiskey. McBeth’s flourishing business, which
also included a blacksmith shop and a still,
purveyed other necessities—paper, shoes,
plates—as well as goods that reflected a more
elaborate way of life like mirrors, ribbons, and
punch bowls.
These stores and the early churches were
the first gathering places in the far-flung
county. The first churches were near the
Laurens County line where Methodists built a
“pole chapel” for outdoor worship about
1786, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians
established a church at Fairview in 1787.
Baptists began Reedy Fork Church before
1789; it later became Fork Shoals Church. At
about the same time, Baptists in the northern
part of the county established Head of Enoree,
later Reedy River Church. When Methodist
Bishop Francis Asbury visited the District in
1804, though, he noted in his journal that
“There is more gold than grace in Greenville.”
Ordinarily the courthouse became the
county center, but John Ford’s plantation
courtroom was distant from most settlers. In
the early 1790s, they unsuccessfully
petitioned the General Assembly to change
the courthouse site to the middle of the
county. While more than three hundred
people signed one petition, two large
landowners, Lemuel Alston and Elias Earle,
pushed especially hard for the change. Alston
had purchased Thomas Brandon’s acreage
around the falls of the Reedy while he was in
the process of assembling more than 11,000
acres of Greenville land, and Earle, who lived
nearby, owned about 7,000 acres of upstate
land. Both wanted their property to be chosen
for the site of the new courthouse.
✧
Above: Lemuel Alston’s Prospect Hill,
overlooking his more than eleven thousand
acres of land around the Reedy River, was
one of the most impressive homes in the
up-country at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: The courthouse in the center of
“The street from the river to the head of
the avenue” created Greenville’s
“Courthouse Square,” whose outlines on the
plat of Pleasantburg are still defined at
all four corners.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER II
13

✧
In 1813, South Carolina Governor Arthur
Middleton built a summer home,
“Whitehall,” on land purchased from Elias
Earle. Although the second floor balcony
was added about sixty years later, it was
clearly an impressive house.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
14
Alston won. Late in 1794 the General
Assembly agreed that the courthouse would
be located on his land at the crest of the hill
north of the Reedy River in the middle of
Pearis’s wagon road. By mid-1795, a one-story
log courthouse had been built and a new
jail—a two-story one—was located next to
Pearis’s old spring. When a U.S. post office
was established there in April, “Greenville
Courthouse” was born.
The site controversy may have fueled a
long-term political battle between Earle and
Alston. Earle was a Democrat-Republican;
Alston a Federalist who had voted with the
rest of the Greenville delegation in favor of the
passage of the U. S. Constitution in 1788.
They jockeyed for political power and
election to the U. S. House of Representatives
for nearly twenty years. According to James
Richardson, Earle was “a great and most
successful electioneer . . . who treated
bountifully.” So bountifully, in fact, that his
cousin, whom he defeated in an election for
state senator, accused him of “the too free use
of liquor” to sway voters. Alston, no saint
either, was said (by Earle’s supporters) to have
purchased a large family Bible for prominent
display to impress voters.
He was also, voters complained, too rich.
His elegant mansion, “Prospect Hill,” located
on the highest point above the falls of the
Reedy River, had grounds that stretched from
the Reedy River to Buncombe Road. The twostory
house was built of clapboard over logs
with simple columns rising to a decorated
pediment. A flight of stone steps led to a
veranda that extended across the front of the
home. The first floor included a square
reception hall, a dining room, and a drawing
(or “keeping”) room with windows offering
mountain views. There he entertained,
sometimes as paying guests, every visitor of
consequence to the new county. Among them
was his cousin, future Governor Joseph
Alston, whose wife, Theodosia, was the
daughter of Aaron Burr. They later built a
summer home on more than a hundred acres
of land not far from the Whitehorse Road.
Lemuel Alston immediately tried to make
money out of the new location of the
courthouse, platting Greenville’s first subdivision,
“Pleasantburg,” in 1797. He laid it out
east of the shallow ford over the Reedy River
with three streets (later Broad, Court, and
Washington) crossing “the street from the river
to the head of the avenue.” The “avenue,” lined
with sycamore trees, led to his home. (For more
than eighty years it was called “Avenue Street”;
in 1882 the name was changed to “McBee”
Avenue.) The plat for Pleasantburg included
fifty-two lots, twenty facing on the wide main
street, with a square around the courthouse.
His development did not flourish. Alston
sold the first two lots in “Greenville C.H.
[courthouse] Village of Pleasantburg” to
Isaac Wickliffe on April 22, 1797, for
$100. More than a year passed before the
next sale, six lots (the block where City Hall
now stands) to John McBeth for $600. Other
initial purchasers of Pleasantburg land
included Francis Wickliffe, Thomas
Alexander, John Wood, John Blackman, Elias
Earle, John Taylor, and John Archer. And the
name didn’t catch on; only twenty-six of the
sales, the last one in 1807, used the name
“Pleasantburg.” Greenville Courthouse had
already been named.

Greenville District’s population grew
slowly between 1800 and 1810, increasing
from 11,504 to only 13,133 residents,
including almost a thousand slaves, because it
remained overwhelmingly rural and
agricultural. But it had potential. Its main
visitors were drovers from Tennessee and
Kentucky herding cattle, wild turkeys, swine,
and horses down the Buncombe Road,
through the village, fording the Reedy River at
its shallowest point at Main Street, and then
traveling to Augusta or occasionally to
Charleston. The animals were a market for
corn, and their drovers needed a place to
sleep. In addition, the mild summer climate
was beginning to attract families from the low
country who sought relief from the heat and
disease of the coast. They too needed
accommodations. And the courthouse, soon
improved to a two-story shingled building,
attracted people from throughout the county
to its semi-annual two or three-day circuit
court sessions.
In 1805 a visitor, Edward Hooker from
Connecticut, described the village as “quite
pretty and rural: the streets are covered with
green grass and handsome trees growing here
and there.” There were, he said, “six homes,
two or three shops, and several log buildings.
The place is thought by many to be as healthy
as any part of the United States. Not a seat of
much business. Only one attorney and law
business dull. One or two physicians…one
clergyman within six or seven miles who
preaches at the Courthouse every three or
four weeks.”
Since Greenville District was agricultural
and less than a hundred people lived in the
village, few businesses were established during
that first decade of the nineteenth century.
“Squire” Jeremiah Cleveland had moved to
town in 1805 and had begun a fairly large
mercantile business on Main Street, and Alston
ran a dilapidated grist mill at the river, but it
wasn’t until the War of 1812 that Alston and
Adam Carruth established an armory on the
Reedy near present day Conestee to make guns
for the federal government. They may have
smelted the iron in their rifles from the narrow
vein of iron ore that ran through the county,
since several foundries had been set up.
Alston, who had lost the 1812 race for
Congress to Earle, and whose land, cultivated
for thirty years, was beginning to wear
out, was lured by the rich black soil of
Alabama. It took him several years to find
a buyer for what would be the future city
of Greenville, since his asking price for his
11,028 acres was $27,550 (about $250,000
in current terms). Early in 1815, though, he
received a letter from Vardry McBee, a
farmer and tanner in Lincolnton, North
Carolina, who had grown up on the Pacolet
River in Spartanburg County near Alston’s
family home.
McBee, then forty years old, was a
substantial citizen with an income of about
$3,000 a year, who was, over the objections of
his relatives and friends, considering buying
Alston’s lands. When McBee visited that
fall, he inspected the land and discussed the
terms (generous—the total amount was
payable over several years) of the deal with
Alston. He went back home to Lincolnton,
borrowed the money, and clinched the
purchase with a signed contract in October.
Alston immediately moved to Clarke County,
Alabama. On November 15, 1815, Vardry
McBee became the owner of Prospect Hill and
the chief landholder of the village of
Greenville Courthouse.
✧
Grist mills dotted the narrow rushing
streams of Greenville District from its
earliest days. Mosteller’s Mill, about four
miles north of Greer on the Tyger River, was
erected in 1814.
COURTESY OF THE GREER HERITAGE MUSEUM.
CHAPTER II
15

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
16

CHAPTER III
F OUNDING
F ATHER
In 1816, Vardry McBee became Greenville’s absentee landlord and the father of its future
growth. Since he continued living in Lincolnton, he immediately leased Prospect Hill to Edmund
Waddell, a jovial innkeeper, to convert into the village’s much-needed first hotel. In order to have
a steady supply of building materials necessary for a growing town, he started a brickyard, a stone
quarry, an ironworks, and a saw mill below the lower falls of the Reedy River. At the upper falls,
he built a brick corn mill in 1817 and, twelve years later, added a stone grist mill.
On the northwest corner of South Main and Avenue Streets, he constructed an impressive twostory
building surrounded by columns. On its ground floor, he and William Irvine operated a
general store (with branches in Spartanburg and Lincolnton), which sold hardware, cutlery,
medicine, paints, perfumes, corsets, pantaloons, twine, and red clover seed. “McBee Hall’s” second
floor, a large open space, hosted balls, fairs, religious services, and public assemblies until it
burned in 1866.
At the same time—1819—that McBee’s building campaign was underway, Joel Poinsett, another
man who became a Greenville icon, was busy overseeing the construction of a state road from
Columbia to the Saluda Gap. It was not an easy job. Abram Blanding, the chief engineer, reported
that it “was a rainy year, and labor was most irregular due to the sale, by local people, of
intoxicating liquor.” Poinsett was head of the state board charged with implementing “internal
improvements” for South Carolina, including the state road, and he designed three Gothic-style
arched bridges, including the one over Gap Creek in upper Greenville County that bears his name,
together with forty-four smaller and simpler ones that spanned creeks and rivers along the ridge
between the Tyger and the Enoree Rivers. Poinsett Bridge remains a landmark today.
After the state road was completed in 1820, he built a small cabin above the bridge at Gap Creek
as a retreat. Poinsett, who served as ambassador to Mexico, where he discovered the Christmas
flower that bears his name and who was Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, became
a regular summer resident sixteen years later. He bought a farm in the Tanglewood area near the
intersection of Easley Bridge and White Horse Roads and became thoroughly involved in the life
of the town.
As another part of the state’s internal improvements, the Legislature appointed Robert Mills as
superintendent of public buildings, responsible for the design and construction of courthouses and
jails throughout the state. He recommended rebuilding and relocating Greenville’s courthouse
because the lot in the middle of Main Street was too small, and the building itself was already
dilapidated. In 1821 the district commissioners signed a contract for $10,000 for a new brick
courthouse to be completed by spring 1822. Its completion, however, was delayed for nearly a year
because the first load of bricks delivered to the site was rejected. Mills, the first trained architect
in the New Republic and one of the most talented, designed the building in the Palladian style. The
elegant fireproof building had a gabled roof and a first floor arcade with offices and a curving
staircase leading to the second floor courtroom. It was Greenville’s fourth courthouse until a new
one was built in 1854.
Having a new courthouse increased the village’s dignity and population—it had grown to more
than 200 residents by 1820. With more people (the county’s population had increased to 45,000),
quarterly meetings of the circuit court, and monthly “Sales Days” during which goods and estates
were sold at the courthouse door, there were more legal proceedings that attracted new residents,
especially lawyers. Certainly there was enough business to justify Colonel William Toney’s 1823
purchase of two lots opposite the courthouse at the exceptionally high price of $5,000 (about
$64,000 today). He planned, he said, to build a hotel that would “excel any house in the upper
✧
This tinted etching of vacationers enjoying
the banks of the Reedy River was published
in Orion Magazine in 1844. McBee’s stone
and brick mills stood on the river’s south
bank until 1920.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER III
17

✧
In 1815 Vardry McBee (1775-1864)
purchased more than eleven thousand acres
that became the city of Greenville. Because
of his initiative and leadership, the village
and the county began to grow.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
18
part of the State in appearance and
accommodation for the traveling public.”
He did so. The Mansion House had brick
walls over two feet thick at the ground level; a
wrought iron balcony extended across the
second floor; nearly every bedroom had a
fireplace. Its floors were heart pine; the roof
was tin; and the circular staircase ascending to
the third floor was considered a rare piece of
workmanship. The basement featured a
popular bar (for gentlemen only) and a card
room opening on a courtyard. In later years, a
massive crystal chandelier, the first in
Greenville, was installed in the bar. Even
teetotalers peeked in to gaze at it. According
to James Richardson’s county history, it was
famous for its “commodious and artistic
design and appointments and the excellent
quality of the food and drink served from its
tables, but more especially for the aristocracy
and wealth of the guests who frequented it.”
They had to be rich. The Mansion House
charged guests $1.50 a day (including meals)
and horses cost an additional 50 cents daily.
The hotel’s guests included many visitors
from the coastal counties who found
Greenville’s mountain beauty and “salubrity of
climate” a summer attraction. Because they
often stayed from June to the first frost in the
fall, they wanted the advantages of home, and
they encouraged community leaders to build
the village’s first schools and churches.
“Free schools,” funded by the state, had
been established in Greenville before 1820,
but those schools, set up by an act of the
South Carolina General Assembly, bore the
stigma of being for paupers and orphans.
Substantial citizens, most legislators agreed,
were responsible for educating their own
children; the state’s responsibility was for
higher education and for educating the poor.
The free schools failed primarily because
middle class families refused to send their
children to schools designated for paupers.
The encouragement of visitors and the
generosity of local residents brought about the
Greenville Academies. In 1819 forty-seven
men pledged $4,738 to create schools for
boys and girls. Amounts contributed varied
from $500 gifts from Jeremiah Cleveland,
Francis McLeod, Tandy Walker, and William
Toney to the $5 contributed by blacksmith
Peter Cauble. Their generosity was rewarded
when Vardry McBee donated thirty acres of
land on the Buncombe Road at the northern
edge of the village in August 1820.
It took the trustees of the new institution,
who were among the largest donors, nearly two
years to build two “neat” brick school houses
and homes for the principals of each school. By
January 1823 both were operating, although all
their money had been exhausted, and the
trustees sought more from the Legislature,
pointing out the purity of a village “where there
is so little risk of corrupted morals.”
Although the Male Academy changed
principals frequently in its first years, the
Female Academy employed William Bullein
Johnson, a well-educated Baptist minister

who advocated education for girls, until
1831. He instituted a four year curriculum
focusing on what he called “the solid branches
of learning.” The first year class learned to
read, write, and do arithmetic; by the time the
girls finished their studies, they were well
trained in English grammar and literature,
geography, history, chemistry, “natural
philosophy,” “moral philosophy,” Latin, and
Greek. It was a rigorous curriculum and one
that compared favorably to the best girls’
schools in New England.
The school year was organized to attract
summer visitors. Students had a month of
vacation in December, and the rest of the year
was divided into four twelve-week terms;
students could enter at any term. Some may
have attended the school for four full years,
but the Low Country visitors probably
enrolled their children only during the
summer months. By the end of the 1820s,
according to Benjamin Perry, who briefly
attended the Male Academy in 1823, “young
ladies were sent from all the surrounding
districts, and they contributed very much to
the society of the village and the prosperity of
the residents and boarding houses.”
Low Country visitors also encouraged the
organization of the first church in the village.
Local residents hadn’t complained; Methodist,
✧
Vardry McBee and Joel Poinsett, friends
in life, face each other across Court
Square in downtown Greenville. While
McBee was neither well-educated nor
cosmopolitan, he was a hard-working and
imaginative entrepreneur.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER III
19

✧
Joel Poinsett, a longtime summer visitor,
was one of the best educated men of his
generation and a world traveler who served
as ambassador to Mexico and secretary of
the Army.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
20
Baptist, and Presbyterian ministers visited
from time to time to preach at the courthouse
and to marry young couples, and there were
churches outside the city. But many summer
visitors were Episcopalian, and they wanted a
place to worship. In 1820, the Bishop of
South Carolina sent a missionary, Rudolphus
Dickenson, to the “heathen parts,” charged
with setting up congregations at Pendleton, at
Carruth’s Armory at Conestee, and in
Greenville Courthouse. Thanks to his efforts,
support from local Episcopalians Edward
Croft, Emily Rowland, and Jane Butler, and
four acres of land donated by Vardry McBee at
the eastern edge of the village, the
cornerstone for St. James Mission, the first
church building in Greenville, was laid on
September 15, 1825. The first service was
held in the still unfinished building in June
1826. In 1828 the congregation was admitted
to the Diocese and consecrated as Christ
Church, Greenville. Local residents (not
Episcopalians) called it “the snap bean
church,” because it was only open during the
summer, when beans were ripe.
In 1826 “the most respectable, most
wealthy, and numerous inhabitants of this
rising town” appointed a committee to erect a
Baptist Meeting House that would also be
open to other “Ministers of the Orthodox
faith.” (That meant Presbyterians and
Methodists.) Vardry McBee had donated a
quarter-acre lot at Irvine and Avenue Street to
Baylis Earle, Jeremiah Cleveland, Richard
Thurston, and George Fleming as trustees of a
yet unformed Baptist Society in 1822. But it
wasn’t until W. B. Johnson came to town to
head the Female Academy that serious fundraising
began. The committee raised about
$1,300 and hired contractors to construct a
sturdy brick building with a balcony and two
doors. When the project went more than
$350 over budget, they pleaded for
community understanding. “Forgive us this
wrong,” they began in a letter to the Greenville
Republican, but they had seen the “liberality”
of the town in building the Academies, and
they wanted to build a place of worship
“suitable in its decency and propriety” for
the whole town. While some ecumenical
meetings were held there, the church was
primarily used by the Rev. Johnson for weekly
services. After he left in 1831, the
congregation officially organized themselves
as the Greenville Baptist Church.
Methodist circuit riders had begun visiting
the town in the mid-1820s, but it wasn’t
until 1832 that Vardry McBee donated
land opposite Christ Church to them,
and two years later a congregation formed
at the home of Mrs. Maria Turpin. Methodists
constructed a solid wood building with

two doors, one for men, one for women,
and welcomed all to their free pews
(Baptist and Episcopal churches rented
their pews.) As a result, says S. S. Crittenden,
writing in The Century Book, Greenville’s
first history, published in 1902, “most
of the school girls attending the Female
Academy attended the church, and as
a natural consequence, the young men
did also.”
It would be another fifteen years before
Presbyterians organized a church in the
village. During the summer of 1847, Mrs.
Sarah Stone and several of her friends raised
about $50 to support a summer’s preaching
by a distinguished Presbyterian minister from
Columbia. Six months later, the Presbyterian
Church of Greenville Courthouse was
chartered, and like all of the earlier churches,
begged Vardry McBee, whose wife was
Presbyterian, for an appropriate lot. Perhaps
Greenville land was increasing in value, for he
approached the trustees of the Greenville
Academy, who held in trust the land he had
donated for the schools, and asked them to
convey a portion of it to the Presbyterians.
They politely declined. Their acres were given
for education, not religion, they pointed out.
So he provided another site for the new
congregation, a lot at the intersection of
Avenue and Richardson Streets, close to his
home at Prospect Hill.
✧
The Record Building, Greenville’s third
courthouse, was a Main Street landmark for
a century. The fireproof building had a
courtroom on the second floor with offices
and legal records stored below.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER III
21

✧
Above: The Mansion House welcomed
summer visitors to the resort as well as local
dignitaries (including John C. Calhoun), to
Greenville for nearly a hundred years.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: William Bullein Johnson, a Baptist
minister who believed in educating young
women, was the first principal of the
Greenville Female Academy (1823-1831) at
the same time that he served as chair of the
trustees of the fledgling Furman Academy
and Theological Institution in Edgefield.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
22
The village’s first newspapers reported on
these signs of growth as well as the allconsuming
issue of politics. On July 12, 1826,
the Greenville Republican made its debut under
the editorship of Charles D’Oyley, formerly of
Charleston. It proclaimed itself “the voice of
union sentiment.” That sentiment contrasted
to that of the “nullifiers,” who followed John
C. Calhoun, opposing agricultural tariffs that
they considered anti-southern. They argued
that a state could “nullify” an act of Congress.
As a unionist newspaper, The Republican
reflected the views of a majority of
Greenvillians, but after two years it ceased
publication. In January 1829, with new
printing equipment and a new editor, but the
same politics, it reappeared, newly christened
the Greenville Mountaineer. Within a year,
young attorney Benjamin Perry was editor. A
thorough-going unionist, he blasted
nullification in every issue. Incensed
Columbia nullifiers set up a competing pronullification
newspaper in the village. They
provided the funds and hired Turner Bynum, a
young journalist, to counter Perry’s editorials.
The Southern Sentinel began publishing in
July 1832. Bynum immediately blasted Perry
and unionism. Perry, furious, challenged him
to a duel. On August 18, 1832, the men and
their seconds met on an island in the Tugaloo
River. Bynum fired the first shot; it pierced
Perry’s coat. Perry did not miss. Sixteen
hours later, Turner Bynum lay dead.
The Southern Sentinel ceased publication, and
Greenville remained firmly unionist.
The Mountaineer reported with some pride
in 1830 that there were 64 houses and a
population of 600. Residents included
five lawyers, four doctors, two parsons,
three schoolmasters, nine merchants, six
tavern-keepers, and thirty-seven mechanics.
The village had nine stores, six inns, and
two churches. Soon it would have two
burying grounds, one at Christ Church and
the other given by Francis McLeod to the

✧
While the initial impetuous for establishing
Christ Church came from low country
summer residents, by 1854, when the neversatisfactory
original building was replaced
with an handsome Gothic Revival structure,
its local congregation had grown to be
self-sufficient.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
village that would become Springwood
Cemetery. Businesses essential for a
flourishing little village—three tailors’ shops,
four blacksmiths’ shops, two tanyards, two
grist mills, a saw mill, a cabinet maker, a
saddler, two tin shops, and a printing office—
had been established.
There were even signs of luxury: it now
had a silversmith, three milliners, and a
painter. The ladies had started a circulating
library; the young men, a debating society.
And because it was a summer resort with a
ready audience for plays and concerts,
traveling musicians visited regularly. Within
just a few years it would add several
bookstores and a civic band.
In 1831 its status became official;
Greenville was incorporated. It was not a
momentous event for the bustling little
community that had long been established
around the Reedy River. Editor Benjamin
Perry noted it in two sentences in a
Mountaineer article, explaining that it meant
that an “intendent,” or mayor, and four
“wardens” (city councilmen) could be elected,
by-laws passed, and a night patrol and fire
watch instituted. Greenville was no longer a
frontier town.
CHAPTER III
23

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
24

CHAPTER IV
T HE 1850S : D ECADE OF D ECISION
Like most of South Carolina in the antebellum years, Greenville District was overwhelmingly
rural and agricultural. Unlike its neighbors, however, where cotton was already king, its landlordin-chief,
Vardry McBee, fostered industry, railroads, education, and unionist politics.
The first stirrings of manufacturing came early. Robert Mills’ 1825 Atlas of South Carolina
identified at least thirty local grist mills and three cotton mills, all located along Greenville’s narrow
rushing streams. These earliest textile enterprises, McCool’s Cotton Factory on Beaverdam Creek,
Lester’s Factory on the Enoree at Pelham, and Shubal Arnold’s factory, later Berry’s Mill, at Fork
Shoals, were small operations (the Fork Shoals mill, says A. V. Huff, had 78 spindles) started by
entrepreneurs from Rhode Island, the first center of America’s textile industry. In the 1830s,
William Bates, another Rhode Islander, set up a larger and more successful mill on Rocky Creek
near modern day Batesville.
Seven miles away, on the Reedy at Conestee, Vardry McBee, who moved permanently to
Greenville in 1836, opened a paper factory that manufactured newsprint, fine stationery, and
wrapping paper. Using the same source of water power, he began a planing operation and cotton
and wool mills. According to his biographer, Roy McBee Smith, McBee established such quality
control standards that his paper and cloth were sold profitably in New York. By the 1840s he had
a “neat” mill village laid out near his Reedy River Factory, which employed seventy workers,
and his millwright (chief engineer), John Adams, had built an octagonal church that served the
entire village.
Ebenezer Gower and Thomas Cox started their coach and cart manufacturing business in the
village in 1835. Located in a serviceable wooden building that stretched along the Reedy’s north
bank above the waterfalls, it was adjacent to the narrow pedestrian bridge linking Main Street with
the trading routes to Augusta and Pendleton. The Gower and Cox Coach Factory immediately
became a Greenville landmark. Visitors and residents alike were fascinated by the huge, slowly
revolving waterwheel that generated power for factory operations.
The factory flourished. Gower’s younger brother, Thomas, came from Maine, and Cox’s nephew,
H. C. Markley, arrived from Charleston, to add their skills and ideas. By 1859 the Gower, Cox, and
Markley Coach Factory had completed a three-and-a-half story shed-roofed combination
blacksmith shop and “carriage repository” with display room and storage space. The factory
employed 73 workmen who turned out more than 160 coaches and farm carts worth $80,000
annually; it was, said an article published in DeBow’s Review, the largest carriage factory south of
the Potomac.
Perhaps even more important to the county’s development in the years before the Civil War,
however, was the coming of the Greenville & Columbia Railroad. Soon after the Best Friend of
Charleston puffed and sputtered along tracks that would eventually reach Hamburg (North
Augusta) in 1833, beginning America’s infatuation with the “iron horse,” Greenvillians, led by
McBee, began working to bring railroad service to the upstate.
It took a massive expenditure of time and money before the first train chugged into the
makeshift depot on Augusta Road on December 8, 1853. In 1847, McBee and thirty other
subscribers raised $300,000 for a 109-mile line from Columbia up the east side of the Saluda River
through Newberry and Laurens to Greenville. But there was major opposition from John C.
Calhoun, South Carolina’s most influential politician, who preferred a 147-mile route up the west
side of the Saluda terminating at Anderson. Vardry McBee put up $50,000 of his own money to
make the Greenville plan a reality. Building the Greenville & Columbia Railroad was entirely
McBee’s doing. His son, Pinkney, a civil engineer, surveyed the line; his sawmill provided the
✧
Grist mills harnessed the power of narrow
streams, but it wasn’t until new technology
in the 1830s that allowed larger dams like
this later one at Conestee, the site of
McBee’s River Reedy Factory, to produce
the water power necessary for cotton and
paper factories.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER IV
25

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
26

timbers; stone came from his quarry on
modern day McDaniel Avenue. It was, he said,
“a monstrous task.”
It was a “rickety road” from the beginning,
built at the low cost of $14,000 a mile,
because difficult-to-procure iron was poor
quality, and funds were pitifully limited. But
it meant that Greenvillians could “board the
cars” at 5 a.m. and be in Columbia by
3:30 p.m. for a cost of $5.75. After spending
the night in Columbia, they would arrive
in Charleston by the following afternoon.
For a journey that had previously taken two
weeks, this was modern transportation at
its speediest!
The railroad brought people. It also
brought Furman University. Begun in 1826 in
Edgefield as the Furman Academy and
Theological Institution, the not-verysuccessful
educational effort of the South
Carolina Baptist Convention had moved first
to the High Hills of the Santee and, in the
mid-1830s, to Winnsboro. There it
experimented with a work-study program
where future ministers studied Greek and
Hebrew in the morning and worked in cotton
fields in the afternoon. The school was failing
in the late 1840s, when the Convention and
the faculty, led by James Clement Furman,
son of Richard Furman, the patriot Baptist
minister for whom the school was named,
decided to convert it into a liberal arts college
and move again. J. C. Furman was appointed
a committee of one to find a new location. He
settled on Greenville, he said, because of its
salubrious climate, cheap land, numerous
Baptists, and the coming of the railroad.
Trustees purchased about fifty acres of land
on a bluff on the west side of the Reedy River
from Vardry McBee, and in December 1850
the South Carolina Legislature chartered The
Furman University. The first on-campus
classes were held in a two-room cottage (now
“Old College” on the university’s Poinsett
✧
Opposite: Robert Mills’s 1825 Atlas
of South Carolina includes this map
of Greenville District. It clearly shows
the geographic influences—the rivers
and mountains—that helped create the
county’s history
Above: McBee Chapel at Conestee is one of
three extant octagonal churches in the
nation and is listed on the National Register
of Historic Places. It was designed to seat
about 150 people.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
Left: The Gower and Cox Coach Factory
was the earliest and for many years one of
the most successful industries in the county.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER IV
27

✧
Above: James Clement Furman, the first
president of the university named for his
father, was, like him, a Baptist minister. He
made the decision to move the failing school
from Winnsboro to Greenville.
COURTESY OF FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Below: “Old College,” the first building
completed on the university campus, was
renovated and moved to Furman’s Poinsett
Highway campus in 1958.
COURTESY OF FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Highway campus) in 1851, while a handsome
main building was under construction.
Charles Judson, a Connecticut native and
University of Virginia graduate, was the
first professor and first layman hired. James
C. Furman was named chairman of the
faculty, and in 1858, when the School of
Religion separated to become the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary under the
leadership of James P. Boyce, Furman became
university president.
Boyce was a theologian educated at Brown
University and Princeton Theological
Seminary. He was also one of the richest men
in South Carolina, the beneficiary of the
massive estate of his father, who died in 1853.
Thoroughly committed to the idea of a Baptist
Seminary in the South because of increasing
friction with northern Baptists over the
theology of slavery, he hired a superb faculty.
They included William Whitsett, John
Broadus, Basil Manly, Jr., Walter Williams,
and Hayden Toy.
In 1854, university students and faculty
moved into their new building, Richard
Furman Hall (“Old Main”), designed in the
Italianate Revival style by Charleston
architects Jones and Lee. More than a
hundred young men were enrolled, all of
whom lived with Baptist families in town,
since there were no dormitories. At about the
same time, Baptists throughout the state
began to recognize the need to educate their
daughters. Mothers, after all, influenced their
sons’ morality, and gentlemen needed
educated wives to entertain their friends and
run their households. A few even believed
that women had God-given minds that
deserved education. When delegates to the
state Baptist Convention met in Greenville in
July 1854, they voted unanimously to
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
28

establish a female college. Vardry McBee and
other Greenville leaders offered the land and
buildings of the failing Greenville Academies
and promised to raise $20,000 for the school.
Anderson, too, proposed a site, offered
funds, and pointed out the dangers of having
young women too near young men: “You
cannot lock up the chambers of the human
heart,” pleaded an Anderson delegate. But
Greenville prevailed, although it took a
lawsuit to establish the legitimacy of
transferring the Academy trust and property
to a denomination. The court ruled that
Furman University trustees should be
responsible for the school.
On January 7, 1855, the Greenville Baptist
Female College opened. It offered, in addition
to a three-year college course, three years of
primary education and three years of college
preparatory studies. Its new main building,
opened in 1858, was located in the middle of
the twenty-three-acre campus on newly
named College Street. Greenville, with two
colleges and a seminary, was becoming the
“Athens of the Upstate.”
It was changing in other ways as well.
Young Baptists flocked to the colleges and
seminary, and their professors were either
Baptist ministers or devout laymen. They
brought a more somber tone to the carefree
summer resort. The Greenville & Columbia
Railroad brought salesmen, new settlers, and
many more visitors. Episcopalians and
Baptists constructed elegant new churches.
Robert Mills’ courthouse was too small to
serve a growing community of nearly fifteen
hundred people, so a new courthouse was
built across the street, and the old courthouse
became the Record Building. Small wooden
stores now lined Main Street all the way to the
Goodlett Hotel at the Washington Street
corner. New homes were built across the
Reedy River near the Depot Green and the
university. And politics changed too.
In the decade of the 1850s, Greenville’s
unionism gradually waned. William H.
Campbell, a young attorney and strong
secessionist, became the outspoken editor of
the Greenville Mountaineer; Benjamin Perry
started the Southern Patriot to oppose him.
Issues involving slavery and states rights
stirred the entire community, especially after
James C. Furman began fervently preaching
secession at Baptist churches throughout the
district. Tensions increased. No one was an
abolitionist—a loathsome word to South
Carolinians—but many opposed South
Carolina’s seceding on her own, and others,
✧
A farm cart and horseman ford the river
below Furman University’s newly erected
main building in the late 1850s.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER IV
29

✧
The main building (and only one until
1891) of the Greenville Baptist Female
College was featured in its catalogue for
more than 35 years. It included classrooms,
offices, parlors, a dining hall on the lowest
level, and beds for 24 students.
COURTESY OF FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
like Benjamin Perry, wanted to stay within the
union. In addition to Campbell’s editorials
and Furman’s sermons, three other events
helped precipitate Greenville’s embrace of
secession by the fall of 1860.
The first occurred in May 1856. During a
two-day speech on “Bleeding Kansas,”
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner aimed
particularly slanderous and unpleasant
remarks at South Carolina and its elderly
senator, Andrew P. Butler, who had returned
to the state following a stroke. Two days later,
South Carolinian Congressman Preston
Brooks, a cousin of Butler, went to the senate
floor, where he confronted Sumner and beat
him on the head and shoulders with about
thirty strokes of a gold-headed cane.
Northerners gasped in horror at the violence,
as Sumner, bleeding copiously, fell to the
floor; southerners applauded Brooks’ stand
for the honor of his family and the state.
While the cane’s splinters became “sacred
relicts” throughout the South, the severity of
the attack and southern attitudes inflamed the
northern press and people.
The Brooks-Sumner affair had local
reverberations. Butler’s brother, Dr. William
Butler, and his wife had lived in Greenville for
many years; their son, Matthew, attended
the Male Academy. Emmalia Butler, A. P.
Butler’s sister, had married Waddy Thompson,
one of the richest men in town. Her niece,
Harriet Butler, was married to Pinkney
McBee. Sumner’s characterization of their
state as “a harlot of slavery” and his
personal attack on the sick and aging
senator inflamed local feelings. A “Brooks
Ball” at the Mansion House, honoring
the attacker, brought a crowd of two hundred
to dance and feast on a huge cake decorated
with an up-raised cane. Even staunch
Unionist Benjamin Perry commented that
“Mr. Brook’s gallantry, spirit, and patriotic
course in Congress, have made him a
hero worthy of the respect and admiration of
his State.”
The Brooks-Sumner affair clearly shook
long-time Unionists, but it wasn’t until
John Brown’s ill-fated raid on the federal
arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia that
led most others—except for Perry—to
see the clash between North and South as
inevitable. The abolitionist-funded raid
frightened southerners because it seemed to
threaten slave insurrections. Finally, the
November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln,
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
30

On December 20, 1860, the Greenville
delegation unanimously approved and signed
the Ordinance of Secession. Benjamin Perry
wrote Charleston unionist James Pettigru that
night: “I have been trying for the last thirty
years to save the State from the horrors of
disunion. They are now all going to the devil,
and I will go with them.” On December 21, a
great torchlight procession thronged through
Main Street. A brass band played. Greenville’s
“Minute Men,” with blue cockades in their
hats, marched from the University to the
Female College, ending their procession at
Goodlett’s Hotel. There were speeches and
fireworks; the ladies of the town presented a
flag inscribed “We Conquer or We Die.”
Greenville was ready to fight.
✧
Left: Attorney, newspaper editor, and
legislator, Benjamin Perry, stood for the
union against both nullifiers and
secessionists throughout his life.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: Greenville signers of the Ordinance
of Secession are commemorated on this
plaque in front of Springwood Cemetery.
The county’s Confederate Memorial stands
behind it, partially hidden by magnolias.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
called “the Black Ape” by the Mountaineer,
sealed Greenville’s shift in allegiance.
Led by H. Lee Thruston and William
Campbell, local men formed a unit of the
statewide Minute Men for the Defense of
Southern Rights. When the state legislature
called for elections to a Secession Convention
in December 1860, the Minute Men raised a
secession flag at a new Liberty Pole, and the
Furman University Rifles, formed in 1856,
saluted it with a volley of gunfire. A crowd
gathered in front of the new courthouse and
wildly applauded speeches by J. C. Furman,
William King Easley, and others, as they
rallied supporters with fighting words.
Perry listened from his office across the
street, knowing that his influence and voice
now meant little. The Southern Enterprise
printed a letter from a committee chaired by
Furman, thundering that without secession,
“Abolition preachers will be at hand to
consummate the marriage of your daughters to
black husbands!” The outcome of the election
for delegates to the Secession Convention was
never in doubt, although Benjamin Perry and
three others ran in opposition to the
secessionist slate composed of Furman, Easley,
Perry Duncan, W. H. Campbell, and Dr. James
Harrison. Perry, the most popular of those
opposed, gained only 225 votes; Furman, who
led the pro-secessionist ticket, won more than
1,300. Doubters stayed home.
CHAPTER IV
31

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
32

CHAPTER V
W AR AND R ECONSTRUCTION
As the Confederacy gathered steam during the winter and early spring of 1861, Greenville’s
young—and some not so young—men rushed to enlist in militia units. By May, says A. V. Huff, the
Butler Guards, formed in 1855, were already encamped at Manassas Junction in northern Virginia
as part of the Second Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers. A second company was mustered in
the following month. At a mass meeting in June to raise funds to outfit the Brooks Cavalry,
Benjamin Perry, supporting the South as he had said he would, offered his son, two horses, a Negro
boy (officers went to war with their slaves), and fifty dollars to the troop. He also encouraged
support in the “Dark Corner” to the north, long a unionist stronghold, where many were apathetic
to or opposed the war. Greenville eventually provided fifteen companies of men, nearly 2,500
soldiers, to the southern war effort.
Soon after cannons fired on Fort Sumter in April, civilian life changed. Cotton mills converted
to military manufacture with only one day’s production a week available to residents. The coach
factory manufactured army wagons and caissons for Confederate guns. An armory, the State
Military Works, was constructed in 1862 on land off the Anderson Road. It produced cannons,
shells, and pikes together with Morse Carbines for cavalry use.
So many Furman students and faculty had enlisted by mid-summer that the university did not
re-open in fall 1861, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, reduced to eight students,
also closed its doors. Since the university’s president, James Clement Furman, no longer had a
source of income except for the produce and firewood produced on his Green Farm on the Paris
Mountain Road, he was appointed president of the Female College, where he served for fifteen
months until Charles Judson replaced him. The college remained open throughout the conflict.
When federal troops landed at Port Royal Sound in November 1861, refugees from the Low
Country began crowding into Greenville. Hotels, boarding houses, and friends’ homes offered
asylum, swelling the district’s population, but putting pressure on stores, which were soon stripped
of both staple goods and luxuries. By late 1863, no stores were open, and newspapers began
publishing recipes for substitutes for coffee, tea, and salt. By 1864, Confederate dollars were almost
worthless, as rampant inflation (9,000 percent between 1861 and 1865) destroyed purchasing power.
With able-bodied men off fighting, women were left with farms to tend, planting, weeding, and
harvesting crops, spinning and weaving cotton, distilling cider and brandy from pears and apples,
butchering hogs and salting hams. James Boyce plowed up the rose garden on his huge Boyce Lawn
estate (it extended from East North Street behind Christ Church to modern day Cleveland Park),
and planted rutabaga turnips in their place. Far from the battlefields in Virginia and from the action
at the coast, Greenvillians shipped whatever food and supplies they could provide from the
Augusta Road Depot to men at war.
The depot, in fact, became one of the busiest places in town because it brought the only current
news of the outside world. Greenville had no telegraph, and while the weekly Mountaineer
continued to publish while newsprint was available, it relied on letters from soldiers, often several
weeks old, for its war news. Crowds gathered every afternoon when the northbound train arrived
to listen as the Rev. Edward Buist, the minister of the Presbyterian Church, who had, it was said,
“the most sonorous voice in town,” read aloud the lists of casualties and deaths on the battlefield
from the daily Charleston newspaper. Pine coffins were stacked nearby.
Local women started their own relief organization, the Greenville Ladies Association in Aid of
the Volunteers of the Confederate Army. Led by Mrs. Perry Duncan, the group converted the old
Male Academy building into a Rest Home for soldiers, providing beds, food, nursing care, and
sometimes money to wounded soldiers. They knitted, sewed, and collected supplies for men at the
✧
The Camperdown Mill harnessed the power
of the Reedy River waterfalls to spin cotton
thread. It was a downtown landmark for
eighty years.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
CHAPTER V
33

✧
Right: Thomas Gower initially enlisted in
the Confederate Quartermaster corps, but
after nine months of service was sent back
to Greenville to produce caissons and
wagons for the Southern cause. An
entrepreneur and inventor, he later served
as Greenville’s mayor.
COURTESY OF THOMAS C. GOWER
Below: The graves of seven unknown
soldiers who died at the hospital established
by the Confederate government lie in a
special plot in Springwood Cemetery.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
34
front, and Mrs. Duncan twice traveled to
Virginia to visit Greenville troops and
distribute shirts and socks, bed linen, soap,
and dried fruit. As the Civil War dragged on
and the Female College needed the space for
its student body, the ladies worked with a
hospital the Confederate government had
established at Goodlett’s Hotel on Main Street.
In January 1865, General William Sherman
invaded South Carolina. Federal troops cut a
forty-mile wide swath of destruction through
the state. Although the upstate was spared,
the tracks of the Greenville and Columbia
Railroad were destroyed, and the town was
almost totally cut off from the rest of the state
for nearly six months.
When General Robert E. Lee surrendered to
General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox
Courthouse in Virginia on April 7, 1865, the
war was over, but it had not quite ended for
Greenville. On May 1, federal troops pursuing
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, said to
be fleeing to upstate South Carolina with what
was left of the Confederate treasury, arrived in
town from Hendersonville. They stole horses,
guns, and provisions, looted goods from
closed downtown stores, and smashed cases of
wine stashed in depot warehouses. They also
discovered, hidden behind bricks in Hamlin
Beattie’s dry goods store, $30,000 in gold sent
for safekeeping by the Bank of Charleston.
After destroying the guns they had
confiscated, the Yankee troops rode on toward
Anderson and Abbeville, where Davis had
held the last meeting of his cabinet. About two
weeks later, troops returning from Anderson
had a brief skirmish with Confederate veterans
on Crescent Avenue. The southerners retreated
gracefully when they realized they were facing
a large mounted force, and no one was
injured. The Civil War had finally ended, but
Greenvillians, both white and black, abruptly
faced a strange new world.
White Greenvillians were devastated.
Hundreds of soldiers had died during the
conflict; others were gravely wounded. The
wealth of the gentry had vanished—invested
in Confederate bonds, slaves, and land or
spent for provisions in the waning days of the
war. Drought during the summers of 1865
and 1866 hurt farmers. Peter Cauble, once
one of the town’s most substantial citizens,
was bankrupt by 1870; James Furman tried to
sell his farm, Cherrydale, because he was so
short of cash; many town leaders moved away.
The “middling sort” and poor subsistence
farmers were in even worse shape and had

nowhere to go; many were reduced to begging
for corn.
In the city, education for white children
nearly disappeared. The Peabody Fund,
established by northern philanthropist George
Peabody to educate southern white children,
provided money for two years for a a primary
school for boys and girls in the old male
academy building on the college grounds, a
female school at the college, and a school for
boys in the West End. But the required
matching funds from the community could
not be raised, and Peabody funding ended in
1870. The Female College offered primary and
preparatory education, but fewer than sixty
children were enrolled. And the school, deeply
in debt, was forced to sell most of its twentythree
acre campus. Furman reopened in 1866,
too poor to print a catalog, but students had
no money for tuition, and, after a brave start,
it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. When
friends advised James C. Furman to give up,
he responded that he had tied his colors to the
mast and would go down with the ship.
Political power shifted immediately. In
June 1865, President Andrew Johnson
appointed Benjamin Perry provisional
governor of the state. Perry asked citizens to
take the oath of allegiance to the federal
government and called for a constitutional
convention that fall. The Greenville
Delegation, all former unionists, quickly
repealed the Ordinance of Secession and
recognized the abolition of slavery. “But,” said
Perry, “this is a white man’s government.”
That statement and his later support of a
Black Code little better than bondage
inflamed the Radical Republicans in Congress
and led to military reconstruction in 1867.
The following year, the Greenville
delegation to the convention charged with
writing a new constitution for the state
consisted of four Republicans: James B. Allen,
W. B. Robinson, and Baptist minister J. M.
Runion, who were white, and Wilson Cooke,
a “very genteel mulatto” and former slave of
Vardry McBee’s. That Constitution established
public schools, universal male suffrage,
abolished property qualifications for state
office, legalized divorce, and changed the
state’s organization from districts to counties.
In November 1868, Greenville once more
elected a full Republican slate to the General
Assembly, although local offices were won by
Democrats. While the county population
increased by only 1.7 percent between 1860
and 1870 (to 22,262), the village of
Greenville grew from 1,518 to 2,757, and in
1869 the Legislature chartered it as a city. At
the same time the county was divided into
sixteen townships extending from Dunklin in
the south to Cleveland in the mountains. In
1870, Republican James Allen was elected to
the state senate, but house representatives
were old line Democrats. It wasn’t until 1872,
when Democrat T. Q. Donaldson replaced
Allen in the senate, that politics in Greenville
returned to their pre-war Democratic control.
By that time, though, the impact of defeat
had arrived. Federal soldiers had first
appeared in the city in July 1865, when a
troop of black Union cavalry briefly occupied
Greenville, requisitioning Goodlett’s Hotel on
the corner of Washington and Main Streets for
lodging. Two months later, a second
contingent set up camp around the Academy
Spring near present day Park Avenue and
Townes Street. They were sent to maintain
order and to protect the rights of the District’s
7,200 newly freed men and women, one-third
of the county’s population.
For them, too, it was a new world.
Hundreds had drifted into the town. Many
owned nothing other than the clothes they
✧
James C. Furman offered his country home,
“Cherrydale,” for sale during the difficult
days of Reconstruction. When no buyer
responded, the house stayed in the Furman
family until 1939. It was moved to the
Furman University campus in 1999.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER V
35

✧
White Greenvillians mourned the death of
Robert E. Lee in 1870 as a sign of a world
“gone with the wind.”
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
36
wore; most could neither read nor write.
While some former field hands traded their
labor for seed, tools, farm animals, and onethird
of the crop they made, and those with
skills—bricklaying, plastering, or cooking—
found jobs in town or repairing devastated
railroads, others begged food and clothing
from former owners.
In 1866 the federal government set up the
Freedmen’s Bureau to offer help. Greenvillians
(and historians) were fortunate because the
local bureau was headed between October
1866 and January 1868 by Major John W. De
Forest, a remarkably unprejudiced and
observant Connecticut writer. According to De
Forest, Greenville in 1866 was “the third town
in South Carolina, ranking next after
Charleston and Columbia. It boasted an old
and a new courthouse, four churches and
several chapels, a university (not the largest in
the world), a female college (also not
unparalleled), two or three blocks of stores,
one of the best country hotels in the South,
quite a number of comfortable private
residences, fifteen hundred whites and a
thousand or so of others colors.”
The Bureau’s first priority was education
for freedmen. In the summer of 1866, Charles
Hopkins, “a full-blooded black from the low
country,” began classes in reading and spelling
at the Goodlett Hotel. He was, said De Forest,
“a meek, amiable, judicious, virtuous, godly
man, zealous for the good of the freedmen.”
When the Goodlett was returned to its
owners, the Freedmen’s Bureau allowed him
$560, which he used to buy a wooden
storehouse, move it two miles across town to
Laurens Road, and remodel the building.
Within two months, 186 pupils were
enrolled, mostly in the first three grades. By
1868, the school had 430 students. Northern
churches supplied salaries for two white
teachers and textbooks. In 1869 the school
was named in honor of state Senator James
Allen and became a part of the newly
established public school system.
In addition to education, the other
enduring change for black people was having
churches of their own. Blacks and whites had
long worshipped together, blacks on benches
in balconies, whites in pews below, but after
the war black preachers began to form their
own congregations. Jubilee Baptist Church in
Taylors began in 1863, and immediately after
the war the Rev. Jim Rosemund, who had
been a licensed Methodist preacher in the
1850s, organized Silver Hill Methodist
Episcopal, now John Wesley United
Methodist, in Greenville. Later he would start
thirteen other churches or chapels for black
Methodists. In 1868 Gabriel Poole led nearly
500 black members out of Greenville Baptist
Church to form Springfield Baptist on McBee
Avenue. The wealthiest member of his new
congregation was Dudley Talley, a drayman
whose wealth was over a thousand dollars. In
1879, both Allen Temple AME and Mattoon
Presbyterian Churches were organized.
Economic changes had an impact on both
races. First was the coming of “King Cotton.”
Most Greenvillians were farmers, but their
principal crops were wheat and corn because
short staple cotton did not grow well in the
sparse and over-worked upstate soil. The
discovery soon after the war of beds of
phosphate, a potent fertilizer, near
Charleston, and the increased use of guano
allowed local farmers to develop a new cash
crop. The first bale to be shipped to northern
mills left the Greenville and Columbia Depot
in 1869, but, while the rise of cotton brought

little immediate prosperity, it signaled
changes ahead.
Then there was Greenville’s first bank.
Hamlin Beattie was a dry goods merchant
who had maintained an “agency” for the Bank
of Charleston before the war. As one of the
town’s few solvent citizens, Beattie decided to
begin a bank. With the assistance of South
Carolina’s senators, he received a charter for
South Carolina’s first national bank in January
1872. Initially he opened for business at the
Goodlett House, but early in 1873 the
Greenville National Bank moved into a new
two-story brick “Cleveland Range” near the
corner of Main and Avenue Streets. As the
only bank in Greenville until 1885, Beattie’s
new enterprise flourished, providing capital
for the textile mills that ultimately brought
prosperity to the growing town.
Among those mills were Camperdown in
the city and Piedmont, some fifteen miles
away on the Saluda River. Camperdown
began humbly in 1873, when Bostonians
Oscar H. Sampson and George F. Hall,
searching for a site for a southern textile
operation, chose Greenville. They leased a
grain mill on the south bank of the Reedy
River below the Furman University campus,
expanded it, purchased machinery, and
opened Sampson, Hall & Co., a cotton thread
factory, in 1874.
Two years later, they leased additional land
on the north side of the river and erected
a much larger mill that they named
“Camperdown” in honor of a famous textile
operation in Dundee, Scotland. Sampson,
Hall & Co. became Camperdown Number
One. Before the new mill began operations in
March 1876, the company started a school to
teach former farmers how to operate the
machinery, built two “factory houses” for
single operatives, and constructed mill village
housing along Falls Street.
At the same time that Sampson and Hall
were starting their in-town mill, native
Greenvillian Henry Hammett was beginning a
riskier venture at Garrison Shoals on the
Saluda. He began digging foundations for
Piedmont Mill in 1873, but a depression that
year brought construction to a halt. Building
would not resume for more than a year, and
the mill itself would not open until 1876, but
soon afterwards Piedmont would become one
of the largest operations in the state.
In addition to cotton and the mills, the
Airline Railroad helped to bring a degree of
prosperity to Reconstruction Greenville. That
railroad, completed in 1874, linked
Greenville to Charlotte and Atlanta. From its
terminal on West Washington Street, town
merchants and farmers could more easily
ship produce abroad, and the town could
entice emigrants. In 1876, Thomas Gower
purchased two cars, four mules, iron for
track, and laid rails from the Airline station to
the terminus of the Columbia and Greenville
Railroad (its name had changed after a
reorganization) on Augusta Street. That “street
railway” became the pride of Greenville, a
source of convenience and economic growth.
Greenville’s population doubled between
1870 and 1876, with much of the
increase due to the Camperdown Mill and
the Airline Railroad. The coming of new
people brought new businesses, new
construction, St. Mary’s Catholic Church,
and new energy to the town. After Wade
Hampton was elected governor in 1876
and Reconstruction ended, there was, said
Alexander Townes, the new president of the
Female College, “a new feeling in the air. The
bonds of Reconstruction had been thrown off.
Everywhere there was building.”
✧
The Greenville station of the Southern
Railroad was originally established for the
Charlotte and Atlanta air lines in 1874.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER V
37

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
38

CHAPTER VI
B ECOMING THE “NEW S OUTH”
In the 1880s, Henry Grady, the dynamic editor of the Atlanta Constitution, proclaimed in
speeches, editorials, and articles the arrival of the “New South,” an integral part of the nation where
industrialization was replacing agriculture, and blacks and whites were partners in progress. While
his assertions were far more optimistic than real, Greenville’s leaders absorbed his encouragement
of industry. Between 1876 and 1912, the county became a place of cotton mills, smokestacks, and
mill whistles; a place that, slowly, gradually, re-entered the Union.
It wasn’t easy. In 1880, Greenville was still overwhelmingly agricultural, and, while its county
seat had attained the dignity of cityhood, it was still a sleepy market town. Its streets were unpaved;
thick red mud made street-crossing treacherous after rains. There was no piped water or sewers,
no electric lights (and few gas streetlights); no public school system. While Camperdown and
Piedmont Mills were expanding and the city’s population had tripled, it took risk-taking
entrepreneurs to lay the foundation of the modern community.
Cotton mills led the way. In addition to Camperdown, Piedmont, and the old mills at Batesville
and Pelham, in 1882 Charles Lanneau built the Huguenot Mill in six months to manufacture “plaid
cloth under electric lights” on Broad Street. But because of an economic depression, the difficulty
of obtaining capital, and a lack of experienced workers, it wasn’t until the mid-1890s that
entrepreneurs created a “Textile Crescent” around the western edge of the city that transformed the
local landscape with huge multi-story brick factories and neat mill villages.
The first three were American Spinning, Poe Manufacturing, and Mills Mill. The first to open,
in September 1895, was American Spinning Company, a yarn mill founded by Oscar Sampson,
who had leased Camperdown Mill, which was closed. Sampson moved Camperdown’s twenty-year
old machinery into a simple wooden building (praised by a local newspaper as “superior to any
mill, north or south”) near the Buncombe Road. A few months later, Francis Poe opened Poe Mill
on adjacent land. “A foolish experiment” some called it. But Poe Manufacturing Company was
successful from the start. Lockwood, Greene & Company of Pawtucket, R.I., an experienced textile
engineering company, assigned their newest employee, Greenvillian J.E. Sirrine, to design a
10,000-spindle, 432,000-square foot mill and lay out its adjacent village. These sites, like all
of Greenville’s textile crescent mills, were located just outside the city limits (to avoid taxes) on
a branch of the Reedy River, had spur lines from the Southern (formerly Airline) Railroad,
and, after January 1901, had easy access to downtown because the city’s first electric trolley
terminated nearby.
Mills Mill, founded by O. P. Mills and directed by his son-in-law, Walter Moore, didn’t open
until the spring of 1897. Mills, an experienced merchant (at 54, “one of the oldest and most
successful entrepreneurs in town,” according to the Greenville Daily News), built it on the site of his
former dairy farm off the Augusta Road. Underfunded, like all of these early mills, it was initially
a small operation with 8,000 spindles and housing for only two hundred workers.
A second surge of mill building began in 1900. Within two years, Brandon, Carolina,
Monaghan, and Woodside Mills, together with Union Bleaching and Finishing Company, were
organized. Brandon, west of Mills Mill, began production in February 1901. Its president was J. I.
Westervelt, who had previously managed Pelham Mill, and who began Carolina (later Poinsett)
Mill on Birnie Street two years later. By the time “Shoeless Joe” Jackson began playing baseball for
the Brandon team in 1903, the village had 450 homes laid out on curving streets.
Jackson, the most famous player never elected to the Hall of Fame, was, like most Greenvillians
at the turn of the century, in love with baseball. Unlike all but a very few, he became a major league
star before the “Black Sox” scandal in 1919 ended his professional career. But every mill had at least
✧
Yoked oxen plodded through Main Street’s
mud and dust until the first decade of the
twentieth century. Note the “County
Dispensary,” one of the few places that
Greenvillians could purchase alcohol in
the 1880s and ’90s, with profits going to
the state.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
CHAPTER VI
39

✧
Right: The Huguenot Mill, constructed in six
months in 1882, was the first factory to be
illuminated by electric lights so that workers
could match the plaid cloth woven there.
Underfinanced, it failed during the Panic of
1907 and was later converted into an
apparel manufacturing company.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY
Below: Greenville’s Confederate Memorial,
with its cannons facing south, stood in the
middle of Main and College Streets until
the 1920s. After 1901, when beltline
trolley began operating, that was its Main
Street terminus.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
40
one baseball team, supported by management
as a source of pride and morale. A young man
with a good throwing arm or the ability to hit
homeruns was guaranteed an easier and
higher paying mill job than his peers and
earned a premium when he played well. Every
time Jackson hit a homerun, for example, his
younger brothers would circulate through the
crowd, hat in hand; he sometimes took home
as much as $25 after a winning game. For a
teenager earning $7.80 a week, baseball was
a bonanza.
The Parker cousins, Lewis and Thomas,
built Monaghan Mill southwest of Poe on
Cedar Lane Road. It opened in 1902 with
25,000 spindles and more than doubled
capacity within two years. President Thomas
Parker hired recent University of South
Carolina graduate Lawrence Peter Hollis, who
became director of an extensive YMCA
recreational program at the mill. Pete Hollis
introduced Boy Scouts, soccer, and basketball
to Greenville, and Monaghan became famous
for its remarkable community services. The
Woodside brothers built between Monaghan
and Brandon on a ridge overlooking a branch
of the Reedy River in 1902. They expanded
Woodside Mill so rapidly and thoroughly that
by 1913 it was the largest textile enterprise
under one roof in the nation, with more than
900 workers living on its mill hill.
Although Union Bleaching and Finishing
was not a textile mill—it was a bleaching and
dyeing operation encouraged and partially
funded by North Carolina tobacco magnate
James B. Duke—it was considered part of the
Textile Crescent, and its success contributed
to Greenville’s development as a textile center.
A risky venture established on swampy
ground along the Buncombe Road by
northern investors, this second bleaching
operation in the South was initially a disaster.
It had to be recapitalized two years after its

opening in 1902, and new management led
by Virginian John Arrington was brought in to
save it.
The “operatives” who worked in these
mills were initially recruited from among poor
white tenant farmers in South Carolina’s
mountain valleys. But mills throughout the
upstate, not just in Greenville County,
clamored for workers, and by 1905 most were
sending recruiters into the North Carolina,
Georgia, and Tennessee mountains to lure
new hands to their operations. The “Great
Migration” that year turned thousands of
“hard-scrabble” farmers into textile workers.
They loaded their families and possessions
into recruiters’ wagons, tied their cow or pigs
to its rear, and made the long trek down the
Buncombe Road to new jobs that brought
cash, security, and substantially better, if less
independent, living conditions.
Men, women, and children (few under the
age of seven) all worked in the mill, for wages
ranging from $5 to $14 a week for 66 hours of
work. Mill floors were hard on bare feet;
cotton lint permeated the air; in summer,
sweat dripped from arms and legs. Life was
regulated by mill whistles: at 5:30 to rise;
6:00 to work; noon for lunch; 6 p.m. the end
of work, six days a week, 51 weeks a year.
But for families who had barely scraped
out existence in one-room cabins in mountain
“hollers,” there were compensations. Mill
houses rented for 25 cents a room a week;
schools and churches were provided,
electricity (one “drop” bulb per room) was
inexpensive; the mill supplied coal, firewood,
and ice at low cost, funded baseball teams,
and provided cow pastures, pig sties, and
garden plots. Basic medical care and garbage
disposal were free; mill stores had reasonable
prices. Most important, there was cash—
nickels and dimes and a few dollars in a
manila envelope at the end of the week.
Mill villages were “like a family” with a
shared heritage. Although mills hired black
men and women for the dirtiest outside jobs
✧
Above: Baseball became a mill village
passion in the 1890s. Here the Piedmont
Mill team poses before a game against arch
rival Pelzer Mill.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: Joe Jackson may never have been
elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the
famous White Sox hitter is today
memorialized in a West End statue.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
CHAPTER VI
41

✧
Above: Monaghan Mill near Cedar Lane
Road offered an exceptional range of “social
welfare” activities, including the first
industrial YMCA in the South. Its
surrounding village was carefully laid out
and landscaped.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Right: By-products like cotton seed oil, used
primarily for fertilizer, added to Greenville’s
cotton economy at the turn of the century.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
and provided housing and schools for them
apart from the central village, more than 95
percent of villagers were poor, white,
Protestant, and ethnically Scots-Irish. While
they were looked down on by city people who
called them “lintheads,” because of the cotton
that lingered in their hair, workers were
proud men and women who sought better
lives for themselves and their families.
While some city folk may have been
disdainful, most knew that the mills and their
workers were the source of Greenville’s
growing prosperity. By the turn of the century,
the face of the city was changing. Wooden
buildings, always a fire hazard, had given way
to fire-proof brick construction on Main
Street. A new federal post office at the corner
of Broad and South Main Streets, completed
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
42

in 1892, quickly became a landmark. A
network of wires crossed downtown streets to
serve forty electric street lights (lit whenever
clouds covered the moon) and telephone
service, started locally by Thomas Gower in
1882. Main Street had been paved from East
North Street to the river. The private Paris
Mountain Water Company piped water into
the city, which had established a sewer
system. Central School on Westfield Street
offered ten grades, although it was not yet an
accredited high school.
The antebellum pedestrian bridge over the
Reedy River at Main Street had, after an
intense campaign in 1870 by mayoral
candidate Thomas Gower, been replaced by a
sturdy wooden one that enabled horses and
carriages to cross over the river. It lasted until
1890, when an iron bridge was erected,
encouraging more growth, both commercial
and residential, in the West End of town.
When Alexander McBee, one of Vardry
McBee’s heirs, sold his farm on the west bank
of the river opposite the carriage factory in
1892, Presbyterians established Chicora
College for young ladies on part of the site.
Their grand domed auditorium and central
classroom and dormitory building provided
✧
Left: Three volunteer companies, one allblack
(Neptune), two all-white (Robert E.
Lee and Palmetto) fought Greenville fires
until 1905, when the force became salaried
(and all white). Even brick construction
could not stop frequently disastrous Main
Street fires.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Below: Presbyterian Chicora College
educated young ladies on its West End
campus from 1894 to 1915, when it moved
to Columbia. The president’s house, to the
right of the main building, had once been
Alexander McBee’s home.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER VI
43

✧
Northern troops, anticipating “the Sunny
South,” shivered during the coldest winter
in the county’s history in 1898. Children
skated on the Reedy River and threw
snow “bolls.”
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
44
primary and preparatory instruction to local
girls, and its college classes brought wellchaperoned
young women from throughout
the region to the growing neighborhood
“across the river.” Chicora sparked a smallscale
West End building boom. River and
Pendleton Streets became elegant residential
neighborhoods; brick commercial buildings,
including cotton warehouses and small stores,
lined the first blocks of Pendleton and
Augusta Streets; the American Bank was
established on the “smoothing iron” shaped
lot between them. Older churches established
missions—Second Presbyterian to serve
Chicora, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, St. Paul’s
Methodist, Pendleton Street Baptist.
When the Spanish-American War erupted
in 1898, Greenville got an economic boost
because real estate developer Alester Furman,
Mayor J. T. Williams, and Alderman James
Richardson convinced the army to locate the
site of Camp Wetherill here. The camp
had two sites: a western one on land around
the Dunbars’ farm, and an eastern one on
the Stone estate on Earle Street between
Buncombe Road and modern day Wade
Hampton Boulevard. Whitehall, the only
house on Earle Street, became a nurses’
residence. Although the war officially
ended in August 1898, just before the first
troops arrived from West Virginia,
Massachusetts, Missouri, and New Jersey, the
ten thousand men assigned to Wetherill
remained here throughout the coldest winter
in the county’s history.
While some residents resented the first
“northern invasion” since Reconstruction,
merchants were overjoyed by the jingle of
cash registers during the Christmas season.
Indeed, most citizens embraced the war,
welcomed the troops, began flying the
American flag again, and for the first time
since the Civil War, celebrated the Fourth of
July, which had been almost exclusively a
black holiday since Emancipation. When the
war ended, there was universal jubilation.
Greenville began for the first time in a
generation to feel like a part of the nation.
While the army camp gave an upward jolt
to the economy, it was the jobs and income
generated by the mills that led to the city’s
first “suburbs.” Ever since the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary had moved to
Louisville in 1872, James Pettigru Boyce’s
grand estate east of Christ Church had been
rented to the Greenville Military Academy
(locally referred to as “Captain Patrick’s
school”); its grounds were used for local
baseball games. Boyce’s heirs sold the
property to the Goldsmith Company in the
mid-1890s. Platted with streets named for
former seminary professors (Boyce and
Pettigru, Williams, Whittset, Toy, and
Broadus) and planted with shade trees, Boyce
Lawn soon became the neighborhood of
choice for textile executives. By 1917
presidents of 54 mills lived there.
After Vardry McBee’s death in 1864, his
heirs sold his home, Prospect Hill, and much
of the surrounding land to John Westfield. In
1874, Westfield extended Washington Street
through his property all the way to the new
Airline Railroad station, and West Washington
Street became a desirable residential avenue.
At about the same time, the McBee heirs laid
out a parallel street, initially named West,
then Highland, and finally Hampton Avenue,
and built substantial homes for themselves on
the first block west of Butler Avenue, close to
the old home of Pinkney and Harriet Butler
McBee. Pinkney had died in 1859, but his
widow lived there with her eldest son, Frank,
until her death in 1902. Then, in a flurry of
buying and selling, Greenville’s first “western

suburb,” Hampton-Pinckney (a misplaced
attempt to “correct” the spelling of Pinkney
McBee’s name), developed, with Pinkney (or
“Pinckney”) Street laid out and gracious
house lots platted along Butler.
Both of these neighborhoods were the
choice of well-to-do executives, but many
new residents were white collar workers,
among them clerks, accountants, and young
professionals, who built or bought cozy
bungalows on new streets in the West End
or on Townes, Stone, and newly developed
Earle Streets.
Black people, though, did not have those
options. The hopes and political participation
of Reconstruction had given way to Jim Crow
laws and segregation at the same time that
sharecroppers were struggling to scratch out a
bare living. While African-Americans in the
city had long controlled the hauling, draying,
and barbering professions and worked together
with white men on construction and railroad
crews, even those jobs were harder to come by
after 1900. Many, probably most, worked as
servants, as cooks, laundresses, maids, and
livery men for white families; many lived in
small houses on alleys near their employers’
homes. But others owned or rented homes in
black enclaves, “towns” that had formed after
the Civil War—Freetown, Buckner Town,
Brutontown, and Nicholtown. As conditions
worsened after the turn the century, many went
north to seek better conditions. The county’s
black population grew by only 1,400 people
between 1900 and 1910; its white population
increased by 14,000. Henry Grady’s brave talk
of “partnership” between blacks and whites
had no reality for them. The only gleam of
hope was Sterling.
In 1896, the Rev. D. M. Minus, pastor of
Silver Hill Methodist Church, established an
academy in the church’s lecture hall. By 1902 it
had outgrown the space, and, with the help of
Monaghan Mill president Thomas Parker, a
biracial board of trustees raised money for a
high school for black children on land that had
been part of Camp Wetherill. Named for a
northern benefactress who had made the first
contribution, the school complex on Jenkins
Street eventually had four buildings, including
✧
Above: Sterling High School, located on the
site of Camp Wetherill, was the educational
center of the African-American community
for nearly seventy years. A fire demolished
the structure in 1969.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: In addition to water and telephone
service, by 1905 Greenville was electrified
by power generated by the newly erected
Saluda Lake Dam. The Carolina Power
Company, organized by Alester G. Furman,
was sold to James B. Duke’s Southern
Utilities Company in 1910.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER VI
45

✧
Above: Greenville’s first free library, opened
by Miss Viola Neblett in 1897 in a small
house across from Central School on
Westfield Street, served the community for
more than twenty years.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
46
dormitories for boys and girls, and within three
years enrolled more than 200 students. Set up
for the “intellectual, industrial, and religious
training of boys and girls of the Negro race,” it
was modeled on Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Sterling Industrial College offered training in
domestic skills for future cooks and
seamstresses, vocational education, and
academic subjects for especially bright
youngsters who dreamed of being teachers,
about the only profession open to African-
Americans. It remained a private institution
until the 1920s, when the city school district
acquired it and made it the town’s only high
school for African Americans.
For whites, though, Grady’s words fell on
fertile soil. A short-lived “Board of Trade and
Cotton Exchange,” known locally as the
Chamber of Commerce, had formed in 1879
with the goal of making Greenville “a big city.”
Members proposed to do so by working to
lower railroad freight rates and bring cotton
sellers to the county. It died in 1882, was
revived, and died again with the Panic of
1893. But then a group of young business
men, led by Lewis Parker and Alester G.
Furman, started the Young Men’s Business
League. Referred to as the “Progressive
Association” by the Greenville Daily News, it
soon enrolled two hundred younger
professional men and executives. They
worked to promote Greenville, improve
sanitation, expand the water system, support
education, and, most significantly, encourage
the building of cotton mills.
In 1901, Parker and Furman, wanting to
engage more Greenville businessmen in the
life of the community, formed a new Board of
Trade. It advocated bringing immigrants to the
city from Northern Europe, municipal
ownership of the water system, and city
beautification. They chose a city motto, “The
Pearl of the Piedmont,” supported the building
of an industrial YMCA at Monaghan Mill and
encouraged industrial diversification because
they were concerned that Greenville was
becoming too dependent on textiles.
Their first major project was bringing a
cigar factory to Greenville. In 1903 members
raised enough money to buy land at the
corner of East Court and Falls Streets and
construct a building designed for the
American Tobacco Company’s Seidenburg
Cigar Manufacturing subsidiary. Although the
location was conveniently near the
courthouse, post office, and retail stores, it
was cheap. The county jail, “Old Siberia,” was
nearby, and the land edged the city’s small but
notorious Court Street “red light” district.
The Board of Trade hired textile mill
designer and architect J. E. Sirrine, who had
just gone into business for himself, to design
and construct a building that could be easily
converted to a cotton mill in case the new
industry was unsuccessful. But it flourished,

offering girls and women a seated alternative
to tending looms for $6 a week. Within six
months after its October 1903 opening, 250
workers at the Seidenburg Factory were
turning out 60,000 high quality (eight cents
each) cigars daily.
Emboldened by its success, new prosperity,
and the national City Beautiful movement,
President Thomas Parker urged the Board to
turn its attention from industrial growth to
aesthetic improvement. In a speech to the
influential 39 Club, he attacked Greenville’s
“ring of smoke-belching furnaces…the streets
muddy in winter and dusty in summer with
waste papers and tin cans conspicuous in every
direction, and a large fertilizer factory adjoining
the corporate limits,” and praised, as its only
redeeming feature, the town’s trees. Sparked by
Parker’s concern, the Board spun off the
Municipal League, whose purpose was to
promote city beautification. They hired Kelsey
and Guild, a well known Boston landscape
architectural firm, to make recommendations
for the future. Small southern mill town that it
was, Greenville, like cities across America, was
feeling stirrings of progressivism.
✧
Left: Governor Benjamin Perry’s “Sans
Souci” mansion became Greenville’s first
country club in 1905, with nine crossing golf
greens. In the prosperous early 1920s, it
moved across town to become the Greenville
Country Club.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: This view of South Main Street at the
turn of the twentieth century shows the
Record Building to the right. On the left,
beyond the 1856 County Courthouse, is the
old Mansion House. Power poles already
festoon the street.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
CHAPTER VI
47

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
48

CHAPTER VII
C IVIC
P ROGRESS
The Municipal League published “Improving and Beautifying Greenville, South Carolina,” the
city’s first attempt at future planning, in January 1907. The report, complete with maps and
pictures, bemoaned treeless and narrow streets, dangerous street-level railway crossings, signs and
telephone poles disfiguring downtown, and cotton stored on sidewalks. It pointed out that privies
and private wells in close proximity bred typhoid fever and vividly described slaughter pens on
Richland Creek near City Park. Author Harlan Kelsey’s recommendations included broadening
and extending streets, planting trees, establishing parks, improving sanitation, and removing
safety hazards.
Greenville did not become a city beautiful as a result. The Panic of 1907 got in the way,
and government hated spending money. But the report triggered interest, both private and
public, in improving the quality of community life and led to nearly twenty years of substantial
civic investment.
Business leaders began urging the replacement of the old jail, long unfit for human habitation, and
the courthouse, a poorly designed, leaky-roofed building with miserable acoustics, although the
county legislative delegation side-stepped the issue by appointing a commission headed by Alester G.
Furman to arrange, somehow, for passage of a bond issue to finance the new public buildings. It took
three votes, and it wasn’t until the jail had been condemned that a new facility, designed to house “the
cleverest crooks who may from time to time find their way within the keeping of the county” finally
replaced “Old Siberia” in 1916. It took even longer—until the spring of 1918— before a handsome
new courthouse, designed by Atlanta architect Thornton Mayre, heard its first case.
Hotels encouraged new investment. New York financiers and selling agents, New England
textile machine manufacturers, traveling salesmen, and internationally known performers at
the new Opera House had begun to make regular visits to the suddenly assertive small city.
The old Mansion House, built in 1823, was run-down and dilapidated. Boarding Houses
offered neither privacy, good food, nor comfort. In 1909 Alester Furman, A. J. Capers, and other
businessmen opened the Ottaray Hotel at the top of North Main Street, on a residential block apart
from the main business district. Critics, and there were many, thought it a questionable location.
But the $100,000 white-painted brick building with 83 rooms on five floors and gracious verandas
across the front was an instant success. So too was the third “skyscraper” in South Carolina, the
90-room, seven-story Imperial Hotel (now “The Summit”), opened in 1912.
In the same year, the first public hospital opened on Arlington Avenue in the West End. It had
taken sixteen frustrating years of effort, mostly by well-to-do and charitable women who sponsored
money-raising teas and bazaars, to make it a reality. Finally the threat of typhoid, cholera, and
smallpox together with the generosity of textile executives raised $20,000 to purchase and convert
the private Corbett Sanitarium into an 84-bed hospital with a training school for nurses. In 1917,
the city bought the hospital and within four years had added a new building that increased the
number of beds to 125 and shifted the entrance around the corner to Memminger Street. With
emergency services, provision for isolating patients with contagious diseases, and some limited aid
for “the deserving poor,” it vastly improved local health care.
So did the first attempt to provide for victims of tuberculosis. In 1915, Mrs. Harry Haynsworth
and Mrs. Mary Gridley formed the Hopewell Tuberculosis Association and opened one of the
pioneer tuberculosis “camps” in the state in a tent on the property of the County Home on
Rutherford Road.
Community health also improved thanks to the YMCA and YWCA. Since 1876 Greenville had
YMCA “rooms” including a (very small) gymnasium, baths, and recreation facilities in the Record
✧
“Swamp Rabbit” railroad cars were as
rickety as their tracks, but the line, which
followed the course of the Reedy River (thus
its name) to Travelers Rest and eventually
north to picnic grounds at River Falls was a
Greenville tradition for fifty years or more.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER VII
49

✧
The 1907 city plan anticipates Cleveland
Park around the Reedy and envisions an
“inner beltway” circling the city. While only
a few of its recommendations were
immediately enacted, it suggested
improvement—including the extension of
Broad Street and a “Civic Center”—that
were realized decades later.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
50
Building. In 1910, however, after a whirlwind
campaign, organizers raised $52,000 and
built an impressive three-story YMCA
headquarters at the corner of Brown and
Coffee Streets. It had all the modern
conveniences for “wholesome recreation”:
reading and game rooms, swimming pool,
baths, bowling alleys, gymnasium, a lecture
hall, and rooms to rent.
The men and boys who enjoyed it were
“downtown people,” but textile crescent mills
also erected their own YMCA’s. The first, at
Monaghan Mill, opened in 1904; by 1912,
when the new downtown building opened,
there were “industrial” YMCA’s at Mills,
Woodside, Victor, and Judson Mills as
well. Although the city’s YWCA was not
established permanently until the First World
War, there was an attempt to start a mill
village YWCA program at Monaghan between
1904 and 1914.
These services were essential to attract
workers to the large new mills that completed
the textile crescent. Westervelt Mill and
Dunean Mill were announced in December
1910 and opened within three weeks of each
other in spring 1912. Unlike earlier mills,
they were funded by northerners. Each had a
million dollars in capital; and each was
planned to produce fine quality textiles. Their
management, however, was local. Captain
Ellison Smyth, who owned Pelzer Mill, was
the force behind Dunean; J. I. Westervelt, the
president of Brandon and Carolina Mills,
headed the mill on the Easley Bridge Road. He
was so over-extended, though, that within
a year management was reorganized, and
Bennette Geer, a former university professor,

was named president. He renamed it Judson
in honor of Charles Judson, his mentor and
the longtime dean of Furman, who had
recently died.
While the city of Greenville was tasting
prosperity, the county’s crossroad villages
grew into (very) small towns. For a hundred
years, drovers and their herds of swine, cattle,
and wild turkeys had stopped at Travelers
Rest, and stagecoach roads had created small
settlements at Simpsonville, Fountain Inn,
and Butler’s Crossroads. Railroads changed
the landscape. The Airline Railroad
established a flag stop—Greer’s Depot—on
Manning Greer’s 200-acre farm in 1875; soon
afterward the property was platted, and a
village grew up around its station. After the
Airline was absorbed into the Southern
Railroad system in 1880, a depot was added at
Taylor’s Station, convenient to the Chick
Springs Hotel. When the Greenville and
Laurens Railroad, whose president was
Lieutenant Governor W. L. Mauldin, selected
a route to Greenville paralleling the old
stagecoach road through Fountain Inn,
Simpsonville, and Butler’s Crossroads in
1884, the latter village was so elated that it
changed its name to honor him. The county’s
population almost doubled—from 37,800 to
more than 68,300—between 1880 and 1910,
and that growth was almost entirely due to
the railroads and cotton mills.
While Greer had grown into a relatively
thriving village because of its depot, cotton
fields, cotton gin, and peach orchards, it
became a mill town in the 1890s when Victor,
Franklin, and Appalache Mills were
constructed. With Monaghan Mill in
Greenville, they became a part of Lewis
Parker’s textile empire, the huge Parker
✧
Above: World War I stalled the construction
of Greenville’s fifth courthouse for almost
nine months. It eventually cost $150,000.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Below: The Ottaray Hotel, completed in
1909, was Greenville’s first “modern” hotel.
It stood at the top of Main Street until 1962.
COURTESY OF THE FURMAN COMPANY.
CHAPTER VII
51

✧
The offices of the Hopewell Tuberculosis
Association were, like all Greenville
facilities, rigidly segregated. “Consumption,”
as it was called, struck rich and poor, black
and white alike, and was one of the major
causes of death.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
52
Cotton Mills Company. Before that company
failed in 1914, it controlled more than a
million spindles and had combined assets of
$15 million dollars. Even though that
company had to be reorganized, the resulting
firm, the Victor-Monaghan Company, was one
of the county’s largest and most profitable
cotton operations for decades.
Taylors was the site of a mineral spring. In
the antebellum period, visitors had flocked to
Dr. Burwell Chick’s spa and gracious hotel on
the site. Although the hotel burned down
during the Civil War, it was resurrected in the
1880s and once more became a pleasant
resort. The grand hotel overlooking the spa’s
bubbling waters was eventually sold at
auction in 1916 to become first a military
academy and then a clinic. Alfred Taylor, who
owned hundreds of nearby acres, was
adamantly opposed to cotton mills, and it was
not until after his death that Southern
Bleachery was erected in 1924.
Both Fountain Inn and Simpsonville grew
up with mills. Local businessmen established
Fountain Inn Cotton Mill in 1897, thirteen
years after the town was chartered. In 1911,
Robert Quillen began the Fountain Inn Tribune,
a small town newspaper that later became
nationally famous because of his humorous
columns and cartoons and his down home
wisdom. Edgar F. Woodside opened
Simpsonville Manufacturing Company in
1908, and three years later the Woodside
brothers purchased the Fountain Inn Mill.
Mauldin, without a mill, grew slowly.
The Swamp Rabbit Railroad (officially the
Greenville & Knoxville) brought day trippers
to the Anderson House, a resort inn near
Travelers Rest. But until Renfrew Bleachery
was established nearby in the late 1920s, it
was still primarily a farming center. In the
“Dark Corner” of the northern county, where
even sheriff’s deputies hesitated to penetrate,
settlers eked out a living by farming and
(more profitably) operating illegal stills along
mountain streams. The one bright spot was
North Greenville High School in Tigerville,
opened in 1893.
In addition to the steam locomotives that
connected many of these towns, starting in
1914 both passengers and freight were also
transported by the electric Piedmont &
Northern Interurban Railway system, linking
Spartanburg to Greenville, Anderson, and
Greenwood. Conceived by James B. Duke,
trains stopped at Greer, Taylors, Paris, and
Sans Souci before depositing passengers at its
terminal at West McBee and Academy Street.
Duke, who had purchased the locally owned
Carolina Power Company in 1910, merged it
into his Southern Utilities Company (later
Duke Power). He used electricity generated
by the 1905 Saluda River Dam for the trains
and the beltline trolley system that encircled
the town.
But in those last years before the Great
War, trains were being challenged. Henry
Ford’s Model T automobile had come to town,
and the Greenville News reported monthly on
the number of local car registrations

compared with those in Richland County. All
those cars—well over a thousand by 1913—
passing over the iron bridge at Main Street,
together with the circus elephants who were
too heavy to use it and had to ford the river,
led the city council to allocate funds for a
handsome new concrete bridge over the
Reedy at Main Street.
While they were at it, they also paved
Academy, River, Court, and College Streets.
Within a year or two, Augusta Road would
become “a mighty highway, forty feet wide,”
and “automobile tourists” were assured that
they would soon drive on “a relatively smooth
road” all the way to Hendersonville. Although
the old Coach Factory on the Reedy River had
a new paint shop, retail outlet, and sheds, its
days were numbered: R. N. Tannahill was
advertising that “One Buick truck can do the
work of three wagons with horses.” In 1914
✧
Above: Greenville’s first YMCA building was
completed in 1911 and served the
community until 1960. Located at the
corner of Brown and Coffee Streets, it was
constructed after a whirlwind four-monthslong
fund-raising drive.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Below: Greer, straddling Greenville and
Spartanburg Counties, grew up as a
railroad town with depots serving first the
Airline (later the Southern Railroad) and
later (1914) the Piedmont & Northern
electric railroad.
COURTESY OF THE GREER HERITAGE MUSEUM.
CHAPTER VII
53

✧
Above: The bubbling sulfurated waters at
Chick Springs near Taylors attracted
vacationers—before the Civil War, when a
special carriage met visitors at the
Greenville & Columbia Railroad Station
and drove them to a resort hotel owned by
“Dr. Chick and his lady.” In later years, day
trippers sipped from a tin cup at the eviltasting
but supposedly health-giving springs.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: For several years before World War I,
a grand new hotel at the Springs welcomed
wealthy tourists. It later became a health
clinic and sanatorium.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
the factory closed; automobiles had
vanquished buggies and farm carts.
Construction boomed. The Greenville News,
soon to be owned by B. H. Peace, built a new
plant; Geer Drug Company constructed a
three-story building in the West End that
almost immediately became the home of
Thompson’s T-Model Ford Agency; Carolina
Supply opened, as did a furniture store
advertising “an electric elevator.” But perhaps
the most substantial construction was at the
Greenville Female College.
After the turn of the century, that school,
presided over since 1878 by its beloved (and
feared) “lady principal,” Mary Camilla Judson,
Charles Judson’s sister, and a series of male
presidents, had begun to grow. A discreet
feminist who believed that women deserved
an education equal to that of men, she
encouraged students to think for themselves.
Many did and became local leaders in the
women’s suffrage movement or in advocating
social changes. James (“Miss Jim”) Perry went
to law school at the University of California
and was the first woman to pass the South
Carolina bar. She later founded the Greenville
Humane Society. Enrollment increased to
nearly 500 in its primary, preparatory, and
college programs; facilities and school spirit
improved; the curriculum was strengthened.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
54

✧
Left: The Piedmont & Northern electric
railroad carried freight and passengers
between Spartanburg and Anderson from
1911 to 1947, when passenger service
ended. In later years it was known as the
“Poor and Needy.”
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Below: The future—in the form of Model-T
Fords—came to Greer in 1909, when
Thompson’s Hardware store began retailing
automobiles in addition to paint, nails, and
grates. The company moved to Greenville
about 1913 and established the first Ford
agency there.
COURTESY OF THE GREER HERITAGE MUSEUM.
When David Ramsay became president in
1911, a major building program changed the
total appearance of the college.
He built two new dormitories, erected a
“sanitary dairy” for the cows that supplied
college milk and butter, upgraded science
laboratories, and totally renovated the old
main building, changing the college façade
from its original Victorian style to a southern
colonial look, complete with columns. And in
1914, as part of its modernization, trustees
agreed to change the school’s name to the
“Greenville Woman’s College.”
Furman University also improved facilities
and modernized its curriculum. It too had
suffered through nearly thirty years of
financial stagnation and mediocrity. After
1898, new president A. P. Montague, the
first layman and first faculty member to
hold a Ph.D., totally revamped the
curriculum, supported student publications,
and built an auditorium, a dormitory,
and a “Fitting School” to prepare future
students. His successor, Edwin McNeal
Poteat, with the help of funds from the
Rockefeller Brothers’ General Education
Board and the Carnegie Foundation,
constructed a new library, a science building,
and a dormitory in addition to paving and
beautifying campus drives.
CHAPTER VII
55

✧
Above: Mary Judson, lady principal of the
Greenville Female College from 1874 until
1910, was a respected, admired, and feared
mentor for generations of Greenville girls
and women.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Below: Greer’s handsome and substantial
grammar school was among the new and
improved county schools erected between
1905 and 1915. Many country school
houses remained one or two room buildings
serving multiple grades.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
56
Even the long-neglected and consistently
under-funded public school system added
new elementary schools, and in 1916 new
superintendent J. L. Mann created an eleventh
grade at Central School, and Greenville High
School was officially born.
Students and faculty from these schools,
together with most local citizens, hailed the
announcement in December 1914 that
Greenville would host the first Southern
Textile Exposition. Atlanta mill men, whose
idea it had been, were leery about going
forward because war in Europe had depressed
cotton prices and mill profits. When a dozen
Greenvillians took up the idea, the Southern
Textile Association was delighted but wary
because the city’s population was only about
20,000; it might not have the resources to
make the exposition a success.
It was a Herculean task to get ready for the
expected 40,000 visitors, but Joseph E.
Sirrine converted a Piedmont & Northern
warehouse for exposition use, and a
committee made elaborate arrangements for
hospitality for the November 1915 show.
Every space was taken with 169 exhibitions.
That first exposition was such a success that
immediately after it closed a new committee
formed to build a permanent site. J. E. Sirrine
designed and built a huge hall on West
Washington Street, costing $130,000, that
opened (without a back wall) in time for the
second exposition in November 1917. Textile
Hall became the site of community events for
the next fifty years, but, more importantly, it
signaled Greenville’s emerging role as the
textile center of the South.
By the time of the second exposition, the
country had been at war for six months.
Patriotic fervor gripped everyone after the
Declaration of War on Germany in April.
Young men rushed to join the army, whites in
the 30th “Old Hickory” Division, blacks in the
371st infantry. That fervor was fanned by the
government’s June announcement that the
county would be the site of Camp Sevier. In
August, when the first 30,000 men of the Old
Hickory Division arrived, the town went into
high gear. Soldiers’ clubs sprouted downtown;
hospitable residents invited soldiers to their
homes; churches arranged special programs
for them. And Mrs. Eugenia Duke began
making hundreds—then thousands—of
sandwiches daily in her Manly Street
apartment, using her special mayonnaise
recipe, to feed the hungry multitudes.
Shuttled to the city by thirteen Piedmont
& Northern trains daily, the 100,000 men
who eventually trained at the foot of Paris
Mountain changed civilian life. Romances
blossomed at chaperoned dances at Cleveland
Hall and the Imperial Hotel. So many soldiers
buzzed around the Greenville Woman’s
College that a military policeman was
stationed there. Wives and families followed
soldiers, filling boarding houses, hotels, and

✧
Left: Textile Hall, constructed in 1917 for
the second American Textile Manufacturers
Exposition, became the site of community
meetings, dinners, and the Southern Textile
Basketball League annual tournament. It
was demolished in 1992 to provide parking
space for St. Mary’s Church.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BLAKE PRAYTOR.
Below: Camp Sevier covered more than
2,000 acres at the foot of Paris Mountain
from August 1917 until February 1919.
Soldiers of the 30th “Old Hickory” Division,
primarily men from the Carolinas and
Tennessee, were warmed by firewood cut
from the trees on the property.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
spare rooms to capacity. Rents rose; so did
prices. When Greenville’s water supply was
threatened by military use, City Council
purchased the private Paris Mountain Water
Company and floated a million dollar bond
issue to expand it.
In September 1918, Spanish flu—
influenza—attacked without warning. The
epidemic swept the nation; locally it led to
quarantine at Camp Sevier, the month-long
closing of both Furman and GWC, and
constant funeral processions down Main
Street to Springwood Cemetery. Thousands
sickened; hundreds died before the epidemic
ended in January 1919. By that time, the “war
to end all wars” was over, and Greenville,
having lost 99 men, was, like the rest of the
nation, ready to return to “Normalcy.”
CHAPTER VII
57

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
58

CHAPTER VIII
B OOM AND B UST
Greenville greeted the Armistice on November 11, 1918, “with every device that human genius
could devise to make a noise.” Textile Hall was jammed with celebrators, and thousands more
stood in the street outside, according to the Greenville News, “waving flags, shooting fireworks, and
throwing talcum power—the stock of confetti having been exhausted.” After casualties, rationing,
and influenza, the Great War was over, and the county anticipated a bright future.
For eight years those hopes were realized, as Greenville entered the greatest building boom in
its history. Retail businesses pushed up Main Street all the way to the Confederate Monument,
replacing old residences as they came and creating so much traffic around the statue that it was
moved to Springwood Cemetery. With the help of the new (1916) Rotary Club, Furman erected
Manly Field, where its football team regularly beat the boys from Clemson College, and the
Woman’s College invested $250,000 in a splendid Fine Arts Center. The Camp Sevier site became
a kind of proto-industrial park, as new businesses, including Minter Homes and Southern Worsted
Mill, moved in. Eugenia Duke gave up her sandwich-making business to concentrate on
manufacturing Duke’s Mayonnaise in the old Coach Factory paint shop. Using his wife’s
architectural drawings, banker and textile president Walter Gassaway constructed an exuberant
and eclectic $750,000 mansion, Isaqueena, on East North Street. And the Chamber of Commerce,
under the leadership of its new secretary, William Timmons, became boosters extraordinaire for
both the city and county.
They scheduled “Acquaintance Tours” from New York to Havana, as well as local visits to
Charlotte and Atlanta. They wanted to familiarize distant businessmen with the glories of
Greenville as well as learn from others’ successes. They discovered, for example, Charlotte’s elegant
new Myers Park subdivision and came home to encourage winding streets and landscaped
boulevards in new subdivisions, like North Main Street and Alta Vista near McDaniel Avenue. But
mostly they promoted Greenville, encouraged industry, and gloried in the city’s surging prosperity.
New mills—Franklin Process, Slater Manufacturing, Renfrew Bleachery, Southern Weaving,
Piedmont Plush—were developed by struggling New England textile companies who sought cheap
land, non-union labor, and plentiful water in the welcoming South. At the same time, prospering
local mills expanded as well: Judson added a silk mill; Brandon, a duck mill; Dunean doubled its
capacity with a twister building. And, with their bulging profits and need to retain reliable workers,
all improved mill village life.
Outhouses were replaced and indoor water provided; mills enclosed house foundations,
paved streets, added street lights, and planted trees. All provided community centers complete with
gymnasiums for the basketball teams that competed in the new Southern Textile Basketball Tournament
and auditoriums for weekly movies. They also offered new facilities: swimming pools and parks, a small
zoo, a decorative fish pond. In addition, Woodside, the Victor-Monaghan Company, and Piedmont Mill
created mountain retreats for their workers at Cedar Mountain.
With far greater and longer-lasting impact, mill executives made an extraordinary commitment
to education. Mill village families had no opportunity for a high school education because they
lived outside the city limits. Most “mill hill” children had, at best, six years of schooling. In 1922,
led by former Monaghan president Thomas Parker and Union Bleachery president Richard
Arrington, textile executives petitioned the state legislature to create the Parker School District.
They did so because they agreed that an educated workforce would improve mills, and a high
school would help retain workers.
Extending from Duncan Chapel to Mills Avenue, the new district had $9 million in taxable
property, making it the richest in the state. The district’s trustees appointed Lawrence Peter Hollis,
✧
Construction boomed all over the city after
the First World War as handsome new
buildings replaced more modest older ones.
In the West End, architect Olin Jones
designed an elegant and expensive new
headquarters for the American Bank at the
triangular intersection of Augusta and
Pendleton Streets.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER VIII
59

✧
Above: This aerial photograph of the
Woman’s College shows the 1923 Fine Arts
Center under construction immediately
adjacent to the inter-connected campus
buildings. Atwood Street is at the rear of
the property.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Right: Slater Mill, just outside of Marietta,
was the last new cotton mill to be built in
the county. Nelson Slater, a direct
descendent of Samuel Slater, who had
started cotton manufacturing in America in
1790, presented a foundation stone from the
original mill to be set in a place of honor in
the mill office.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
60
director of social welfare for Victor-Monaghan
Mills, as its superintendent. His accomplishment
was amazing. Parker High School,
costing $150,000, opened in September 1924
with 500 students, 23 teachers, music and
athletic directors, and a fulltime dentist.
In the years that followed, the high school
became a model of vocational education because
Hollis believed in learning by doing. Because of
his commitment to hands-on education, Parker
held the state’s first science fair; its school
newspaper was published weekly in the
Greenville Piedmont; student government,
complete with a constitution and student court,
began operating. Although it had been
conceived as a school emphasizing vocational
training, including cosmetology, secretarial
science, auto mechanics, and especially textiles,
nearly fifty percent of its early graduates went on
to college. The “Mill Village Miracle,” as the
Reader’s Digest termed Parker in 1941, became
the center of the community, the heart of the
Westside, a national model of educational
innovation, and the precursor of South
Carolina’s technical college system.
Thomas Parker was also responsible for
bringing free reading to the community. In
May 1921 he and John W. Norwood
organized the Greenville Public Library
Association, raised $5,000, and hired Miss
Annie Porter, a Georgia librarian, to open a
library in a leased building on Brown Street. It
had 500 books, locally made pine
bookshelves, tables, and chairs, and was open
from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. It was
so successful that within a year a city
referendum approved a two-mill tax to make
it publicly funded.

Because the library served only the city, in
1923 Parker and Norwood paid for an
experimental two-year mobile service to travel
throughout the Parker District. The small
truck, fitted out with shelves so that adults
could browse on one side and children on the
other, was so enthusiastically received that
Parker District trustees soon took over its
funding. A year later, Parker and Norwood
personally contributed $10,000 to extend the
service from Glassy Mountain to Fountain
Inn. By 1926, the library had the largest
circulation in the Carolinas, was the only
“library on wheels” south of Washington,
D.C., and was the first to serve mill
village communities.
Parker’s benevolence did not stop there. In
1919, Hattie Logan Duckett, a 23-year old
black teacher and social worker who had been
reared in Greenville, raised $3,500 with the
help of other black men and women and
opened the Phillis Wheatley Home in a
modest house on the corner of East McBee
and Heldman Street. Designed as a residence
for young black women, it also offered story
hours and Bible study to boys and girls.
Because she could not cover the mortgage and
operating costs, in October 1923 Duckett
turned to Thomas Parker to help build a
community center for the black community.
Together with a biracial board, they raised
$65,000 and built a much-enlarged Phillis
Wheatley Center on East Broad Street. It
offered a full range of services: sewing classes,
choral groups, Boy Scouts, a gymnasium,
meeting rooms, and a social worker. Parker
ensured that a library was included.
Nearby, a second new building offered
office space for services to blacks. The
Working Benevolent Temple and Professional
Building at the corner of East Broad and Falls
Street had been designed, constructed, and
financed in 1922 by the Working Benevolent
State Grand Lodge of South Carolina, a
black health, welfare, and burial benefit
✧
Above: Parker High School students rode
trolleys or walked to school from as far
away as Duncan Chapel to the north and
the Mills Mill village to the east, but the
long trek was worthwhile: the high school
had superb facilities and a progressive
educational philosophy.
COURTESY OF BOBBY DUKE.
Below: Thomas Parker’s progressive
leadership helped establish Sterling High
School, the Phillis Wheatley Center, the
Parker School District, and the Greenville
County Library. His death in 1926
coincided with the end of an era.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER VIII
61

✧
Above: Children and adults alike flocked to
the “Pathfinder,” Greenville’s first
bookmobile, when it arrived at mill villages
and country stores. With the slogan
“Free Reading for Everybody,” it was an
instant success.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: The Chamber of Commerce Building
at Court Square replaced the Record
Building in 1924, but it too became a
landmark and a distinguishing feature of
Greenville’s downtown streetscape. It later
was the headquarters of Liberty Life
Insurance Company.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
62
society. In addition to serving as the
lodge’s administrative offices, it provided
offices for black doctors, lawyers, dentists, a
short-lived newspaper, and the first black
mortuary in Greenville.
Around the corner on South Main Street,
construction was also booming. In June, 1923
wealthy mill owner John T. Woodside
celebrated the completion of his 17-story,
$1.5 million Woodside Building, the tallest
structure in the Carolinas. With a lobby
glittering with marble, brass, and mirrors, and
a roof garden offering splendid views of the
city and mountains, it was the home of his
Woodside National Bank and offices occupied
by some of the city’s leading firms.
A block away at Court Square, two of
Greenville’s oldest buildings were demolished
and replaced with new landmarks between
April and November 1925. The century-old
Mansion House was the first to go, replaced
by the $1.5 million Poinsett Hotel. Another
Woodside project, its one hundred luxury
rooms and white glove service attracted
elite travelers and visitors to the Southern
Textile Exposition.
Across the street, the Chamber of
Commerce had a more difficult time. They
planned to raze Robert Mills’s historic Record
Building and construct an office building and
headquarters. Neither the awkwardly narrow
lot, protests by local historians, nor legal
problems with the transfer of county property
stopped them. Funded by life insurance
policies on Chamber members, the 10-story
building, designed by local architects
Beacham and LeGrand and engineered with
difficulty by J. E. Sirrine, opened with
splendid ceremonies on November 2, 1925.
Greenvillians boasted about Main Street
building, but they also celebrated other good
news in the mid-twenties. W. C. Cleveland
announced in December 1924 that he was
giving 112 acres around the Reedy River to
create a much-needed park. In the same

month, Furman University officials learned
that the school had been accredited and, ten
days later, that James B. Duke had named it
one of four collegiate beneficiaries of his great
endowment for the Carolinas. And citizens
hailed the news that W. L. Burgiss was
establishing an endowment for Greenville.
The first recipient would be the Shriners’
Hospital for Crippled Children; the second,
YWCA Camp Burgiss Glen. The expanding
water system added new sewage treatment
facilities, and three years later the U.S. Health
Service named Greenville the healthiest city
and county in the nation.
But there were already signs of trouble
ahead. The boll weevil, devastating to cotton
crops, had arrived in South Carolina in 1916.
By 1923 it was spotted in Greenville County.
At the same time, cotton from California,
cheap and abundant, began flooding the
market. Drought in the summers of 1925 and
1926 further reduced crops. Farmers had
difficulty making their mortgage payments,
and banks, many of which had overvalued
land, were hard hit. The failure of the Bank of
Commerce in 1926 was a portent of future
financial disaster. By 1927 the city’s budget
was so tight that it could not afford the
$10,000 necessary to begin needed air mail
✧
Below: The Woodside Building was almost
complete in the spring of 1923. Note its
proximity to the pre-Civil War Goodlett
Hotel, where federal troops had been
stationed in 1865 and where Greenville’s
First National Bank had its first offices.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Left: It took the combined forces of the
American Legion, the Chamber of
Commerce, air enthusiast George Barr, and
the City Council to finally create Downtown
(later Municipal) Airport. Shows including
“aeroplane rides” and stunt pilots first
landed on an open field near the Cedar
Lane Road.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER VIII
63

✧
Above: The failure of the Bank of
Commerce, housed since 1905 in the
handsome Cauble Building, was an early
sign of the Great Depression to come. The
first home of the Greenville County Library
was on the lower level facing Coffee Street.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Below; By the 1920s, Greenville could
claim, even with some confidence, that it
was “The Textile Center of the South.”
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
64
service; Municipal Airport did not begin
passenger and mail service until 1930.
Textile mills felt the pressure immediately
and responded by using “scientific industrial
engineering” principles, including making
fewer employees responsible for more looms,
and when dividends began falling, cut wages
by 30 percent and reduced work hours from
60 to 55 a week. Workers, unhappy about
these “stretch-outs” and lower salaries, first
protested and then joined unions. Although
Greenville mill workers had walked out in the
past—including a bloody two-month strike at
Judson Mill in 1915—it wasn’t until 1929
that a series of brief and unsuccessful strikes
closed Poe, Mills, and Brandon for several
months. But union funds couldn’t sustain
long strikes, and mills, already reeling from
loss of income and threatened with closure,
refused to increase pay. Management made a
few token concessions, and within six months
all strikes had ended with little satisfaction on
either side.
While the poor suffered most after the
Great Depression became a reality in 1929, it
hit the rich more dramatically. Walter
Gassaway, the president of three banks, two
textile mills, and owner of the most elaborate
home in the county, was nearly bankrupt
when he died unexpectedly in 1930. John T.
Woodside, the president of Woodside Mills,
had described himself as the richest man
in Greenville County in 1917; a decade
later, he fell. His mill was heavily mortgaged
to northern commission agents; his bank
had made unwise and unsecured loans; and
his huge risk in developing hundreds of
myrtle-covered isolated beach acres in
Horry County as a resort and building the
huge Ocean Forest Hotel there was a disaster.
In 1930, he lost everything: the bank failed,
he lost his Crescent Avenue home; William
Iselin and Company ousted him from
the mill’s management and sued him for
$57 million.

The Chamber of Commerce, dependent on
office rents to make payments on their new
building, had increasing vacancies. The
mortgage company foreclosed, and their
headquarters was sold to Liberty Life
Insurance Company, one of the few
businesses that flourished during the decade,
and it became the “Insurance Building.”
Furman University and the Greenville
Woman’s College, both Baptist, both deeply in
debt, were forced to consolidate. GWC
became the coordinate women’s college of the
university, and half the college staff was
dismissed. The public library reduced wages,
hours, and staff. The school year was limited
to eight months, and teachers’ low salaries
were paid in scrip. Local government saved
money by firing staff and briefly removing
telephones from city offices.
If the elite and middle class struggled, the
poor despaired. The Red Cross, overwhelmed
with needy people, closed its doors. The Cigar
Factory closed, throwing two hundred
women out of work. Although no mills failed,
all went to one shift; work weeks were
reduced to three or four days. Local agencies
tried to provide for suddenly hungry and
homeless people. A citizens’ committee ran a
Welfare Service, hiring (white) women to sew
and men to chop wood. Black men were
employed digging ditches for sewers at fifty
cents a day, redeemable for groceries at the
Phillis Wheatley Center. So many applied that
each was limited to two day’s work a week.
The Salvation Army distributed more than
five hundred stale loaves of bread daily.
As the depression worsened in the early
1930s, it became clear that neither individual
charity nor local governments could bring
relief, and in November 1932 voters
✧
Above: Although money was tight and
people suffered during the Great Depression,
downtown Greenville looks prosperous on a
busy summer afternoon in the mid-1930s.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Below: The stone bath house, now the
visitors’ center of Paris Mountain State
Park, was constructed by CCC workers in
the middle of the 1930s.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER VIII
65

across the country turned to Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Ninety-eight percent of South
Carolinians cast their ballots for the
Democratic Party as the only hope for the
future. In Greenville, the agencies and
programs spawned by the New Deal brought
lasting community improvements.
Civilian Conservation Corpsmen built Paris
Mountain State Park and landscaped
Cleveland Park, adding shrubs and trees, two
tennis courts, a roller skating rink, and a
swimming pool and bathhouse. They also
modified the bed of the Reedy River, paved old
roads, and constructed new ones. Funds from
the Works Progress Administration paid for
Greenville’s new Senior High School on
Augusta Road, a hospital wing, and Sirrine
Stadium for Furman University football
games. Thanks to heavy lobbying from Senator
James Byrnes and a complicated local deal,
WPA funds were used to construct a new
federal building and post office on East
Washington Street that allowed the city
to convert the elegant old post office on
Main Street into a much needed City Hall.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation
improved the airport, sewer system, and Boy
Scout Camp. Between 1932 and 1938, almost
four million dollars (the equivalent of $58.2
million today) in federal funds flowed into
local construction. That aid did not end the
Great Depression, but it saved some people
from starving and others from losing their jobs
and homes.
Textile workers initially had high hopes
that the National Recovery Act, which set a
minimum wage of $12 a week, would ease
their misery. When it did not, mill operatives
from throughout the South joined with those
across the nation in the largest industrial
action in American history: the General
Textile Strike of 1934. Organized by the
United Textile Workers Association, its point
was to close every mill in the country to
emphasize the need for improved textile
salaries and working conditions. On
September 4, 1934, “flying squadrons” of
trucks and cars arrived in Greenville from
Spartanburg to enforce the strike locally.
Governor Ibra Blackwood had called out the
National Guard, and management was
prepared: soldiers with guns leveled and
orders to shoot to kill kept guard on
mill roofs, and non-striking workers were
armed with sticks.
After successfully closing all four Greer
Mills, the militant strikers drove on to
Greenville. Brandon workers turned them
away, and, after a nasty fight at Judson, where
workers refused to join the action, mobs were
turned away at Dunean, Monaghan, and
Woodside. On the morning of September 7,
one man was killed by a deputy at Dunean
before the “squadrons” gave up on Greenville
✧
Ground-breaking for Sirrine Stadium in
1936 was a festive celebration for the
federally-funded facility that would serve
both Greenville High School and Furman
University. Note barren Cleveland Street
curving behind the site.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
66

and went on to Honea Path, where six strikers
and sympathizers were killed at Chicola Mills.
Longtime friendships and allegiances died
with the strike, but, after the union disbanded
the squadrons on September 11, its memory
was repressed. The strike had been a
failure, but Greenville had become a bastion
of anti-unionism.
Even in those dark years, Greenvillians
enjoyed small pleasures. Nearly everyone
listened to the radio, some on fine new
Atwater-Kents, most on inexpensive receiving
sets that drew static-filled programming from
far distances or, after May 1933, from local
WFBC. (The station’s name was inherited
from First Baptist Church of Knoxville,
Tennessee, which had given up its license and
offered its equipment to Roger Peace’s new
Greenville station.) Rich and poor alike
listened to “Amos and Andy,” “Duffy’s Tavern,”
the Grand Ol’ Opry,” FDR’s “fireside chats,”
sports, and news from Europe.
While radio, Victrolas, and talkies brought
new pleasures, traveling professional troupes
no longer provided entertainment: tours
stopped because neither companies nor
audiences could afford them. Greenvillians
turned instead to developing home-made arts.
After a Little Theatre production by a
Columbia group in 1926, local drama
enthusiasts organized the Greenville Artists’
Guild, “to develop the art, music, and drama
which has lain so long dormant in Greenville.”
Throughout the thirties, the group, without a
stage, box office, or director, produced three
performances annually (two series tickets cost
$6). In 1931, George Mackey started a citywide
Boy’s Choir, and Dupre Rhame revived a
Woman’s College tradition with annual
Christmas performances of The Messiah. In the
mid-1930s the new Greenville Art League
sponsored tours of local art collections and
worked with the WPA in setting up the city’s
first art gallery. In 1938, Lennie Lusby of the
Women’s College re-organized the scattered
Greenville Symphony Orchestra.
At the end of the decade, wars in Europe
and Asia brought new orders to mills and a
gradual return to higher salaries for
employees. As the economy improved,
Greenville turned its back on a traumatic
decade and looked toward better times ahead.
✧
Homegrown entertainment attracted
substantial audiences, but Main Street
movie “palaces” like the Carolina, with its
giveaways, lotteries, and special events
allowed many Greenvillians hours of
escape from the unpleasant realities of the
Great Depression.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER VIII
67

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
68

CHAPTER IX
W AR AND P OSTWAR
On December 8, 1941, Greenville learned the tragic news: Luther Kirk McBee, the greatgrandson
of Vardry McBee, stationed on the USS Arizona, had been killed during the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. He was the first of Greenville’s twelve hundred casualties (183 dead, 1,046
injured) in World War II. Although it was a shock when it came, the war had been anticipated.
Textile mills were already working two shifts to supply government orders, and a Chamber of
Commerce Defense Committee had been lobbying for nearly a year for a military installation. On
December 11, 1941, they learned that an army airbase would be located on twenty-six hundred
acres of land near Conestee, leased to the government for the duration. The community watched
the building of the Greenville Army Air Base with rapt attention after Daniel Construction
Company of Anderson received the $8-million construction contract and moved its offices to
Greenville in January.
The first airman arrived in late March 1942; in June, the first of 130 bombers and pursuit planes
and 400 command pilots arrived at the field. By fall, the military had established a Glider Training
base at Municipal Airport. The coming of the base with its annual payroll of $9,485,000 brought
both prosperity and problems, since airmen, their families, and nearly 5,000 civilian employees
flooded into town.
Greenvillians once again created apartments and rented rooms to accommodate the influx and
planned social events to entertain them. Clubs opened downtown for enlisted men, officers, and
“colored” soldiers. Women rolled bandages for the Red Cross; the Junior Charity League gave
money-raising performances to benefit the war effort; college girls sold war bonds on street
corners; black leaders collected scrap metal to outfit a club for African-American soldiers at the
base. The draft, air raids, blackouts, rationing, and increased security at textile mills “to prevent
sabotage” were instituted immediately after Pearl Harbor. By 1943, Furman University had lost 80
percent of its male students and many of its professors to the war effort.
In late 1945, those soldiers, now veterans, returned to a city virtually unchanged in a decade.
Main Street stretched from the West End, where the old Furman campus was now bulging with
students, across the Reedy River (foaming with multi-colored residue from upstate bleacheries),
past the Poinsett Hotel, to the Ottaray Hotel at College Street. Department stores, pharmacies,
restaurants, movie theatres, music, appliance, and hardware stores lined every block. Beneath a
jungle of power wires, cars, trolleys, buses, and highways emptied into the crowded street.
To relieve that congestion, in 1947 the city and the state highway department proposed
extending Church Street from the Super Highway—Wade Hampton Boulevard—through the
Camperdown Mill village and university property to Mills Avenue. In the same year, a hard-fought
annexation referendum brought neighborhoods along Augusta Road and North Main Street into
the city in the first major expansion since 1869.
Although many of the county’s textile mills were no longer locally owned, mill village life was
virtually unchanged. In 1947, though, J. P. Stevens & Company president Robert Stevens, whose
company had purchased fourteen local mills, including Dunean, Slater, and the Victor-Monaghan
Company, decided to sell their villages. He kick-started a process begun before the war, when
Derring-Milliken sold about 60 houses in Judson’s village. Over the next two decades, the Alester
G. Furman Company managed the sale of approximately 26,000 mill village houses throughout the
South. Offered first to residents at seventy-five percent of the appraised value, the sales were an
extraordinary success: mill workers and veterans had saved money during the war, and owning
their homes was attractive. At the same time, mills rid themselves of costly services and spent
money upgrading machinery. These sales were the primary reason that Greenville County’s rate of
✧
The Army Air Base at Conestee brought
thousands of servicemen and women as well
as civilian workers to Greenville. It became
Donaldson Air Base in the 1950s when it
continued to serve the U.S. Air Force
airlift operation.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
CHAPTER IX
69

✧
Above: Everyone on the home front did their
best to support the war effort. Children
bought war stamps at school; adults were
encouraged to buy bonds at work or the
local post office.
COURTESY, GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: Returning veterans found South
Main Street unchanged when they returned
from Europe or the Pacific. By 1990, almost
every building in this photograph, including
City Hall, the Masonic Building, and
Southeastern Life, had been demolished
and replaced.
COURTESY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
70
home ownership increased from 28 percent in
1940 to 67 percent in 1970.
At the same time that mill villages were
being dismantled, a new Greenville institution
took root. In October 1946, Bob Jones
University broke ground for the first eighteen
buildings on its new campus on Wade
Hampton Boulevard. The fundamentalist
Christian college, located in Cleveland,
Tennessee, since 1933, needed room to
expand because of dramatically increased
postwar enrollment. President Bob Jones, Sr.,
welcomed over 2,500 students to the new
campus on October 1, 1947. Within a few
years, it had started its own radio station,
WMUU, and a Christian films department. Its
museum of religious art, opened in 1951,
brought visitors from around the world to
Greenville. Elaborately costumed operas and
Shakespearean productions offered guests an
opportunity to see colorful classic theatre.
While Bob Jones, with its state-of-the-’50s
campus, was building on the east side of
Greenville, Furman faced its own postwar
problems. It too was over-enrolled and could
not expand. Furthermore, since the early
1930s, it had operated two campuses a mile
apart, with shared administration and faculty,
and students transported by bus, cars, and
taxis between the men’s and the women’s
campuses. Furthermore, Bob Jones was
making the university look “dangerously
modern” to conservatives who dominated the
South Carolina Baptist Convention, while its
physical plant, unchanged since the mid-
1920s, looked antiquated to students. In
1947, the Furman Board of Trustees decided
to bring men and women together on a
new campus.
In the early fall of 1950, the Board
purchased about 1,100 acres on the Poinsett
Highway for $542,531. Three years later,
ground was broken in the middle of red clay
fields near Duncan Chapel. In the meantime,
Furman, Greenville, and eventually the nation
gaped as basketball star Frank Selvy set new
collegiate scoring records, including his still

unexcelled 100-point game against Newberry
College at Textile Hall in 1954.
In 1958 male students moved from
downtown, and in 1961 women left their
century-old grounds on College Street for the
raw new campus. Three years later, the
university and the county celebrated the
news that Greenville native and alumnus
Charles Hard Townes had been awarded the
Nobel Prize.
Public schools saw equally dramatic
postwar changes. In 1946, although the
Parker and Greenville City Districts educated
two-thirds of the county’s students, there were
86 county school districts, including one with
a single one-room school. In order to equalize
and improve education, in 1949 the county
delegation appointed a study committee to
recommend a consolidation plan. Voters,
concerned about losing a voice in their
children’s education, promptly defeated the
concept. In 1951, however, Governor James
Byrnes, hoping to forestall school
desegregation, gave legislative sanction, and
the County Board of Education established
the School District of Greenville County. In
the next nine years, Superintendent William
Loggins eliminated 102 schools, built 24
new ones, and created a stronger and more
equal system.
Initially, Greenvillians assumed that the
airbase would close after the war. But the Cold
War led the Defense Department to maintain
and expand it as the home of the 63rd Troop
Carrier Wing. Because the Pentagon planned
expensive improvements, (their eventual
investment was $20 million), the government
wanted title to the land. Greenville
commissioners insisted on a reversionary
clause in case the base ever closed. The
military refused. It took tact, persistence, and
the resignation of three commissioners, but
eventually the government agreed.
Starting in 1948, planes from Greenville
relieved Berlin, and during the 1950s, they
made the city “the Airlift Capital of the World,”
ferrying men and supplies around the globe.
Renamed Donaldson Air Force Base in 1951 to
honor Major John O. Donaldson, a World War I
✧
Above: This photograph of Poe Mill and
beyond it the site of the American Spinning
Company’s demolished village shows the
changing nature of mill village life after
World War II. Mill workers drove rather
than walked to work, and parking lots
replaced homes.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY.
Below: Extending Church Street from Wade
Hampton Boulevard provided an ideal
location for the construction of Memorial
Auditorium. First proposed by the Lions
Club in 1937, it took two decades to make
it a reality.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
CHAPTER IX
71

✧
Above: The campus at Bob Jones University
may have been barren of trees and shrubs in
1948, but more than two thousand students
and solidly constructed buildings already
gave a sense of permanence to Greenville’s
newest university.
COURTESY OF BOB JONES UNIVERSITY.
Below: Furman University’s 750-acre
campus on the Poinsett Highway was under
construction in 1957. The first building
erected was a nursery for the thousands
of trees and shrubs planted on former
cotton fields.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
air ace from Greenville, the facility housed 2,200
men of the Military Air Transport Command
until 1961. In the spring of 1963, Donaldson
Air Base was declared “surplus,” triggering
its reversionary clause. On August 19, the
base, with its barracks and 8,000 foot
airstrip, was sold back to the city and county.
When commissioners immediately sold one
hundred acres to Union Carbide, the facility
was on its way to becoming Donaldson
Industrial Park, one of the region’s great postwar
success stories.
Two other postwar events brought national
media attention to Greenville. The first
occurred in the early evening of November
19, 1946, when the Ideal Laundry on the
corner of Buncombe Road and Echols Street
exploded. Devastation from an incorrectly
installed gas line was startling: six people
died; more than a hundred homes within
three blocks of the laundry were leveled;
dozens more were damaged. Medical
personnel rushed to hospitals while Boy
Scouts, the Red Cross, police and firemen
helped survivors. It was the greatest disaster
in the city’s history.
Six months later, less sympathetic attention
focused on the Willie Earle lynching. The
trial of twenty-nine white men for the
brutal lynching of Willie Earle, an
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
72

unemployed black laborer, on the night of
February 16, 1947, was held in the
impressive courtroom of the County
Courthouse. It was covered by Life Magazine,
the New Yorker, the Christian Science Monitor,
TASS (the Soviet news service), in addition to
the national black press, news services, and
every major newspaper.
Earle was accused of murdering a white
Greenville taxi driver in Pickens County on
February 15. Shortly after 2 a.m. the next
morning, a fleet of local cabs made their way
to Pickens, took him from the jail, murdered
him, and left his body near Bramlett Road.
Twenty-nine taxi drivers were arrested and
confessed before the trial at Greenville County
Courthouse in May. The trial was carefully
conducted, but its all-white, all-male jury
found the defendants not guilty. Although the
verdict was obviously unjust, the trial sent a
message that lynching was unacceptable and
would be prosecuted to the full extent of the
law. The Willie Earle lynching was the last in
a long series of violent extra-legal racial
attacks in the state, and while it has remained
a scar on Greenville’s reputation, it led to the
first efforts to improve conditions for black
people in the county.
Greenville was still a rigidly segregated
society, but since the establishment of a local
chapter of the NAACP in 1930, black men and
women had begun to challenge the status quo.
Nearly 60 had registered to vote in 1939, and
after the state’s white Democratic primary was
declared illegal in 1947, many more went to the
polls. A biracial committee formed in 1948 as a
result of the trial produced a study of
conditions of black people that brought some
improvements. But it wasn’t until the 1960s
that Greenville’s Jim Crow laws were
successfully challenged. Brooklyn Dodger
baseball star Jackie Robinson was ordered to
leave the white waiting room at Municipal
Airport in October 1959. In protest, on January
1, 1960, more than 250 blacks marched from
Springfield Baptist Church to the airport to
denounce “the stigma, the inconvenience, and
the stupidity of racial segregation.”
Later that year, young African Americans,
led by local college student Jesse Jackson,
staged a sit-in at the segregated public library;
they also demonstrated at the lunch counters
at the Kress, Woolworth, and Grant Stores
on Main Street. Another demonstration
closed the segregated municipal skating
rink at Cleveland Park. The white elite acted.
They had already seen other southern cities
erupt in violence to massive resistance, but
that was not the Greenville way. Urged to
act by Charles Daniel, whose business
success and vigorous promotion of economic
development had propelled him to the top of
✧
Above: Frank Selvy, shown here when he
played professionally for the Los Angeles
Lakers, set an all-time collegiate basketball
record when he scored 100 points against
Newberry College in 1954.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Below: Charles Hard Townes accepts the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for his
invention of the laser. The only Greenvillian
to win the coveted award, he graduated
from Furman in 1933.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
CHAPTER IX
73

✧
Above: The explosion of the Ideal Laundry
in November 1946 left the building in ruins,
six people dead, and damage for blocks
around the Buncombe Road site.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE COUNTY
HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Right: While the African-American children
who integrated public schools and led sit-ins
at downtown lunch counters were reviled at
the time, today the city has erected a
monument to their courage on Main Street.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
74
the county’s leadership, Greenville created a
biracial committee that dampened potential
conflict and in 1963 supported the formal
repeal of its segregation laws. The committee’s
agreement that segregation had to go was the
first time, according to state historian Walter
Edgar, that South Carolina’s “power brokers”
decided that riots would not happen here.
But schools were still segregated. When A.
J. Whittenberg, president of the Greenville
branch of the NAACP, and four other black
leaders asked that their children be assigned
to white schools, the school district went to
court. A year later, Judge Robert Martin
dismissed the case, and 55 African-American
children were transferred to 16 formerly allwhite
schools for the fall of 1964. This token
integration lasted for five years, but in 1969
the court ordered Greenville to submit a
complete desegregation plan by January
1970. The plan, involving 58,000 students,
went into effect on February 17, 1970,
after massive citizen involvement led by
Furman University professor Ernest Harrill.
In spite of the speed and complexity of
arrangements, it was done, as Harrill said,
“with grace and style.”
Greenville’s own WFBC-TV covered every
step of the process, as it had since 1954, when
the FCC assigned channel four to a coalition
of three local groups, one headed by Roger
Peace of WFBC radio, one by Robert Jolley of
WMRC radio, and one by Charles Daniel and
Alester Furman, Jr. New media brought
Greenville closer to the nation, but, more
importantly, so did the new interstate
highway system. Building Interstate 85
through Greenville County in the late 1950s
opened up remarkable opportunities for both
industrial and residential development along
its 385 by-pass and to the southeast in
Mauldin, Simpsonville, and Fountain Inn,
newly nicknamed the “Golden Strip.”
The new interstate also brought better air
service. By the late 1950s, local leaders,
including Charlie Daniel, Francis Hipp, the
president of Liberty Life Insurance, Alester
Furman, Jr., and Governor Fritz Hollings
had launched economic development
initiatives to bring new companies to the
upstate. In order to do so, they needed
an airport that could handle commercial
planes too large to land at Municipal Airport.
Charlie Daniel and Spartanburg’s Roger
Milliken identified land near Greer adjacent to
the interstate route, and in November 1958
introduced a master plan for the Greenville-
Spartanburg Jetport to upstate politicians,
who immediately agreed to spend the
millions of dollars necessary. It opened on
October 15, 1962.

For successful economic development,
though, the state needed workers trained to
serve the new industries. In 1962 the
Greenville Technical Education Center
opened its doors on a former landfill on
newly extended Pleasantburg Drive. In
1968, it became Greenville Technical
College. Its president, Thomas Barton, has
expanded it constantly so that Greenville
Tech, now the third largest college in the
state, annually educates 15,000 day students
and more than 56,000 people in continuing
education programs.
Greenville was the world’s textile center in
the 1950s and ’60s, but its dominance was
threatened. In 1956, when the Church Street
extension was under construction, the
Camperdown Mill, which was losing business
✧
Above: The Greenville-Spartanburg Jetport
was essential to the county’s economic
development in the 1960s and afterward.
With a terminal designed by Skidmore-
Owings-Merrill of New York and
landscaping by Innocenti and Weibel, it
became the pride of the community.
COURTESY OF THE GREER HERITAGE MUSEUM.
Below: As textile mills felt the impact of
cheap foreign manufacturing in the
1960s and began laying off workers,
General Electric Corp. announced that it
would build a gas turbine factory in
Greenville County.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
CHAPTER IX
75

✧
Until the early 1960s when a vaccine was
invented, summers meant the possibility of
polio epidemics. Iron lungs, like this one
shown here at Greenville General Hospital,
were essential parts of hospital equipment.
COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE HOSPITAL SYSTEM.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
76
to cheap Japanese imports, announced that it
was closing; its land was worth more as an
office park than for cotton manufacturing. Old
Textile Hall had closed, and when visitors
from all over the world crowded into the 1962
ATME-I show at the new Palmetto Exposition
Hall in 1962, they saw huge automated
machinery on display. Fewer workers would
be needed in the future, and mills would face
increasing foreign competition.
New companies stepped in. In 1964,
General Electric chose 600 acres on
Garlington Road to build a gas turbine plant,
opened in 1968 with 250 workers; by 1970,
900 were employed. GE was one of the first
major non-textile related industries to move
to Greenville; it gave the impetus for other
multi-national companies to settle here. Most
newsworthy was Michelin Tire Company, the
closely held French company that was the
world’s third largest tire producer. After two
years of rumors, it announced in July 1973
that it would make an initial $175 million
investment in South Carolina and would
build on a tract adjacent to Donaldson Center.
Eventually the company built its North
American headquarters near the interstate. A
new internationalism was coming.
And so was better health care. During the
postwar years, Greenville General Hospital
expanded at an amazing rate, with new wings,
including the first psychiatric care service in
the Southeast at its main building and satellite
hospitals—Allen Bennett in Greer and
Hillcrest in Simpsonville. In 1953, General
Hospital was the largest and best equipped
hospital in South Carolina; within a decade, it
had become the Greenville Hospital System,
the twelfth largest system in the nation. Costs
rose, in part because of the charity patients it
served; to help cover them, in 1959 the price
of a private room rose from $11 to $13 a day.
But even with additions, the hospital was
overcrowded, and in 1966 trustees
announced that they had purchased 128 acres
on Grove Road for a major expansion.
Marshall I. Pickens Psychiatric Hospital
opened there in 1969 and the Roger C. Peace
Institute of Rehabilitative Medicine in 1972.
As early as 1957, in a speech to the
Downtown Greenville Association, Charles
Daniel pointed out that Main Street was
“unclean and neither attractive nor competitive
with comparable progressive cities.” When
Charlie Daniel spoke, civic leadership listened.
City government instituted a Clean-up
Campaign; merchants embraced sparkling
aluminum siding to cover their old buildings.
The Ottaray Hotel was razed, replaced by the
modern Downtowner Motor Inn. But retail
stores were already finding new homes in
suburban shopping centers. In 1948, Lewis
Plaza was built on Augusta Street. In 1962,
Wade Hampton Mall opened, even further
from downtown. Three years later, plans were
announced for McAlister Square, a covered
shopping center on Pleasantburg Drive. A few
months later, out-of-town developers
announced that Bell Tower Mall would be built
on the old Furman campus.

With retail stores leaving, movie theatres
closed, and “For Sale or Lease” signs
began dotting downtown. To stop the
hemorrhaging, Charlie Daniel and Roger
Peace of the Greenville News-Piedmont agreed
to erect new buildings to anchor the ends of
Main Street. In his last public act before his
death in 1964, Daniel broke ground for the
twenty-five-story Daniel Building, completed
in 1967. As it was nearing completion, a
building for the newspapers began rising at
the corner of Broad and South Main Streets.
The City did its part, Officials purchased
the old Woman’s College campus from
Furman for $500,000 to use as the
community’s arts center. The Little Theatre,
opened in 1967, was the first building erected
there. Revitalized by Greenville High School
director Robert McLane and student actress
Joanne Woodward in 1948, it had been
located in a converted chapel/movie theatre
on Lowndes Hill Road. Ground was broken
for a new main library in 1965, and in 1974,
when a distinguished contemporary building
replaced the Gassaway Mansion as the home
of the County Art Museum, “Heritage Green”
was complete. On Main Street, officials
erected a ten-story brown-glass city hall; to
provide underground parking and a “plaza,”
they razed the 1892 post office and former
city hall.
Across the river, the old West End was
neglected and disreputable. Traffic had been
diverted by the Church Street and Academy
Street extensions; Furman students and
faculty no longer patronized its stores and
cafes. The banks of the Reedy, cluttered with
weeds and refuse, were uncared for, except for
the Carolina Foothills Garden Club’s 26-acre
garden and renovation of an old gas station
into Falls Cottage. The remains of the old
Coach Factory stood crumbling on the north
bank of the river.
By 1976, textile employment was reduced,
but it was still hearty; Greenville’s east side was
exploding with subdivisions; new industries
were thriving; but its heart, its downtown, in
spite of new buildings, was dying.
✧
The banks of the Reedy River at Main Street
were crowded with undergrowth, railroad
tracks, and the decaying Coach Factory
paint shop, once the home of Duke’s
Mayonnaise, in the late 1970s.
PHOTOGRAPH BY EILEEN HUNTER.
CHAPTER IX
77

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
78

CHAPTER X
R EVITALIZATION AND N EW D IRECTIONS
In October 1976, Mayor Max Heller and members of City Council traveled to San Francisco to
meet the nationally known landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Impressed by his achievement
in designing urban spaces where people could interact, like Ghiradelli Square, they hired him to
design a new streetscape for Greenville. It was a significant move, brought about by an agreement
between private business leadership (the “Total Redevelopment Committee,” appointed ten years
earlier by the Chamber of Commerce and headed by Alester Furman, Jr., and Buck Mickel, the new
president of Daniel Construction Company) and the city of Greenville.
In 1975 the committee began a risky public-private partnership push toward revitalizing
downtown. To obtain the necessary start-up funds, they set up the Greenville Community
Foundation and sought investors for 50,000 shares of stock at $100 a piece to be used to help
finance property acquisition and construction of a convention hotel, office building, and retail
space. Attorney Tommy Wyche, Mickel, and Furman were among the arm-twisters who invited 27
potential investors to a meeting in July 1976. With the money pledged there, they paid Halprin’s
company to conduct public input sessions and design a plan for Main Street renewal. Thanks to a
$1.85 million federal grant, in August 1977 the city began implementing the street renovations
that he recommended, included narrowing traffic to two lanes with diagonal parking, landscaping
corner plots, and adding benches, new lighting, and signage.
They accepted Halprin’s initial plan with one exception: the urban designer had called for
shrub-filled landscaped corners; but the mayor, remembering the Vienna of his youth, insisted on
flowers. And flowerbeds they became. Max Heller’s international background, his close working
relationship with business leadership, and his faith in Greenville future made revitalization a
reality. He had arrived in Greenville, a Jewish immigrant fleeing the Nazi takeover of his native
Austria, in 1938 with $1.80 in his pocket and went to work an hour after he arrived here in a shirt
factory. He later became its president, and after he retired in 1962, he turned his attention to
improving the city that had given him refuge.
It took vision, intense persuasion, complex public-private relationships, and fortunate
relationships to put together the first pieces of Greenville’s redevelopment, so when the Regency
Hyatt opened in February 1982, the city had accomplished something of a miracle. The initial plan
called for a hotel-convention center to be sited awkwardly just south of the Downtowner Motel.
But when the families that controlled the Downtowner agreed to sell the 15-year old motel and its
land to the new foundation, and the city closed Oak Street, bordering the south side of the motel,
they created the possibility for success. But it also took creative financing; Mayor Heller was the
guiding force behind an essential $7.4 million Urban Development Action Grant, and the city’s
agreement to pay for the adjacent parking garage, convention center, and hotel atrium as a “city
park.” Attorney Tommy Wyche was primarily responsible for convincing the Hyatt Hotel
management to build a Regency-level hotel in a city as small as Greenville. When IBM leased much
of the office space, the anchor project triggered the revitalization of Main Street.
It did so with history. When developer Courtney Shives removed aqua aluminum siding from
the 1905 Bank of Commerce Building at the corner of Coffee and North Main Streets in 1985, he
found enough details remaining to undertake a complete and careful restoration, returning the
building to its elegant historic appearance. Then he restored and converted an 1884 building on
South Main Street into condominiums. The success of those projects sparked a surge of
restorations around old Court Square. Mack Whittle’s new Carolina First Bank totally refurbished
the art deco First National Bank Building; the Chamber of Commerce Building was restored to its
historic appearance; a century-old building across from City Hall became the high-end Soby’s
✧
The bottom left of this 1988 aerial view
of downtown shows the crumbling
coach factory and a parking lot where the
Peace Center is now located, buildings on
the north side of the bridge, and a range
of 1913 stores that is now the site
of RiverPlace.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE JORDAN.
CHAPTER X
79

✧
Above: Mayor Max Heller guided and
encouraged the public-private partnership
that revitalized Main Street.
COURTESY OF MAX HELLER.
Below: The atrium of Greenville’s
Regency Hyatt is officially a public park.
The hotel triggered downtown development
in the 1980s.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
80
Restaurant; the Cigar Factory became Kent
Place; the decaying and empty Poinsett Hotel
had a $20 million renovation; and the 1916
Courthouse was refurbished and restored by
Design Strategies, an architectural and
planning firm.
These restorations were accompanied by
renovated storefronts and conversions of
long-vacant second floor space into
condominiums and apartments. The idea of
living downtown was extraordinary when
Shives began it; within a decade, it had
become accepted; within two decades,
downtown residences, notably including
renovating the wings of Downtown Baptist
Church into condominiums, became so
attractive that major new projects like “The
Bookends” were purpose-built to serve new
city residents.
But people needed reasons to live and visit
downtown, and the Peace Center for the
Performing Arts, announced in 1986, opened
in 1990, gave it to them. Another example of
Greenville’s private-public partnerships,
fundraising for the center started with the
announcement that the Peace family, the
owners of the Greenville News and Piedmont,
would contribute $10 million to the
campaign. Led by attorney David Freeman
and Henderson Advertising executive Fred
Walker, it eventually raised $47 million,
about 70 percent of the total cost, from
private sources. They city bought and
developed the six-acre site on the corner of
Broad and South Main Streets, and the Peace
Center Board agreed to purchase and renovate
the adjacent 1858 Greenville Carriage Factory,
its 1904 paint shop, once the home of Duke’s
Mayonnaise, and the 1882 Huguenot Mill.
The combination of a world-class concert
hall seating about 2000 and the 400-seat
adjacent theatre, the gift of Dorothy Hipp
Gunter, gave Greenville a superb performing
arts venue. On the other side of downtown,
the Bi-Lo Center, completed in 1998 at a cost
of $63 million, provides about 15,000 seats
for concerts, sporting events, the circus, and
ice shows. Built to replace the aging Memorial
Auditorium, which was demolished the same
year, it was privately funded after three
taxpayer-funded referenda were defeated.
People also came to eat. Greenville had
never been known as a place for fine dining;
when the Hyatt-Regency opened, there were
only four downtown restaurants. Perhaps it
was the crowds who flocked to the Greenville
Central Area Partnership’s Fall for Greenville
restaurant festivals, which now draw more
than 250,000 hungry grazers for three
October days, but restaurants, bistros, and
taverns, many with outdoor seating, began to
bloom along Main Street. By 2007 more than
fifty eating and drinking places drew crowds
from morning to midnight.

As the face of the city changed, so did
Greenville’s industrial landscape. Textile
manufacturing moved to developing nations
where labor was cheaper, taking its toll on the
county’s premier industry. Southern Bleachery
in Taylors had closed in 1964; between 1977
and 1979, so did Brandon, Poe, Piedmont, and
Mill’s Mill and those in Greer and Simpsonville.
In 1984 Woodside closed; Renfrew Bleachery in
Travelers Rest lasted until 1988. The old multistory
brick mills became white elephants on the
local landscape. Some—Judson, Dunean,
Slater—continued operating with greatly
reduced work forces; others—Piedmont, Poe,
and Union Bleachery—burned down. But
Mills, Simpsonville, and Monaghan Mills have
been restored and converted into loft
condominiums, and mill villages have been
refurbished by the Greenville County
Redevelopment Authority.
In the 1970s, the county’s largest textile
employer, J. P. Stevens & Co., which had
moved its manufacturing and personnel
offices to Greenville, became the target of the
ACTWU, the Amalgamated Clothing and
Textile Workers Union’s attempt to unionize
southern workers. International product
boycotts, pickets, protestors, a corporate
campaign focused on directors and full-page
newspaper advertisements denouncing the
company’s labor practices made both
Greenville, where the company’s annual
meetings were held after 1976, and its
ingrained anti-unionism a subject of generally
unfavorable national attention.
That attention, though, had a positive side
for it attracted international companies seeking
an American manufacturing site with less
expensive labor costs. Greenville was
becoming increasingly internationalized as
multi-national companies made it their home.
Japanese executives, some lured by the
availability of new golf courses as well as
economic opportunity, brought TNS Mills,
Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Ryobi to the upstate.
The Chamber of Commerce responded by
publishing a multi-language guide to the
county, expanding translation services that had
been started by Textile Hall for its international
expositions, and encouraging city officials to
begin a “Sister City” relationship with Bergamo
in northern Italy in 1985. (Kortrijk in Belgium
and Tianjin in China have since been added.)
The welcoming environment and
Greenville’s success in diversifying its textile
base led to the 1992 announcement that
BMW would make an immense investment—
now totaling more than $2.2 billion—and
build its only plant outside Germany on
1,150 acres of land bordering I-85 midway
between Greenville and Spartanburg. When
almost forty of the company’s vendors located
nearby, residential development in Greer
exploded. In November 2003, BMW and
Clemson University, with a dozen other
✧
Above: The “Bookends,” developed through
a private-public partnership, wrapped
condominiums around a downtown
parking garage.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
Below: This view, looking south on
Richardson Street, of First Presbyterian
Church, the Imperial Hotel (now the
Greenville Summit), and Downtown Baptist
Church (originally First Baptist) is one of
the very few that has not changed in nearly
a century.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
CHAPTER X
81

✧
Right: After it closed in 1977, developers
attempted to reuse Mills Mill for a variety
of purposes. But it has only been in the last
few years that the Lofts at Mills Mill has
become a remarkably successful
condominium project.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
Below: While Simpsonville’s modern clock
tower has become a symbol of the small
town that has grown dramatically with subdivisions
spreading out from the town center,
the railroad tracks and restored stores also
remember the past.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
82
partners, announced the building of ICAR,
the International Center for Automotive
Research, a multi-million dollar research and
graduate center for automotive engineering
on 250 acres of land bordering Interstate 85.
That land was available because
when eccentric multimillionaire John D.
Hollingsworth died in 2000, he left his vast
estate—primarily thousands of acres of
undeveloped land, much of it along Interstate
85 near Laurens Road—in trust to benefit
Greenville charities including Furman
University and the YMCA. The committee
charged with distributing his estate began
planning for the gradual development of the
tract bordering the highway. While much of the
Verdae property will be residential, ICAR and
the massive new headquarters of the South
Financial Group are transforming the site.
The new high-tech industries have also
transformed towns throughout the county.
While the city’s population fell from about
61,000 to 56,000 between 1970 and 2005, the
county’s increased from 240,500 to 407,300 in
same thirty-five years. That growth was
especially obvious in Greer and Mauldin, where
population increased by more than thirty
percent between 2000 and 2006 because of a
surge of residential building. Simpsonville
wasn’t far behind. Greer, the site of BMW and
Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport
(known as GSP to most residents, but pilots
simply call it “Greer”) has particularly
flourished. Residents have restored and
renewed historic downtown buildings, and city
officials have organized a major planning effort
to beautify the city.
Growth and prosperity led to library,
hospital, and school expansion. Combining
county tax dollars with local contributions of
land, library system trustees replaced nine
branch libraries throughout the county and,
in 2002, completed a new $17.8 million
downtown Hughes Library. In the early
1980s, Greenville Memorial Hospital System
gradually phased out General Hospital and

added a new Shriners’ Hospital, the
Carolinas-Georgia Blood Center, and a cardiac
rehabilitation program. Both the Hospital
System and St. Francis Hospital built huge
new complexes on Greenville’s eastside. In
2002 the School District of Greenville County,
working with Institutional Resources,
launched a 70-project, four-year, $800
million building program aimed at providing
equal facilities for children across the county.
Colleges, too, felt the impact. Greenville
Technical College expanded, adding buildings
and its first dormitory. The Greenville
University Center, founded in 1987, brought
classes from seven cooperating universities to
its site at old McAlister Square Mall. Between
1991 and 2007, North Greenville Junior
College became first a four-year college and
then a Bible-centered university enrolling
1900 students. Bob Jones University grew to
more than 5,000 students.
Furman University, whose endowment
grew from $22 million in 1976 to about $460
million in thirty years, became a nationally
prestigious liberal arts college. In 1992, after
four years of controversy, it became
independent of the South Carolina Baptist
Convention. Led by President David Shi since
1993, its new and renovated facilities and
magnificent campus have attracted highly
capable students from throughout the nation.
New audiences and sites for performances,
exhibitions, festivals, and museums reflected
the population surge. The Greenville
✧
Left: Greer, prospering from industrial,
commercial, and residential development,
has restored historic downtown buildings, is
rapidly building new ones, and is planning
for future revitalization and growth.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT W. BAINBRIDGE.
Below: The main campus of the Greenville
Hospital System now spreads over 138
acres of land between Grove and Faris
Road and includes Shriners’ Hospital for
Crippled Children.
COURTESY OF GREENVILLE HOSPITAL SYSTEM.
CHAPTER X
83

✧
Right: The first building at ICAR, the
International Center for Automotive
Research jointly funded by Clemson
University and BMW with support from
state and local governments, is sited
dramatically on a part of the former
Hollingsworth property.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
Below: Bob Jones University created a
welcoming new entrance to its campus in
the summer of 2007. In addition to its
undergraduate and graduate programs, it
also offers elementary and high schools.
COURTESY OF BOB JONES UNIVERSITY.
Symphony, whose artistic director, Edward
Tchivzhel, defected from the Soviet Union in
1991, became a major regional orchestra; both
it and the 160-voice Greenville Chorale
perform at the Peace Center. The Warehouse
Theatre, Centre Stage, and the Children’s
Theatre, together with new outdoor
amphitheatres for Shakespeare in the Park and
Chautauqua performances added to theatrical
offerings. Under the leadership of its first
president, Virginia Uldrick, the residential
South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts
and Humanities was established in the West
End for talented high school students. Heritage
Green expanded to include the Upcountry
History Museum, and a sampler of religious art
from the Bob Jones University collection in the
renovated the Coca-Cola building. A Children’s
Museum plans to open in the former downtown
library building. Museums in Travelers Rest and
Greer as well as the downtown Confederate
Museum and the Cultural Exchange Center,
which focuses on local African-American
history and culture, provided new
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
84

understanding of the community’s past. Public
art—statues both whimsical and admiring—
became a part of the streetscape.
But more people also brought congestion
and urban sprawl. Woodruff and Haywood
Roads were quiet country drives until 1980.
After the openings of Greenville Mall in 1978
and Haywood Mall, the largest in the state, in
1980, the land around them was immediately
developed. Although the Greenville Mall was
demolished in 2006, Woodruff Road had
already become a planner’s nightmare with
bumper-to-bumper traffic. Retailing on Wade
Hampton Boulevard stretches in a nearly
uninterrupted stream from Greenville to Greer.
Accompanying this economic power,
Greenville began to flex its political muscle.
Although the county had long been the largest
in South Carolina, no native son had ever
been elected governor, although President
Andrew Johnson had appointed Benjamin
Perry governor in 1865, and Martin Ansel
(governor, 1907-1911) was a native of
Walhalla who moved to Greenville when he
was twenty. Beginning in 1986, however, first
Democrat Richard W. Riley, who emphasized
more spending on education, and then
Republican Carroll Campbell each won two
consecutive terms in the governor’s chair. In
addition, State Senator Vern Smith of Greer,
first as a Democrat, later as a Republican, was
one of the most important political brokers in
the state, and Republican David Wilkins, long
time Speaker of the House, wielded
tremendous influence. Greenville native Jesse
Jackson, who had become a spokesman for
civil rights causes and a strong proponent of
black pride through the Chicago-based
Operation Push, made a credible showing in a
run for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1984. Governor Riley went on
to serve two terms as Secretary of Education
in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and in
✧
Above: Graced by mature tree-lined malls,
fountains, and magnificent landscaping,
Furman’s campus, one of the most beautiful
in the nation, is centered around the James
B. Duke Library, recently renovated at a
cost of $25 million. To the left, a
combination of renovation and new
construction is creating the $55 million
Townes Science Center.
COURTESY OF FURMAN UNIVERSITY.
Left: South Carolina Governor Richard W.
Riley became a two-term Secretary of
Education in the Clinton administration and
one of state’s most admired public servants.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER X
85

✧
Above: Evening illumination of the
pedestrian Liberty Bridge creates a
dramatic view for West End visitors.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
Below: The beautifully landscaped banks
of the Reedy River draw families from all
over the county to enjoy the atmosphere of
the park.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
86
2005, Speaker Wilkins was named U.S.
ambassador to Canada.
Civic leadership also evolved. A generation
of powerful Greenville men died or retired in
the 1960s and ’70s, and younger leaders began
to replace them. Some emerged from the
Leadership Greenville program, started by the
Chamber of Commerce in 1973. Others—
Mack Whittle, then a young banker, Minor
Shaw, the daughter of Buck Mickel, banker
Dempsey Hammond, attorney Larry
Estridge—honed leadership skills through
service on the board of the Greenville Central
Area Partnership between 1981 and 1987.
Mayors W. D. Workman and Knox White and
city staff vigorously encouraged and supported
economic development and planning. But the
growth of Greenville, bringing with it a new
internationalism and technological sophistication,
brought new challenges. The size of
the county meant that leadership would
necessarily be more diffuse, more diverse, and
greatly enlarged. About eleven hundred people
from across the county, led by Furman
President David Shi, Minor Shaw, George
Fletcher, and Merl Code worked to create
Vision 2025, a plan for Greenville’s future.
That vision includes protecting and
enhancing the county’s remarkable natural
beauty. In 1973, Tommy Wyche established the
Natural Land Trust to conserve forty thousand
acres of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains in
the northern part of the county. His son,
Bradford Wyche, worked, encouraged, and
inspired efforts to clean up the Reedy River and
organized Upstate Forever, an eighteenhundred-member
grassroots environmental
conservation group. A part of that drive led to
the recovery and conversion of polluted Lake
Conestee into a public park and environmental
center. Paradoxically, renewing the river was
made possible by the $7-million penalty
imposed on Colonial Pipeline, which, in the
late 1990s spilled hundreds of thousands of
gallons of oil—the sixth largest spill in the
nation’s history—into the Reedy.
And that river, Greenville’s historic heart,
was the key to revitalizing the historic West
End. Falls Park, with its public gardens and
amphitheatres, that now brings families to the
now pristine river banks. When the
Camperdown Bridge over the river’s waterfalls
was replaced with the pedestrian Liberty
Bridge, an instant landmark was born.
After twenty years of significant
investment, city officials saw the arts district
they had envisioned in the once-decaying
commercial buildings become a reality. The
$13.5-million RiverPlace development across
the river from the renovated Coach Factory,

with its office buildings, hotel, and
condominiums, as well as significant public
spaces, attracts more people to the restaurants
and shops located in once-decaying buildings.
Although it aroused substantial controversy,
siting a remarkably pleasant minor league
baseball stadium for the South Atlantic
League Red Sox affiliate, the Greenville Drive,
in the West End sparked new construction
and crowds of visitors.
Greenville today is a product of its past and
the faith and vision of its leaders. In the last
three decades it has evolved from a textile
town into an international industrial center;
its small towns have grown into prosperous
suburbs; its revitalized downtown has
garnered prestigious national awards. But it
has been changing, finding new directions,
exploring new possibilities, for more than two
hundred years. Fortunate in its location, open
to new ideas, gifted with persistence and drive
(the local team was well named), Greenville,
South Carolina, has woven its history into
its future.
✧
Left: RiverPlace, whose hotel, offices, and
condominiums are reflected in the waters of
the Reedy River, adds an entirely new
complex and view of downtown Greenville.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
Below: There was substantial controversy
when the city proposed to build a minor
league stadium in the West End for
The Drive, Greenville’s minor league Red
Sox affiliate. Its success with fans, however,
has led to crowds and continuing
revitalization in the old downtown
commercial district.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ERKENS, REEL VIDEO AND STILLS.
CHAPTER X
87

HISTORIC GREENVILLE
88

SHARING THE HERITAGE
historic profiles of businesses and organizations,
that have contributed to the development and
economic base of Greenville and Greenville County
Thornblade Park ..........................................................................90
Goodwill Industries of Upstate/Midlands South Carolina, Inc...............94
Goodwill Foundation .....................................................................97
Fluor..........................................................................................98
Collins Entertainment Corporation ................................................102
Greenville Symphony Orchestra.....................................................105
Greenville County Schools ............................................................106
Rolling Green Village ..................................................................108
Lockheed Martin.........................................................................110
Hubbell Lighting, Inc...................................................................112
Furman University......................................................................114
City of Fountain Inn ...................................................................116
Dority & Manning, P.A. ...............................................................118
American Services, Inc. ...............................................................120
Village at Pelham .......................................................................122
Bob Jones University ...................................................................124
llyn strong fine jewelry................................................................126
Interim Healthcare......................................................................128
KEMET Corporation ....................................................................130
The Furman Company .................................................................132
Gallivan, White & Boyd, P.A. ......................................................134
Greenville Technical College .........................................................135
Arbor Engineering.......................................................................136
Greenville Heritage Federal Credit Union .......................................137
Baldor•Dodge•Reliance ...............................................................138
The Great Escape........................................................................139
Family Legacy, Inc. .....................................................................140
O’Neal, Inc................................................................................141
Benefit Controls Companies ..........................................................142
Printmasters Professional Printers, Inc...........................................143
First Presbyterian Church ............................................................144
Sweetgrass Connections ...............................................................145
Long Trailer and Body Service ......................................................146
Shannon Forest Christian School ...................................................147
Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce.......................................148
The Woodlands at Furman............................................................149
Reel Video & Stills, Inc. ..............................................................150
East Broad Trust Company ...........................................................151
Bon Secours St. Francis Health System ...........................................152
Christ Church Episcopal School.....................................................153
Prudential C. Dan Joyner Co. .......................................................154
FGP International.......................................................................155
General Wholesale Distributors, LLC .............................................156
University Center of Greenville.....................................................157
Super Duper ® Publications ...........................................................158
University of South Carolina Upstate.............................................159
Bowater Incorporated ..................................................................160
Greenville County Library System .................................................161
Pendleton Street Baptist Church ....................................................162
SPECIAL
THANKS TO
Hyatt Regency Greenville
SHARING THE HERITAGE
89

THORNBLADE
PARK
Imagine the good life: Enjoying food
and drink and catching the big game
on a king-sized television, scoring a win
in a friendly battle of tennis, pumping
some iron to get in shape, simply relaxing
poolside while soaking up the sun’s
rays, or, maybe taking a walk along
a beautifully appointed nature trail just to
relax at the end of the day and reflect on
important things. Sound too good to be true?
Think again!
Some may think amenities such as these
are only acquired with a visit to the shore, at
a luxurious resort or hotel, or some exotic,
far-away island. Not so, say the owners of
Thornblade Park, an upscale apartment
community just east of Greenville in the
booming area of Greer, and The Arbors at
Brookfield, located off I-385 in Mauldin. The
twenty-one acre and fifty acre facilities,
respectively, offer quality living in instant
getaway atmospheres, twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week!
Thornblade Park, a multifamily property,
was developed in 1997 and features a
clubhouse, swimming pool, two tennis
courts, a playground, a clothes care center,
fitness center, executive center, car wash area
and the unique nature trail—uncommon to
most apartment dwellers.
Management’s primary marketing focus
is the Premier Employer Program,
which targets large employers in the
area, offering their employees a five percent
discount off market rent. Resident retention
is of major importance. To show its
appreciation, management selects two
residents each month to be guests at
a special luncheon. But, that is not all. Renters
are recognized on their birthdays with
balloons and cards on their doors. These are
just some of the ways that the staff shows its
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
90

SHARING THE HERITAGE
91

gratitude, because “we don’t want current
residents to leave.”
With 293 units, it features a multifaceted
mix of 94 one-bedroom units, 144 twobedrooms,
and 55 three-bedrooms. There
are seventeen independent buildings in
the gated community. Monthly rent, of
course, is based on bedroom size, and starts
at $700.
Now a decade old, Thornblade Park
continues to maintain its curb appeal
and the location makes it ideal for workers
being drawn to Greenville’s Eastside
professional, retail, high tech and healthcare
jobs. It is conveniently located for
easy access to Michelin and BMW, as well
as the Clemson University–International
Automotive Research Center (CU-ICAR)
which is being developed at Millennium
Campus near I-85 between Woodruff and
Laurens Roads.
Both properties are staffed by a property
manager, assistant manager and a
marketing/leasing specialist. In addition, the
maintenance supervisor, maintenance
technician, groundskeeper and housekeeper
keep it looking spiffy. With years of tenure,
the staff maintains the property as if it were
their own.
The Arbors at Brookfield offers a
comfortable lifestyle seldom found in
apartment living. With 702 units and
thirty-five buildings, the Arbors at
Brookfield is the largest apartment
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
92

community in the upstate of South Carolina.
It has been referred to as a small city with a
large living appeal. The twelve different floor
plans and monthly rents allow the residents to
choose their own lifestyle.
Like its sister community, it offers one-,
two- and three-bedroom homes that are
equipped with standard benefits such as
washer and dryer connections, ranges,
dishwashers, refrigerators (with icemakers),
and residents’ choice of a patio or balcony.
And like Thornblade Park, it also features
gated living.
Special décor or amenities make residing
there, more enjoyable and easy to take. Why
not? It goes beyond the traditional, offering a
state-of-the-art fitness center including an
aerobics program; not one, but three,
sparkling clear swimming pools with adjacent
outdoor spas, two lighted tennis courts, two
designer clubhouses, a business and
conference center, two playgrounds, two car
care centers, a sand volleyball court, garages
and storage units.
The Arbors at Brookfield takes pride
in welcoming individuals of all generations
alike. It is just minutes from everything—
award-winning schools, shopping, fine
restaurants, entertainment such as
performing and visual arts, and the
famous downtown, revitalized streets of
Greenville. Whatever an individual’s
lifestyle, they are sure to find it at one
of these communities, says Cinnamon
McCauley, property manager. “Thornblade
Park and The Arbors at Brookfield
are the Upstate’s ultimate apartment
home communities.”
SHARING THE HERITAGE
93

GOODWILL
INDUSTRIES OF
UPSTATE/
MIDLANDS
SOUTH
CAROLINA,
INC.
✧
Above: Lloyd Auten, founder of Goodwill
Industries of Upper South Carolina,
started the Goodwill movement in the
Upstate in 1972.
Below: Goodwill stores offer great values on
gently used merchandise and create funding
to support Goodwill’s job training and
placement services.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
94
Goodwill Industries of Upstate/Midlands
South Carolina, Inc., like many organizations,
was started on a shoestring with a heaping
hand of faith mixed in. Today, it stands as a
model to other not-for-profit service agencies.
The reason is simple and based upon its
mission statement:
“Goodwill Industries of Upstate/Midlands
South Carolina is a nonprofit organization
that is committed to helping people
with disabilities and other special needs
become fully independent citizens through
education, training and employment leading
to job placement.”
While the history of Goodwill International
was forged over 100 years ago, it was not until
1972 that the idea for a local Goodwill arose in
Greenville. Lloyd Auten, the owner of a
large and successful hardware store on
Rutherford Road, planted the seed. Knowing
about the good work that Goodwill was doing
nationally, he invited Nelson Kittle, Regional
Consultant for the Southeastern United States
Goodwill Operations, to pay a visit and
complete a needs survey. He did, and the rest,
they say—is history!
The effort was seriously undertaken in
1973, when community leaders met with
Goodwill officials at a public meeting to
determine interest and feasibility in the
Greenville market.
In February 1973 the decision was made to
incorporate, and Goodwill Industries of
Upper South Carolina was born. In March,
the corporation selected its first board
members and applied to the state for a
charter. The charter was approved April 30,
with incorporation a few days later.
Board members had been selected from
area civic and business leaders in March, and
they held their first meeting May 2. The board
chose the Reverend Cecil McFarland as its
first executive director.
In August the Executive Committee
approved the lease of the P. L. Bruce Building
on Poinsett Highway for the first store. In
September, McFarland began his tenure with
Goodwill, a position he held until 1977, when
he “retired” to Richmond, Virginia to do
prison ministry. To contain costs during startup,
he solicited assistance from companies
like Ryder Trucks, to provide free pick-up of
donated goods.
In December 1973 the board developed
the motto, “Not Charity, but a Chance,”
alluding to the fact that the organization was
formed to provide job training for individuals
with disabilities and other special needs so
they could become self-sufficient.
In order to secure donations for sale in
the store, the organization placed the first fifteen
collection-donor boxes throughout the city on
December 15. By the end of that year, the
organization began doing contract work.
The new year brought with it new
opportunities and new challenges.
Commemorating its first year of success,
Goodwill Industries of Upper South Carolina
began holding what would become an annual
dinner—in the Gold Room of Greenville’s
grand old hotel, The Poinsett. The Reverend
Edgar James Helms, son of Goodwill’s
founder, was keynote speaker.

In the fall, the Commission for the
Blind and Vocational Rehabilitation began
contracting with Goodwill for evaluation
and on-the-job training services. From that
initial effort, six workers were placed into jobs,
and a second store opened in the Augusta
Road area.
In 1977, Robert Langford became
Goodwill’s second executive director. Blinded
in an accident as a teen, he knew first hand
the career obstacles faced by individuals with
disabilities. Necessity had forced him to
change his career path from aeronautical
engineering to psychology and industrial
management. He had received his master’s
degree, and later earned a Ph. D. degree from
New York University. A statement he once
made with reference to persons with
disabilities bears repeating because it fits so
well with Goodwill’s mission statement: “My
primary motivator is not a column of profitloss
figures. Profit is measured by the people
that can be helped.”
In 1981, William G. “Bill” Oakley
succeeded him as executive director. It was
during his tenure that even more attention
was directed to opening new retail stores and
gaining additional work contracts. As a result
of his efforts the organization generated
additional revenue that has enabled it to
continue to grow and provide job skills
through additional training programs. Bill left
in 1997 to become executive director in
Savannah, Georgia and was succeeded by
Doug Bell in 1998.
In October 1984, Goodwill was awarded
the janitorial service contract at the Federal
Building in Greenville, setting precedence for
other companies to follow suit.
By January 1985, Goodwill had grown to
five stores: Poinsett Highway, Terrace
Shopping Center, Greer, Easley, and
Spartanburg. Additional donation centers
were located at Loehman’s Plaza, Westgate
Mall, Roper Mountain Road, and Berea.
The organization continued its upward
mobility, moving its contracts operation
service to Poe Mill, adding an employee
dining area at the Poinsett location whereby
workers could purchase low-cost meals.
On June 10, Lloyd Auten, original founder
and president, passed away. That same day,
Goodwill hosted its first Disability Awareness
Day for the Girl Scouts—a tradition it has
continued over the years.
Stores were added, some moved, others
received face-lifts. In fact, following the
original location’s face-lift in 1993, a grand
reopening was held offering antiques for sale.
In December a trailer was filled with
donations in a public relations effort with
WSSL’s John Boy Crenshaw, who broadcast
from the roof of the Peace Center to
encourage listeners to donate items to
✧
Above: The Goodwill Headquarters on
Haywood Road in Greenville houses the
corporate offices, the distribution center
for the Upstate, Goodwill’s Subway
restaurant where clients are trained for jobs
in the Food Service industry, and a
Goodwill Clearance Center.
Below: Goodwill’s first store in Greenville
opened in August 1973 at 912 Poinsett
Highway..
SHARING THE HERITAGE
95

✧
Above: Members of Goodwill’s Board of
Directors (from left to right): Tony Bell,
Nell Stewart, Beverly Kaplan, Dean
Anderson, Tom Hemans, Barbara Lassiter,
Becky Clement, Bill Hummers, Gordon
White, L.R. Byrd, Tom Miller, Gabriel
Cuervo, Jeff Gilstrap, David Doubek, Joe
Long, and Eddie Houston.
Below: Goodwill’s Business Support Services,
located at the Goodwill Training Center on
Sulphur Springs Road in Greenville,
provides cost-effective solutions for
businesses needing assistance in packaging,
assembly, contract manufacturing, and
custodial services while providing training
positions for Goodwill clients.
Goodwill; and twenty-two years after opening
its first store, Goodwill opened its eighth.
In 1994, administrative offices were moved
from the Poinsett Highway location to
Industrial Drive’s old Umbo Company, a
former plastics manufacturing plant.
Four years later, the Food Service Training
Program was begun at the Industrial Drive
location. The existing kitchen was remodeled
into a training kitchen so individuals could
be trained for entry-level jobs in the food
service industry.
In 1998, Goodwill Industries of Upper
South Carolina, Inc. celebrated its Silver
Anniversary at Palmetto Exhibition Center.
Special guests were President and Chief
Executive Officer of Goodwill Industries
International, Inc., Fred Grandy. Grandy, an
actor on television’s Love Boat, had
previously served four terms in the U.S.
House of Representatives in Iowa; and the
Honorable David M. Beasley, 113th governor
of South Carolina. Beasley, at the age of
twenty, was the youngest majority leader in
the nation.
In 2002, Bill Wylie assumed the direction of
the Upstate division of Goodwill. Under his
direction, the organization has continued to
grow, enabling it to fulfill its mission of
providing job training and job placement. More
people have been served and placed in full-time
jobs during his tenure than at any other time in
its history. He oversaw the renovations of the old
Sears warehouse on Haywood Road and, in
2006, turned the building into one for
donations, worker training, and sales, and
established the first restaurant, a Subway, which
houses the Food Service Training Program as
well providing quick food for the general public.
He says that people come to Goodwill
filled with fear, hopelessness and despair over
having no job or source of income through no
fault of their own. “They have lost their
dignity, independence and direction. They
may be physically impaired, mentally
challenged or fallen on bad times. Goodwill
and the board of civic and business leaders
provide the direction to help them become
self-sustaining.”
With his continued effort, Goodwill has
further developed its Business Support
Services Division, providing workforce
solutions and custodial services. Business
Support Services partners include: 3M, BI-
LO, Inc., BMW, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin,
Michelin North America and Siemens.
In 2006, Goodwill Industries of Upper
South Carolina changed its name to Goodwill
Industries of Upstate/Midlands South Carolina
to fully reflect the entire region it serves.
Goodwill finished the 2006 fiscal year
with astronomical statistics: 1,162 people
placed into full-time employment; 5,144
people served with a $20 million impact
in the community. Serving on the board
are Nell Stewart, Dean Anderson, Tony
Bell, Eddie Houston, Bill McMartin, Bob
Jenkins, Becky Clement, Jimmy Jones, Gabriel
Cuervo, Beverly Kaplan, Ben Fugitt,
Bert Sanders, Tom Hemans, Gordon White,
Bill Hummers, Barbara Lassiter, Joe Long,
Sarah McGregor, Ali Saifi, David Doubek,
Tom Miller, Jeff Gilstrap, Erika Newsom,
Rick Sumerel, Patricia Westmoreland, and
Phyllis Martin.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
96

In 2005, community and civic leaders who
comprised the board of directors of Goodwill
Industries of Upstate/Midlands South
Carolina, Inc. (GWI) felt that a holistic
approach was necessary to assist clients.
While adhering to the organization’s mission
statement of providing job training for
individuals with special needs and assisting
them via job placement or contract work, the
consensus felt that was not always sufficient.
“Because people have different needs—so do
GWI clients,” says President Bill Wylie. “What
works for one doesn’t always work for everyone.
We realize there are issues such as housing,
childcare and transportation. In short, if they
earn minimum wages, it isn’t enough to pay the
rent … or buy a house … pay a babysitter …
purchase a car …or even buy gas to get to work.
“We decided to adopt a holistic approach by
accessing the total situation of every client who
comes through our program. The result was
the establishment of the Goodwill Foundation,
a 501 (c) 3 charitable organization.”
The Foundation’s mission is to amass
capital and other resources and leverage them
with effective community organizations such
as Upstate Homeless Coalition, Greenville
Area Interfaith Hospitality Network (GAIHN),
United Way, United Ministries, Housing
Authority of Greenville, Greenville Transit
Authority, Miracle Hill Ministries, Habitat for
Humanity, YMCA, and DSS, among others, to
develop innovative solutions that enable the
disabled and disadvantaged to permanently
overcome the barriers to self-sufficiency.
Known as the Road to Self-Sufficiency
Program, it is a partnership with these
agencies designed to assist families in
overcoming principle barriers to selfsufficiency
in a holistic fashion.
The Foundation does not attempt to
duplicate any services being performed by
those agencies. The Foundation simply works
in collaboration with those organizations and
their models or constraints, utilizing them as
adjuncts to its own efforts.
“Beyond the typical issues that some
organizations embrace, GWI also considers
other infrastructure components like
healthcare, education and financial
management,” Wylie adds.
The GWI Foundation works with its
partners to select qualified families for
the Road to Self-Sufficiency Program. Once
selected, the Foundation assists clients
in obtaining safe transitional housing,
affordable childcare, reliable transportation,
job training and education, and permanent
full time employment.
The Foundation believes self-sufficiency is
the desired state for all people and that
individuals and society function best in that
environment. As a result of that belief, by the
year 2017, Goodwill’s Foundation expects to
facilitate the development and employment of
an innovative, systematic, holistic approach to
enable the disabled and disadvantaged to
permanently and predictably overcome the
barriers to self-sufficiency. Through these
efforts its innovative approach to self
sufficiency will be widely recognized as a
national model and will be broadly emulated
by other communities.
GOODWILL
FOUNDATION
✧
Above: Bill Wylie founded the Goodwill
Foundation with the dream of helping
disabled and disadvantaged families become
self sufficient.
Below: Goodwill Foundation, Goodwill
Industries, Greenville Area Interfaith
Hospitality Network, and Upstate Homeless
Coalition participate in a groundbreaking
ceremony of five transitional homes being
built for families entering the Road to Self
Sufficiency Program.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
97

FLUOR
✧
Above: Charles E. “Charlie” Daniel, founder
of Daniel Construction.
Below: Fluor moved to its current Greenville
campus in 1983.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
98
Charles E. Daniel’s legacy is evident in
Greenville and throughout the world. His
name is associated with construction from
post-WW I days to the present, although
the company that once bore his
name has experienced several changes:
Daniel Construction Company, Daniel
International, Fluor Daniel and, today, Fluor.
Charles, known as “Charlie,” was truly a
man of vision long before many had a
definitive roadmap, giving new meaning to
entrepreneurship. Born in 1895 in Anderson,
South Carolina, he later won a two-year
competitive scholarship to the Citadel and
soon after served as a lieutenant in the U.S.
Army during WW I.
In 1919 he returned to Anderson to work
for Townsend Lumber Company, building
crates for the textile industry. The next year,
however, boll weevils stripped the cotton
crops, a major source of industry in the
South. Living conditions were poor; banks
failed, and by the 1930s, the area was
feeling the devastation imposed by the
Great Depression.
In 1934, Charlie started Daniel
Construction Company in Anderson with
faith, determination, and a $25,000 loan. In
the years that followed, it was said that he
“shifted the Southern emphasis from
reconstruction to construction” and gained
recognition as an economic philosopher in
industry, finance and politics. He believed in
exerting his management skills at the jobsite
rather than from behind a desk.
He learned from experience and drilled
into co-workers that repeat business and
success were built on reliability. That
philosophy proved true for him, leading to
many construction transactions that were
handled in an informal manner without so
much as a written contract. For him, a
handshake was all that was needed.
Industrialization remained dormant in
the South for several years after WW II,
except for military and related projects,
leaving very few jobs for returning
servicemen. While Charlie had acquired a few
defense contracts, most had been fulfilled,
and he did not have enough work to keep
craftsmen on his payroll or rehire those out of
uniform.
Determined to secure new business,
Charlie headed to the North and Midwest,
convincing many corporations to consider the
South for expansion. This resulted in a
successful influx of new construction,
particularly in South Carolina and
neighboring states, which had a lasting effect
on the South. He was on his way to
successfully proving that the South was not
the lowest paid, most illiterate and
underdeveloped part of the nation—facts for
which it had become known.
He was a self-made man—successful, yet
not indulgent in self-satisfaction. He never
backed off from new challenges or
opportunities. He saw the right moment and
seized it!
His word became his bond, states a history
written about his life. “It came to be known as
the ‘Daniel way’ of doing business.”
He formed relationships with people from
all walks of life. One relationship was with a

young Roger Milliken, who moved his textile
company from New York to Spartanburg in
1939. Daniel went on to build forty-four
grass-roots plants or major expansions for
Milliken. Charlie continued forging
relationships—securing the contract for
Greenville’s Army Air Base (later known as
Donaldson AFB). In fact, it was during WW II
that his business diversified, and he began
working with the textile industry, building
plants for companies producing synthetics,
chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper,
metals, and power. These accomplishments
won Charlie the title of “Builder of the South.”
His early business acumen was the
stepping stone to making the company one of
the nation’s top open-shop construction
companies and paved the way for the
international business it enjoys today.
The company moved its headquarters to
Greenville in 1942, and by the 1950s the
company began working with the U.S.
government, gaining contracts in the nuclear
field. It contracted for U.S. Air Force work at
Dhahran Air Base, Saudi Arabia. When the
decade ended, it had diversified and
established offices worldwide.
By 1964 the company had outgrown its
headquarters and purchased property on
North Main Street for a twenty-five-story
building bearing Charlie’s name. (This
building was the city’s first high-rise office
building.) That same year, however, Charlie
passed away, leaving his company and legacy
to his nephew, Buck Mickel.
Under Mickel’s leadership, the company
continued to prosper. Two years after
breaking ground, the new headquarters was
dedicated, and an additional office was
opened in Puerto Rico. In 1968, Daniel
Construction Company began managing
larger, more complex projects by establishing
specific divisions encompassing power,
chemicals, textiles, fibers, and industrial jobs.
These divisions paved the way for the power,
industrial, and process sectors that comprise a
great deal of the company’s business today.
Not only did Mickel share many of Charlie’s
business visions, but he also improved race
relations and life in Greenville.
Daniel Construction became a publicly
held company in 1969. By then, the company
was recognized as an industrial contractor
with revenues of more than $1 billion a year.
In 1977 the company was acquired by Fluor.
It was the perfect merger because Daniel was
largely based in the United States, while Fluor
worked primarily overseas. The two had
different client bases and were involved in
different types of projects. Many Fluor
locations were unionized; Daniel’s were not.
When the merger was over, however, the two
companies integrated efficiently.
In 1986, Fluor’s two largest divisions—
Fluor Engineers, Inc. and Daniel
International—became a single operating unit
known worldwide as Fluor Daniel. The
merger and name change gave the company
more flexibility in the marketplace. The
formation of the combined companies into
✧
Above: Buck Mickel succeeded Charlie and
continued his legacy.
Below: Mega petrochemical complex—more
than seven thousand workers a day report
to the project site in Kuwait.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
99

✧
Above: Fluor provided engineering,
procurement and construction management
services to Merck’s state-of-the-art
Bioprocess Research and Development
facility in West Point, Pennsylvania.
Below: 165 Greenville employees
participated in the 2007 Hands On
Greenville Day project at the Boys Home of
the South.
Fluor Daniel was led by Les McCraw, who
served as CEO of Fluor from 1988 to 1997.
Today, Fluor Chairman and CEO Alan
Boeckmann continues the dedication to
attracting, retaining, developing, and supporting
a world-class workforce that is positioned to
meet the challenges of the future.
Fluor Corporation today is consistently
rated as one of the world’s safest contractors,
Fluor’s primary objective is to develop,
execute, and maintain projects on schedule,
within budget and with excellence. Its
outstanding dependability, expertise, and
safety performance distinguish it as the
preeminent global leader in the building
services marketplace.
Fluor is a FORTUNE 500 company,
ranked number one in the “Engineering,
Construction” category of America’s largest
corporations. In addition, Fluor ranks number
one on Engineering News-Record magazine’s
“Top 100 Contractors by New Contracts” list
and number two on its “Top 400 Contractors”
and “Top 100 Design-Build Firms” lists. For
Fluor’s clients, this recognition emphasizes the
company’s ability to successfully execute large,
financially complex projects around the globe.
Through their individual and collective
expertise, more than forty thousand
international employees provide costeffective,
intelligent solutions in a timely
manner. Fluor maintains a network of offices
in more than twenty-five countries across six
continents. This workforce provides Fluor
with the capability to execute diverse scopes
of work on projects and the flexibility to staff
projects in accordance with project needs.
Fluor serves clients in a wide variety
of industries, including oil and gas, chemicals and
petrochemicals, commercial and institutional,
government services, healthcare, life sciences,
manufacturing, microelectronics, mining, power,
telecommunications, and transportation.
Fluor’s Greenville office is the most
diversified office within the company. Fluor is
comprised of five business groups, and all are
present in Greenville. They are:
• The Industrial & Infrastructure Group is an
extremely diverse group, overseeing design
and construction of highways and bridges,
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
100

manufacturing and life sciences facilities,
and mining and metals projects. This group
has also designed or built sixty-one percent
of the biotech industry’s total capacity.
• The Government Group serves federal
agencies domestically and internationally.
Projects include environmental and nuclear
management, nuclear site decommissioning
and restoration, international reconstruction,
contingency operations, and disaster recovery.
• Its Power Group designs and constructs
state-of-the-art fossil and nuclear power
generation facilities.
• The Energy & Chemicals Group began
building chemical production facilities in
the 1940s for numerous clients. Greenville
remains the Center of Excellence for design
and construction of chemical production
facilities globally.
• The Global Services Group, which includes
O&M (operations, maintenance, and small
capital project services), AMECO
(equipment and tool services), and TRS
(staffing services), has been operating out
of Greenville since 1947. This group is
working on six continents, servicing over
100 clients at more than 250 sites.
New awards in 2006 increased to $19.3
billion compared to $12.5 billion in 2005,
while the company’s backlog rose to a record
high of $21.9 billion. Total revenues grew
from $13.2 billion to $14.1 billion.
From the company’s founding as Daniel
Construction Company to the conglomerate it
has become, Fluor has a renowned tradition of
community involvement. Company executives
and employees realize that business has a duty
to positively impact the quality of life in the
communities where it has offices. The
establishment of the Fluor Foundation in
1952 and the Fluor volunteer program in
1976 are a testament to Fluor’s long-time
commitment to investing and building
relationships in global communities.
In Greenville the benefactors of Fluor’s
contributions of both time and money include
March of Dimes and Meals on Wheels, among
others. In total, this Fluor office made
significant monetary contributions and donated
more than 11,500 volunteer hours in 2006. Its
local United Way campaign raised $465,122,
along with a $100,000 donation to the Kroc
Center. Fluor also sponsors the annual Golf for
Greenville tournament, which has raised more
than $1 million since its inception in 1989.
Because of their construction capabilities,
Fluor employees are heavily involved in the
Habitat for Humanity program. Habitat encourages
Greenville County businesses to work
together to build affordable housing for
deserving, low-income families. As of 2006, Fluor
has built 12 houses during the last 11 years.
Fluor…builds industry, careers and
communities. “Fluor is how the world is built.”
✧
Above: Fluor is providing full EPC at this
200-megawatt plant in Nevada.
Below: As of 2006, Greenville employees
have built twelve houses during the last
eleven years for Habitat for Humanity.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
101

COLLINS
ENTERTAINMENT
CORPORATION
✧
Fred J. Collins, Jr.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
102
A child of the Great Depression,
Fred J. Collins, Jr., was born in 1935. Fred’s
mother passed away when he was in grammar
school. During those times, motherless
children were often forced into orphanages, and
Fred spent several years at the Salvation
Army’s Bruner Home located on Rutherford
Road. Years later, Fred returned to Rutherford
Road, where he located the headquarters of
his multimillion dollar company. He never
forgot the Salvation Army and, in 2005,
donated $1 million to the organization so it
could build a community center for
Greenville’s children. Fred’s seventy year
rise from an orphanage to philanthropist
is remarkable.
In 1947, Fred Sr. purchased a small house
in the Judson Mill Village and regained
custody of his young son. But the time spent
at the Bruner Home contributed to the young
boy’s assertive independence and strong will.
Former Sheriff Johnny Mack Brown, who
went to school with Collins, remembers his
friend’s tenacity, even though he “didn’t weigh
100 pounds soaking wet.”
To support his family, Fred Sr. operated
jukeboxes and began buying homes from
various textile mills on Greenville’s Westside
for rental property. He also operated a
small café. The senior Collins passed along
his entrepreneurial spirit to his son. The
Collins family believes it was the takecharge
personality of young Fred, combined
with his father’s business acumen that
launched him to success. “As a young boy,
he had a great mechanical aptitude (for
repairing jukeboxes) and the personality to
negotiate contracts for machines among
Greenville area businesses,” says Felicia
Collins Robbins, Fred’s daughter and current
CEO of the family business.
When Fred was only thirteen, he saw an
opportunity to put pinball machines into
locations where his father had jukeboxes.
He quickly acquired a pinball machine
and placed it into his first location. Soon,
he purchased three more machines and
placed them where the jukeboxes were
operated. This was the birth of what
became Collins Music Company and later
Collins Entertainment Corporation and
eventually, the Collins Companies’ empire.
“Perhaps it was the confidence Fred Sr. placed
in his young son to manage his jukebox
business that gave young Fred a real sense
of self-confidence,” says Charlie Forrester,
a childhood friend. Fred continued to
expand his business, and, at the age of
sixteen, purchased his first jukebox with a
$250 loan.
Young Fred’s maternal great grandfather,
the Reverend Symmonds Sloan, was a Baptist
clergyman and instilled a strong faith in him.
He went to Sunday school every weekend and
was baptized at thirteen. It was during a
Sunday school class outing that Fred
developed polio. It was one of the many
hurdles he faced in life, but he overcame it
through grit, determination, exercise, faith,
and mental toughness. Religion always played
an important part in his life and sustained
him during rough business times and an
illness that finally took his life in 2006 at age
seventy. During these tough times he was
known for saying, “The Lord is going to take
care of us.”
At age sixteen, he fell in love with Shirley
Ward, and they were married in 1951. Shirley
quit school and worked so Fred could
continue growing his business. Fred realized

with marriage and the long hours he worked,
he could not keep up his studies, so he also
had to quit school. The business, combined
with the birth of four children, Fred III,
Kathy, Felicia and Cindy, demanded the
young parent’s full attention.
Although circumstances forced him to end
his schooling, education remained an
important focus for Fred. In 1984 he
established the Fred Collins Foundation to
assist education, the faith-based community,
and healthcare organizations. The nonprofit
organization has donated to institutions of
higher learning and other charities, including
USC, USC School of Law, the Salvation Army,
Greenville Law Enforcement Officer
Scholarships, Allen University, Charleston
Southern University, Clemson, College of
Charleston, Furman, Greenville TEC, the
Medical University of South Carolina and
North Greenville College, as well as Crime
Stoppers and The Meyer Center for Special
Children. While Fred was president of the
National Amusement and Music Operator’s
Association he helped establish the
association’s Executive Development Program
at Notre Dame, and he was a member of the
USC, School of Law Partnership Advisory
Board, and was appointed by Governor
Campbell as a commissioner for the
Commission on the Future of South Carolina.
At twenty-one, he went to work for Peter
Sasso, owner of Southern Amusement
Company and continued buying pinball
machines for his own business. Thirty years
later, he would buy Sasso’s company and
SHARING THE HERITAGE
103

✧
TouchTunes.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
104
other gaming routes. During the ensuing
years, Collins’ acquired jukeboxes, pinball
machines, pool tables, and eventually video
poker machines that were placed in various
businesses throughout the state. “Instant
Service” became his company’s motto and
remains the guiding principle today.
The 1950s and early ’60s beach music
craze, combined with South Carolina’s native
dance, The Shag, propelled Collins Music’s
jukeboxes, and the company enjoyed its first
major financial success. In 1964 the company
incorporated and officially became Collins
Music Company. In the eighties the
computerized PacMan craze was the
company’s second financial breakthrough. In
1994 the company’s name was changed to
Collins Entertainment Corporation to reflect
the changing technology in the coin-operated
machine industry. Video poker became
extremely popular and lucrative, but it also
became a heated political issue and a “thorn”
in Fred Collins’ side.
During those contentious years, Collins
chose to withdraw from the South Carolina
Coin Operators Association because
the organization was against strict state
regulation of video poker. Fred, on the other
hand, believed the state should regulate
and tax the industry with the taxes being
used to support South Carolina’s struggling
educational system. At his own expense
he even drafted legislation outlining his plan.
But in 2001, after much media attention,
courtroom fights, and bare-knuckled
politics, the state outlawed video poker.
Not to be defeated, Collins returned to its
core beginning by offering the latest
jukeboxes, pinballs, and amusement
machines to South Carolina businesses.
The company continues to stay abreast of
the ever-changing electronic games industry.
It is still based on Rutherford Road in
Greenville and has branch offices in
Anderson, Spartanburg, Columbia, Sumter,
Myrtle Beach, and Charleston, and also
operates in North Carolina, Georgia,
Louisiana, and Montana. Today, the company
has 120 employees and is led by a team of
experienced, well-seasoned veterans of the
coin-op industry as well as newcomers. Mark
Meglic joined the team in 2007 as chief
operating officer. Jerry Richardson, director of
operations, has been with Collins since 1984.
Since the late 1990s, Fred Collins, III, an
electrical engineer, has served as the
Midlands Director and head of Research
and Development. Bob Coiner is the
company’s director of service. He has
thirty-three years in the industry with twentythree
of them with Collins. Finally, Fred
named his daughter, Felicia Collins Robbins,
to succeed him as president and chief
executive officer of his companies because of
her successful business career in education
and because of her experience in South
Carolina’s coin operated amusement industry
in the 1980s.
Coin-operated games today are far more
complex and sophisticated than the games of
the past. Collins’ service technicians have an
up-to-date understanding of computers and
monitors in order to provide the “Instant
Service” required to maintain Collins’
equipment in top revenue-producing
condition. For example, the jukeboxes that
started the company went from playing 45s,
to CDs, and can now download music from
the Internet. Felicia says the company has
successfully adapted to industry change, the
loss of its leader when her father,
Fred J. Collins, Jr., lost his fourteen-month
battle with cancer, and that “Collins future is
bright. We continue to be South Carolina’s
undisputed leader in the coin-operated
amusement industry, a title we plan to hand
down for generations.”

For sixty years, the Greenville Symphony
Orchestra (GSO) has made beautiful music in
the Upstate. From its first concert season in
1948, featuring only two concerts, to the
Sixtieth Anniversary Season, featuring thirtythree
concerts, the GSO has become one of the
finest symphony orchestras in the Southeast.
Under the leadership of Music Director and
Conductor Maestro Edvard Tchivzhel, the
Symphony is the highlight of an “evening on
the town” for patrons and sponsors alike.
With concerts once held at Furman
University, the GSO now offers a variety of
classical and pops performances in the heart of
downtown Greenville at The Peace Center for
the Performing Arts. Programming includes six
Masterworks Concerts, performed on Saturday
nights and Sunday afternoons in the main
concert hall, with timeless orchestral repertoire
and internationally renowned guest artists. The
Chamber Orchestra Series features four
concerts held on Friday nights, Saturday
nights, and Sunday afternoons in the intimate
Gunter Theatre, and focuses on the lighter side
of the classical repertoire, with each piece
introduced by the Maestro. The popular new
Spotlight Series features small ensembles of
GSO musicians with three chamber music
performances in a casual downtown setting.
Rounding out each season is the GSO’s
“Holiday at Peace” pops concert, held three
nights in December.
Since the first children’s concert was
presented in 1951, the GSO’s Education and
Community Engagement Programs continue to
be an important facet of Greenville
life. Every year GSO musicians present free
educational concerts and programs for nearly
35,000 children in the Upstate.
Internationally acclaimed and Russian-born,
conductor Maestro Tchivzhel is the fifth Music
Director and Conductor of the GSO. Tchivzhel
considers Greenville his “American cradle,”
after a number of Greenvillians came to his aid
in 1991 when he and his family defected from
the Soviet Union at the end of his American
tour with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra.
Having performed with many great guest
artists, including André Watts, Nadja Salerno-
Sonnenberg, Mark O’Connor, and Yo-Yo Ma
(who wrote after his appearance in Greenville
that Tchivzhel is “a master”), Tchivzhel has won
international status with appearances in New
Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Germany,
England, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania,
Australia, and Sweden. He was appointed
GSO’s music director and conductor in 1999.
The GSO continues to thrive, thanks to
dedicated musicians, board members, staff and
volunteers, including members of the Guild of
the Greenville Symphony who have contributed
countless volunteer hours and financial
resources to the Symphony since 1958.
The offices of the Greenville Symphony
Association are located in the Symphony
Center building on 200 South Main Street,
which was donated to the organization in
1997 by Holly Magill, a longtime supporter.
For additional information on the
Greenville Symphony Orchestra, please visit
www.greenvillesymphony.org.
GREENVILLE
SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
✧
Maestro Edvard Tchivzhel.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
105

GREENVILLE
COUNTY
SCHOOLS
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
106
Greenville County Schools is at the center
of the county’s strong economic development
and high quality of life. According to
Superintendent Dr. Phinnize J. Fisher, “Our
area’s economic prosperity today and in the
future depends on having high quality public
schools and the best teachers to provide
superior educational opportunities to prepare
students to become our business and
community leaders of tomorrow.”
In support of that belief, Greenville County
Schools (GCS) places its major emphasis on
continually raising the academic challenge
and performance of its 67,000 plus students
and supporting them with quality
personnel—teachers, principals, support
staff, and others.
GCS offers an abundance of academic
opportunities, including magnet academies
and International Baccalaureate Programs, at
all school levels. In addition, the school
system has a nationally recognized child
development program, an award-winning
Fine Arts Center, special education programs
to meet all students’ needs, and expanding
Advanced Placement offerings.
The school system’s magnet program
includes twelve academies (Select Schools)
providing unique learning opportunities in
languages, arts, science, math and technology,
health professions, academic excellence, and
year-round education. Four K-12 school
clusters across the school system offer the
highly-acclaimed International Baccalaureate
curriculum, which is recognized and accepted
for credit by colleges around the world.
Twelve schools are recognized as National
Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence; seventeen as
Palmetto’s Finest; and thirty-seven as Red Carpet
Schools (customer friendly award). In addition,
there are twenty-nine PTA National Schools of
Excellence, and twenty-five Baldridge Model
Schools, a “total quality” approach to education
provided through a partnership with the
Greenville Chamber of Commerce and the
Carolina First Center for Excellence.
In addition to the above programs, the school
system boasts a variety of programs/schools for
students with special needs or talents. Among
them are: Sterling School with the Charles
Townes Center (gifted students) named for the
Greenville native who won the Nobel Prize for
his inventions of the maser and laser, four career
technology centers, Washington Center and
West Greenville School for students with special
needs, Alternative Programs, and Lifelong
Learning (adult education).
The school system continues to expand its
academic offerings beyond the traditional school
setting with a Twilight School (evening school),
Virtual High School, New Beginnings (program
offering online courses for expelled students),
and STAR Academy (program for overage eighth
graders and ninth grade repeaters.)
Greenville County students benefit from
the many hands-on experiences offered by

Roper Mountain Science Center, including
planetarium shows, an observatory with a
Hubbell telescope, living history farm,
rainforest, nature trails, and arboretum.
Greenville County Schools is committed
to exposing all students to academic rigor,
as illustrated by the number of students
taking college entrance and Advanced
Placement courses.
On college entrance tests, Greenville
County students outperformed their national
and state peers on the American College Test
(ACT) with an average of 21.3, beating the
national average of 21.2 and the state average
of 19.6. On the new Scholastic Assessment
Test (SAT), GCS students exceeded their state
counterparts by twenty-five points with an
average score of 1490, just below the national
average of 1518. A high percentage of local
seniors (sixty-two percent) take the SAT,
compared to forty-eight percent of seniors
across the nation.
More students are taking and passing
Advanced Placement courses. About one
in five Advanced Placement exams completed
in South Carolina are taken by Greenville
County students. In 2006 the percentage
of exams qualifying for college credit
increased from forty-three percent to fortyeight
percent.
Continued success is planned for through
the school system’s Strategic Plan, which
outlines specific initiatives to implement the
Education Plan: Priorities for Performance,
Greenville County’s Guide to Excellence. The
initiatives serve as a guide for the school system,
from which decisions are made regarding
budget priorities, staffing, and work focus.
Education Plan Goal Areas include:
• Raising the academic challenge and
performance of each student;
• Ensuring quality personnel in all positions;
• Providing a school environment supportive
of learning;
• Effectively managing and further developing
necessary financial resources; and
• Improving public understanding and
support of public schools.
The General Fund Budget pays for teachers,
school staff, instructional supplies, and other
operating costs. The school system is a strong
financial steward, having received the Excellence
in Financial Reporting Award for nineteen
consecutive years and superior credit ratings
from the top two financial rating services.
A separate Building Fund Budget
pays for renovation and construction of
schools. The BEST Construction Program, an
innovative approach to build schools in less
time at a lower cost, is nearing completion
of seventy schools and centers. Results:
improved instruction, safer schools, “equal”
school facilities for students, and needed
classrooms for a growing student population.
School Board Trustees are elected to
four-year terms, with elections held for
six seats every two years. The 2007 School
Board members are: Tommie Reece, chairman,
Keith Ray, D.Min., vice chairman, Megan
Hickerson, secretary, Debi Bush, Dr. Grady
Butler, Danna Edwards, Lynda Leventis-Wells,
Roger Meek, Dan Moravec, Chuck Saylors,
Leola Robinson-Simpson, and Pat Sudduth.
✧
Greeville County Schools facts:
• 2007 graduates awarded $76.6 million
in scholarships.
• GCS students outperform their state
counterparts on college entrance tests.
• Eighty-six percent of graduates pursue
higher education.
• Fifty-fourth largest school system in the
nation with 67,000 students.
• Growing school system with an
additional 1,500 to 1,800 students
each year.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
107

ROLLING
GREEN
VILLAGE
✧
Above: Independent apartment homes
are conveniently located next to the
Village Center.
Below: Enjoy a stroll around the lake or
spend the afternoon fishing.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
108
Located in South Carolina’s pastoral
Upstate region and cradled in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, Rolling Green Village (RGV) is
Greenville’s first premier retirement
community offering a full continuum of care
and a dedicated staff committed to serving the
residents. Like an artist’s idyllic landscape,
magically made real, the woods, fields, and
lakes of Rolling Green Village are alive with
enough sweet sounds, sights, and smells to fill
the senses. Although the atmosphere is
certainly serene, it is anything but sleepy. The
challenge is finding the time to take advantage
of all of the activities and opportunities
available at “The Village.” Open to seniors
ages fifty-five-plus, the community offers
on—and off—campus activities, including
educational seminars, fitness classes, cultural
events, and social events. RGV has been
managed since 1996 by Life Care Services
(LCS) of Des Moines, Iowa. LCS, the leader in
senior living development and management,
which has empowered RGV to provide
residents with active lifestyle options today
and peace of mind for tomorrow.
Life at Rolling Green is a vital, growing
testimony to the vision of its founders.
Opening in 1986, RGV was developed by a
group of individuals who recognized a need for
a secure and healthy environment for seniors.
In 1973, when Reverend John Bandy began
looking for a place to support his aging
parents, he realized there was nothing available
in the Greenville area. Reverend Bandy went to
the Greenville Baptist Association with his
conviction that the Baptist Association should
establish a retirement community. In the fall of
1974, the Greenville Baptist Association
formed a Task Study Committee for Housing of
the Aging. Seven representatives, including
Sam Putnam and Reverend Dan Page, served
on the committee.
Reverend Troy Goodwin, Pastor of Roper
Mountain Baptist Church, had heard
Reverend Bandy present his proposal to the
Baptist Association. Reverend Goodwin
shared the dream of a retirement community
with his congregation at the Sunday worship
service. He articulated the need for acreage to
build the community. Hoke and Mildred
Smith, members of the congregation, were in
attendance that Sunday. The following week,
they asked Reverend Goodwin to “pay them a
visit.” Hoke explained that the couple wanted
to show appreciation for the many blessings
they had received. This humble, modest dairy
farmer proposed donating some of his
farmland to build the continuing care
retirement community.
At the same time, Putnam, who worked for
J. E. Sirrine Engineering Company sketched a
proposal for the community. When Hoke saw
the drawing, he realized that the proposed
community fit perfectly with the lush rolling
hills and peaceful lakes. Hoke passed away
January 4, 1977, without seeing his dream
become reality. The Board of Trustees initially
wanted to name the retirement community
after Hoke to honor his generosity. However,
the Smith family did not desire it—so the
community was instead named after Smith’s
farm—and “Rolling Green Village” was born.
There was plenty of praying, planning,
fundraising and building to be done. RGV,
under the leadership of Bandy, broke ground
on June 30, 1985, with an opening target date
of late 1986. When Bandy resigned from the

project, Russell Smart stepped up and took
the helm. A fire broke out April 12, 1986, at
the peak of construction, destroying the core
Village and apartment homes. Although the
fire was devastating, it could not prevent a
group of dedicated, tenacious individuals
from prevailing in getting Rolling Green up
and running.
Today, over 650 residents enjoy retirement
living at its best at RGV. With 291
independent living patio homes, 133
apartment homes, 72 assisted living units
(including an Alzheimer’s/dementia specialty
care unit), and 44 Medicare-certified
healthcare beds, RGV provides independent
living residents with a choice of lifestyle
opportunities while offering a full range of
healthcare options.
On August 20, 2007, with more than
twenty-one years of successful operation,
Rolling Green announced a $65 million
community expansion (Phase I) that will
increase residents’ living options and update
and modernize community amenities, while
maintaining the community’s rich “mission”
heritage and values.
The project will add 100 new apartment
homes to RGV’s roster of living options,
increasing the community’s total residence
space by over 150,000 square feet. Rolling
Green currently offers residents ten apartment
floor plans ranging from studios to two and
three bedrooms, as well as six patio home
neighborhoods with one to three bedroom
home options.
Developed by Davidson Retirement
Properties, the expansion project will also
reposition the 177-acre community to add a
state-of-the art wellness center with an indoor
pool; skilled nursing center offering a cuttingedge
approach to resident-centered care;
multiple dining venues, chapel, educational
center, theater, library, assembly room,
common areas in each of the main buildings, and
a more convenient entrance to the community
with more parking. The added spaces will be
located in a new building, centralizing the
“common” program functions, improving
operational efficiencies and minimizing travel
distance to these daily functions for residents
and employees.
Rolling Green Village’s expansion is
expected to be complete in 2011.
✧
Above: Enjoy home ownership with all the
conveniences of a continum of care.
Below: Rolling Green Village welcomes
everyone to experience retirement living at
its best.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
109

LOCKHEED
MARTIN
The entire world gives “thumbs up” to the
Wright brothers—Orville and Wilbur—who,
in 1903, invented the first successful airplane
that was heavier than air. It was their basic
idea of a three axis control that enabled the
pilot to steer the aircraft effectively while
maintaining its equilibrium. And, it was their
basis of that technology that led to the fixedwing
aircraft as we know it today.
While enthusiasts and travelers enjoy
and rely on airplanes, just over 1,200
employees at Lockheed Martin’s Greenville
facility make their living primarily by
sustaining military airplanes.
Lockheed Martin established its roots in the
Greenville community in 1984 as a transport
aircraft repair station primarily for commercial
aircraft. In 1997 the company was transformed
into a central hub for global military aircraft
maintenance and logistics support. More
military contracts were bid and won, and the
focus of the facility shifted from commercial to
military aircraft, where it remains today.
The Greenville facility is part of the
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company,
which is headquartered in Fort Worth,
Texas. The primary repair facility, located on
161 acres at the Donaldson Industrial Air
Park, features sixteen hangars that are
fully equipped to provide a multitude of
sustainment services, including heavy depot
maintenance for multi-engine military aircraft
such as the C-130 Hercules and P-3 Orion. It
also provides large, structural repairs, avionics
upgrades, airframe overhaul, and interior
refurbishment for customers like the United
States Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and
Customs and Border Protection.
In addition the Greenville facility provides
logistics and supply chain support solutions
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
110

for U.S. and international military customers.
It has also served private companies who call
upon the company’s resources and expertise
to maintain, repair, and overhaul the world’s
most sophisticated weapons systems.
Lockheed Martin values community
partnerships and worked with Greenville
Technical College to develop a special training
agreement. Individuals are trained in aircraft
maintenance and repair, thereby providing
specially trained, well-qualified employees
who are thoroughly knowledgeable and
skilled in the type of work for which
Lockheed Martin is recognized. Management
feels that the employees are a testament to the
quality of work the company provides.
It was no surprise that Lockheed Martin
chose Greenville for its site in 1984. The
former air base provides a 520,000-squarefoot
base with more than 700 acres of airpark
right in the middle of one of the heaviest
concentrations of transport aircraft in the
country. At the time, the decision was an easy
one for the company. The defunct military
facility provided an “anchor” with runways
and hangars. While there are other tenants on
the property, Lockheed Martin is the anchor
tenant among a growing number of aircraft
service companies considering the location.
“To be successful in an industry like ours
takes more than just having adequate
facilities,” says Marillyn Hewson, president of
Lockheed Martin’s Global Sustainment
organization. “It takes dedicated people who
are the best at what they do. Our employees
are members of the community who are
involved in serving the community in many
volunteer capacities both on and off the job.”
Annually, the company and employees
are active participants in the United Way
of Greenville County, the March of
Dimes WalkAmerica, the American Cancer
Society Relay for Life, the American
Diabetes Association campaign, and supports
Greenville County K-12 math and science
programs in local schools and at Roper
Mountain Science Center. In addition, it is an
Armed Forces Day Parade sponsor.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
111

HUBBELL
LIGHTING, INC.
✧
Above: Founder, Harvey Hubbell, II.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HUBBELL INC.
Below: Lighting Solutions Center.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HUBBELL INC.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
112
The closing decades of the 1800s brought
an era of invention and business development
that powered the world in the twentieth
century. Like his contemporaries—Edison,
Ford and Westinghouse—Harvey Hubbell, II
would contribute to progress through new
product design and manufacturing innovation.
Today, the company he began is Hubbell
Incorporated, a diversified $2.5 billion
international company, but his tradition of
innovative solutions with premium quality
products continues.
It began in 1888 when Harvey Hubbell, II
opened his first manufacturing facility in
Bridgeport, Connecticut. From the company’s
earliest years, when a chance encounter on a
New York City sidewalk gave Harvey Hubbell
an idea, the company has emphasized applied
engineering: new solutions to problems, and
finding a better way to do things.
By 1896, fixtures for electric lights were
slowly replacing gas lamps, but most electric
lights burned continuously, since the
installation of a separate circuit and switch to
control each fixture was costly, and electricity
was a novelty at the time. Who knew whether
or not this fad would last long enough to
justify the cost? Hubbell envisioned a better
solution, and in August of 1896, his new “pull
chain socket” was patented, and is still in use
today. The convenience of an electrical plug
and wall receptacle were also inventions from
Harvey Hubbell.
The 1920s saw an increase in the demand
for electricity, as well as in public
transportation and street lighting. In 1927 the
invention of a lighting fixture connection
called “Elexit” allowed homeowners to install
most fixtures without hiring an electrician.
This year also ended the company’s first era,
when founder Harvey Hubbell, II died on
December 17. He was succeeded as president
of the company by his twenty-six year old son,
Harvey Hubbell, III.
By 1936, Harvey Hubbell, Inc., like most
manufacturers, could not escape the rigors of
the Depression. The company went public to
raise much needed capital. Hubbell showed
that he had inherited his father’s acumen for
product innovation and business
development, growing the company
throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1963 Hubbell’s lighting division began
when the company acquired Shalda Lighting
as the foundation for Hubbell Lighting. Many
other acquisitions of well-established, highlyrespected
lighting companies would follow. Its
mission was to create superior value in
lighting for customers, representatives,
employees and shareholders by building the
strongest package of premium lighting brands
in the industry. In 2002, Hubbell acquired
Lighting Corporation of America, making
Hubbell Lighting one of the largest lighting
fixture manufacturers in North America.
In January 2008, Hubbell acquired Kurt
Versen Company, the leading provider of
specification-grade commercial downlighting.
Today Hubbell Lighting is one company,
with seventeen distinct lighting brands.
Hubbell’s Progress Lighting brand is the largest
manufacturer of residential lighting in the
world. Its Prescolite brand, founded in
1944, offers full-line specification-grade and
commodity products, such as track lighting
and downlights.

Hubbell’s Columbia Lighting, founded in
1897, is well-known for specification-grade
fluorescent lighting. Alera Lighting is a
relatively new division specializing in
architectural fluorescent lighting, ideal for
applications such as commercial, educational,
healthcare, and retail. Dual-Lite offers
premium life safety product lines that
encompass emergency lighting units, exit
signs, and air conditioner inverter power
systems in commercial, institutional, and
industrial applications.
Kim Lighting brought to Hubbell
high-quality, performance-oriented outdoor
lighting, while Architectural Area
Lighting provides architecturally-relevant
outdoor fixtures.
Hubbell Outdoor and Industrial Lighting
provide fixtures for industrial, manufacturing,
warehouse, and even harsh and hazardous
applications. Sports fans will appreciate
Sportsliter Solutions’ outdoor sports field
lighting for night games from little leagues to
the majors. Their portfolio of well-lighted
fields includes the Arizona Diamondbacks’
Chase Field, the San Diego Padres’ new Petco
Park, and of course, the Greenville Drive’s own
West End Field.
With seventeen distinct lighting brands
literally spread across the country, Hubbell
Lighting needed a new headquarters to bring
all those brands and its more than 500
employees together. Furthermore, Hubbell
Lighting’s management also envisioned an
innovative lighting education and training
center unlike any other in the industry. The
Lighting Solutions Center would provide real
world solutions to the lighting challenges its
customers face.
In May 2007, Hubbell Lighting completed
construction of its new corporate headquarters
and extraordinary Lighting Solutions Center in
Greenville’s 500-acre Millennium Campus.
The 185,000 square foot facility that overlooks
I-85 houses the company’s brand management
and marketing functions, engineering and new
product development labs, customer support,
finance, human resources, and executive
management staff.
According to Hubbell Lighting’s President,
Scott Muse, “As a recognized leader in the
design and manufacture of lighting fixtures for
virtually every conceivable indoor and
outdoor commercial, institutional, industrial,
and residential application, Hubbell Lighting
is committed to growing our business and our
industry through innovation and superior
market support. The Lighting Solutions
Center underscores our pledge to remain on
the cutting edge of technology and ingenuity.”
From a single idea in a small loft in 1888,
Hubbell has grown to a more than two-billion
dollar international corporation committed to
being a leading provider of lighting products
and services through the creation of superior
value for customers, representatives,
employees, and shareholders. Hubbell’s vision
is to consistently design, develop, and deliver
innovative products and services that meet the
needs, values, and decision drivers of the
market it serves.
✧
Above: Hubbell Lighting Headquarters, 2007.
COPYRIGHT 2007 BRIAN DRESSLER PHOTOGRAPHY
Below: Tool Room, 1930’s.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HUBBELL INC.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
113

FURMAN
UNIVERSITY
✧
Above: A distinctive, white bell tower
anchored Furman's campus in downtown
Greenville. In the mid-1950s, Furman
joined with the Greenville Woman's College
and moved to a new campus north on
Highway 25.
Below: Tree-lined avenues and shimmering
fountains lead to the Daniel Memorial
Chapel. Although no longer affiliated with
the South Carolina Baptist Convention, the
university maintains a commitment to
religious values with a respect for diverse
religious perspectives.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
114
No other South Carolina college or
university can match the rich history of
Furman University (FU). Its identifying Bell
Tower, standing on a tiny peninsula in the
middle of the campus lake, is the only
testament to its former days, when it was
chartered as The Furman University in
downtown Greenville. The tower is a replica of
the one on the earlier campus, and the original
old school house and several other structures
were moved from the Woman’s College.
Richard Furman of Charleston, a Baptist
minister, spearheaded the college’s founding.
Although he died in 1825, it became reality a
year later, when the South Carolina Baptist
Convention (SCBC) continued his efforts to
establish the Furman Academy and
Theological Institution in Edgefield. The
college was built on $25 and the faith of a few
Baptist leaders with a vision. Because of hard
times and the lack of students, that site was
abandoned in 1829. At that time, the school
was located in the home of the pastor of High
Hills Baptist Church in Sumter. In 1837 it was
moved to Winnsboro and relocated to the
Upstate in 1850.
In 1853 the university began operations
with collegiate, theological, and preparatory
departments; however, the theology
department separated from the university and
became the Southern Baptist Seminary in 1858.
Nineteen years later, the seminary moved to its
present location in Louisville, Kentucky.
When the Civil War beckoned, students
left the classrooms, forcing closure of the
school from 1861 to 1866. For seven years,
beginning in 1893, the college was
coeducational. That effort soon was discarded
and not re-implemented until 1900. That
year, Furman’s curriculum was coordinated
with the Greenville Woman’s College and
became permanently coeducational, although
the two campuses were separate. The men’s
campus was located just off Church Street and
the women’s school was located where
Heritage Green is today.
The Woman’s College was founded as a
female academy in 1820, but did not begin its
association with Furman until 1854, when the
Greenville Baptist Female College was
founded and chartered. Governed by the
Furman Board of Trustees, it became
independent in 1908, and in 1914, changed
its name to Greenville Woman’s College. Later,
it became the Woman’s College of Furman
University. The separation of the campuses
remained for twenty years, and, in the mid-
1950s, Furman announced plans to move
north on Highway 25. From the sprawling,
800-acre campus, one can view Ceasar’s Head
and the Western North Carolina mountains.
The Bell Tower, which houses a sixty-bell
carillon, continues to remind the community
of the historical significance from the earlier
Greenville campus.
Furman’s heritage is rooted in the noncreedal,
free-church Baptist tradition, which
values religious commitment. It insists on the
freedom of the individual to believe as he/she
sees fit, but also respects diversity or religious
perspectives, including that of the nonreligious
person.
Suffice it to say that Furman is the oldest,
largest, and most selective of the state’s private
colleges and among the leading liberal arts

colleges in the nation. It is one of a select group
that qualifies for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa,
the prestigious academic honorary society. The
benchmark of Furman University is its
curriculum and diversity afforded nearly 3,000
undergraduate and graduate students today.
Furman serves as a paradigm of a new type
of liberal arts institution. Grounded in the
humanities, arts, and sciences, it has garnered
a national reputation for engaged learning,
with a problem-solving, project-oriented,
experience-based approach to liberal arts.
President David Shi and the board of trustees
believe that engaged learning encourages
students to develop creative ways to put
classroom theory into practice by encouraging
a more active role in the education process
through internships, service learning, study
abroad, and research.
Furman has received regional, state, and
national recognition for its academic
departments, including music, chemistry,
history, political science, earth and
environmental sciences, and health and
exercise science. It offers a lifelong learning
program for children and adults. Its music
department is highly respected, and the
Richard Riley Institute for Politics and Public
Policy sponsors annual conferences with
renowned speakers such as former Secretary
of State, The Honorable Madeline Albright
and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David
Shipler, among others. The school is a
member of the NCAA Division One college
sports program, which encourages excellence
in scholastics. The women’s golf team won the
national championships in 1976. The football
team won the national championship in 1988.
Furman boasts a number of distinguished
alumni, among them Charles H. Townes,
Nobel Prize winner for the development of
the maser and laser; The Honorable Richard
W. Riley, former governor and secretary of
education; Keith Lockhart, conductor of the
Boston Pops; Herman Lay of Frito-Lay, and
John Broadus Watson, founder of behavioral
psychology, as well as a number of governors
and professional athletes.
The university is no longer affiliated with
the Southern Baptist Convention; however, its
motto remains: Christo et Doctrinae (for
Christ and Learning). That motto underlines
the interrelationship of faith and learning.
Furman is committed to the education of the
whole person.
✧
Above: A replica of the original bell tower,
complete with a sixty-bell carillon, perches
on a peninsula in the campus lake. Nestled
in the foothills of the Appalachian
Mountains, Furman boasts a stunning
setting for its nearly 3,000 undergraduate
and graduate students.
Below: Twin brick gatehouses, lush foliage
and one of the university's signature
fountains greet visitors at the main entrance
to Furman.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
115

CITY OF
FOUNTAIN INN
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
116
Fountain Inn, with its rich history, inviting
neighborhoods and geographic location,
offers the best of suburbia. In fact, the City of
Fountain Inn could easily be the canvas for
Norman Rockwell’s illustrations of the good
life in “small town” America.
Typical of his artwork, residents enjoy
family fun where century-old houses are
decorated with red, white, and blue bunting,
and there are parades and backyard barbeques
on the Fourth of July. Luminaras and colorful
holiday decorations trim homes and streets
alike at Christmas.
Nestled in the popular section of the state
known as the Foothills, Fountain Inn is home
to approximately 6,500 residents and a
number of easily recognized businesses like
Caterpillar, Faurecia, GlaxoSmith Kline,
Kyocera, and Teknor Apex. Many businesses
welcome its pro-business environment. There
is an abundant, well-trained labor force
encompassing technical, skilled and
professional workers. The state is a right-towork
state and non-unionized.
The area is conveniently located just off
the I-85 corridor between Charlotte and
Atlanta and within close proximity to the
Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport.
The Port of Charleston, about 200 miles to
the East, allows for ease in exporting and
importing goods.
Featuring a mayor-council form of
government, which is popular throughout the
state, it welcomes residents and businesses to its
economic development mix. City Administrator
Eddie Case says it takes both to support the
relaxed quality of life that Fountain Inn
residents and businesses have come to enjoy.
City Council decides what services the
city will provide, how much those services
should cost, and how money will be raised
from taxes and other revenue sources. Council
also adopts the city budget in a strong-mayor
form of government (another reference to the
mayor-council form), and council hires the
administrator; however, the city administrator’s
duties are not prescribed by state law, but
determined by the mayor and council.
There are many reasons that life is good in
Fountain Inn. Consider for instance, new and
historical homes, quaint shops, and boutiques
that promote the importance of small business.
There is abundant healthcare provided by a
satellite facility of the Greenville Hospital
System that recently acquired medical
university status. The county educational
system is one that is highly rated and
appreciated by parents and students alike.
Residents have access to several nearby
institutions of higher learning. Among them
are Furman University, Bob Jones University,
Clemson University, Greenville Technical
College and the University Center, with
curriculums for day and evening students via a
number of out-of-town colleges or universities.
Add the city’s low crime rate, and it definitely
becomes the ideal place to call “home.”
There are excellent apartment and
condominium opportunities, making it a
perfect fit for young professionals who prefer
the easy, care-free lifestyle. The median house
value is approximately $100,000, which has a
tax rate of about $600-$800 annually.
Fountain Inn, like the rest of the Upstate,
boasts a four-season climate. That fact alone
beckons many people to the area to enjoy the

mild winters and moderate summers. The
summer average temperature is 77.4 degrees,
and the average winter temperature is a warm
42 degrees. The city is close enough, however,
to enjoy a day boating, sailing, and fishing on
nearby lakes such as Greenwood, Hartwell,
Murray, and other waterways. A weekend trip
to historic Charleston, sun and fun at coastal
areas like Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,
or a day ski trip to the Western North
Carolina Mountains, are also easily within
reach and budget.
The small city has produced some big
names. The artist, Art Frahm, who designed
the Quaker man logo still seen on the familiar
oatmeal box, was a resident, as was the
African-American dance great, Peg Leg Bates.
In recent years, a statue was erected to honor
Bates’ contribution to the arts and
entertainment industry. It also attested to his
determination and ability to overcome a
physical disability, not allowing it to hinder
his spirit and drive for a successful life.
Annually, the city celebrates Robert
Quillen, a well know cartoonist, humorist,
and newspaper columnist of the 1940s. The
city touts the name of its Fall Festival—Aunt
Het Festival—after one of his more renowned
characters, “Aunt Het.” The City Hall
Complex now resides on the Quillen home
place at 200 North Main Street and maintains
Quillen’s memorial to Eve—the first
woman—whom he said was “a distant relative
of his mother.” His library and small gold fish
pool remain in use to this day.
In addition, as the winter holidays approach,
Fountain Inn’s rich history shines forth in its
Spirit of Christmas Past Festival, which runs
throughout much of the holiday season. The
excitement is evident in the annual Christmas
parade, breakfast with Santa, and church
programs. The Fountain Inn Garden Club
sponsored home decorating contest shouts
Christmas’ presence, showcasing creative
Christmas decorations and lighting. But the
highlight of it all is the horse drawn carriage rides.
The ride takes the route of homes participating in
the decorating contest, thus drawing crowds from
miles around.
“Fountain Inn! Your home away from home.
A home town feel with unique appeal.”
SHARING THE HERITAGE
117

DORITY &
MANNING, P.A.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
118
When it comes to the business of high tech
legal services, Julian W. Dority and Wellington
M. “Mackie” Manning, Jr., have proven the old
adage that the sky’s the limit. As founding
partners in the firm bearing their names, the
two Greenville attorneys created a law
practice that exclusively employs attorneys
who specialize in intellectual property law
(patents, trademarks, copyrights, and related
litigation). Dority & Manning, P.A. has grown
from the two founders to become the largest
firm of this type in the state, and among the
largest in the Southeastern United States,
whether measured in terms of personnel,
clientele, or revenues.
Their twenty-three year partnership has
been continuously evolving and transforming
for both men and for the organization they
cultivated. Early in their careers they operated
out of an office that once served as a mill
home, and their client base focused on the
textile community. Reminiscing in their firm’s
modern offices perched on two adjacent floors
high above downtown Greenville, the two
recall those early days when patents were
obtained by mill employees who developed
better, faster, or more economical ways of
doing things. Back then, they say, costs for
obtaining and owning patents were
considerably less than they are nowadays. In
large part, this increase stems from the greater
complexity and sophistication of the
technology being patented today. Indeed, as
high technology continues to change the
face of the South, the firm’s current client base
has diversified even faster than the
Southeastern economy.
Dority, newly minted electrical engineering
degree in hand, examined patent applications
of IBM and other high tech firms while
working in the U.S. Patent Office, pursuing
his law degree and starting his family with his
young bride, an English teacher. After
receiving his law degree about forty years ago,
he moved to Greenville to join the only patent
attorney in private practice in South Carolina.
Dority soon landed the patent work for the
National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) at Cape Kennedy, and
for the next twenty years, he wrote every
patent for the Cape Kennedy Center,
including ones for the lunar module and the
space shuttle.
Manning majored in chemical engineering
at Clemson University, where he and Dority
cemented their friendship. After receiving his
undergraduate degree, Manning worked as an
engineer in the textile industry until he
moved his family to the Washington, D.C.
area and enrolled in law school. He supported
his family and put himself through law school
by using his technical education to research
patents in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office in Washington, D.C. Upon gaining his
law degree, he moved his family to New
England to join the patent department of a
major corporation. His next move was south
to Spartanburg, where he worked in Milliken’s
patent department before founding his own
successful private law practice.
Over breakfast one morning in
Spartanburg in 1984, having been friends and
colleagues for more than two decades, the two
decided to practice law together and formed
Dority & Manning. Today, with the exception
of some “healthy” disagreements over the law,
they claim they have never had an argument.
The firm’s clientele runs the gamut from
individual entrepreneurs to multinational
corporations with complex IP portfolios.
Regardless of size and sophistication, such
clients have come to expect and appreciate
the firm’s resourceful, creative, and reliable
employment of IP law to protect their
business interests. Among the firm’s clients
headquartered outside of the Upstate are
AVX Corporation (Kyocera Corporation),
Flashpoint Technology, Inc., Graham White
Manufacturing Company, Kaliburn, Inc.,
Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Mattson
Thermal Products, Neenah Paper,
Rapal/Normark, Rieter Group, Schlumberger,
Schweitzer-Mauduit International, and
Scientific Games Corporation. Among the
firm’s many locally headquartered clients are
Alfmeier Corporation, Clemson University,
Hartness International, Safety Components
Fabric Technologies, Span-America Medical, and
the University of South Carolina.
The firm’s clientele engages in numerous
technical disciplines and industries, including
antimicrobial technologies and related

products, biomedical products, biochemistry,
thermochemical reactors and processes,
computer hardware and software, systems
controls, polymer chemistry, plant genes,
nanotechnology, fixtures and valves for
manufacturing processes, textile machinery,
railroad equipment, underground boring
equipment, excavation equipment, water
treatment chemicals, papermaking, consumer
products, non-woven products, and
many more.
Servicing Dority & Manning’s high tech
clientele requires attorneys that excelled not
only in law school but also in their pursuits of
technically oriented undergraduate and
graduate degrees. Not surprisingly, the firm
maintains strong relationships with Clemson
University and the University of South
Carolina. For example, Dority & Manning
recruits some of the brightest students from
Clemson’s cooperative engineering and
science programs. Gifted students selected for
the co-op program are offered the chance to
earn while learning about the practice of IP
law under the guidance of Dority &
Manning’s attorneys. In this way, students
who may have envisioned that their degrees
would take them to the corporate world for an
engineering or scientific career find that
further schooling to obtain a law degree
can open the door to a challenging and
rewarding career in IP law in the down home
yet vibrant environment that is the Upstate of
South Carolina.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
119

AMERICAN
SERVICES,
INC.
Few people are as determined as Henry
Harrison in following their dreams. As a
youth growing up in the Sans Souci area of
Greenville, he was impressed by the
uniformed police officers who patrolled the
streets and decided one day he wanted to
become an officer himself.
After graduating from high school in 1950,
he went to work at Milliken & Company’s
Judson Mill. Still, the thought of becoming a
police officer remained in the back of his
mind. At the age of twenty-one, he decided to
follow his childhood dream and joined the
South Carolina Highway Patrol.
He spent eight years working in Cherokee
County and later transferred to Greenville
County, where he worked his way up to
sergeant. His career with the Patrol spanned
twenty years. “I enjoyed my twenty years of
service, but when I retired, I wanted to go
into business for myself.” Harrison said.
It was in 1975, when Harrison had a
conversation with Willard Fowler of J.P.
Stevens and Company, that he realized a
definite need for professional security in the
manufacturing business. With the faith and
help of several investors, he founded American
Security to provide contract security services.
In the years since, American Security has
grown to become the largest and most
responsible security company in the Upstate.
It was through his affiliation with Stevens
that he met Jim Ward, a senior vice president.
Ward began working at the mill while still in
high school and worked his way up to a
management level—eventually running the
plant. With Ward’s talent in operations, the
two initiated a partnership to form another
division—American Commercial & Industrial
Janitorial Services. Their experiences from the
first two divisions of American Services, Inc.,
taught them a great deal about the operations
aspect of the business they served. This
knowledge gave them a better understanding
of yet another area of need—professional
staffing services. As a result of that discussion,
✧
Henry Harrison served twenty years in
law enforcement.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
120

Action Staffing was born, the third division
that fulfills the employment needs of
businesses that rely heavily on outsourcing.
The merger of the three service companies
into one organization provides a greater mix
of services under a single corporate umbrella;
however, the company’s core ownership has
not changed. The company remains a tightly
held, private company, with Harrison serving
as chairman and CEO and Ward as president.
This ownership structure is expected to
continue well into the future. With American
Services making decisions as it always has, it
will continue to earn business that it will
maintain over the long term.
American Security, the security division
remained as a sole company until 1997, when
it was decided to merge all divisions into one,
giving the company a new name, American
Services, Inc.
Harrison gives credit for the company’s
growth and success to providing quality
customer service. “We do not tell clients what
we expect to do for them without following
through. We do exactly what we say we will
do. They respect us for that,” he adds.
American Services, Inc. does more
business in Upstate South Carolina than any
other security company. Contributing to that
success are the company’s initiatives:
• Strong relationship with local law
enforcement agencies;
• Successful track record in client retention;
• Financial stability;
• Diversification of corporate staff;
• Exemplary service techniques;
• Continuous management training; and
• Commitment to business ethics
and integrity.
There are many Fortune 500 companies
among its client base, as well as many local,
regional, and national ones. Thus far, the
business has successfully averaged ten percent
growth on an annual basis. Perhaps the
best measure of the company’s business
model, however, is its ability to retain their
long term client base and employees. “Much
of this growth has come at the request of
existing clients to serve as regional
contractors as well as bundling their services
by utilizing more than just one of our
three services,” says Harrison. Hence the
company logo, “Three Services, One
Solution.” Expanding on that, he says, “In an
industry with an average client turnover of
twenty percent and average employee
turnover of 100 percent, American Services is
an industry leader with average client
retention of 95 percent and employee
turnover rate of 38 percent.”
Headquartered in Greenville, with satellite
offices in Spartanburg, Gaffney, Columbia,
Clinton, Anderson, Seneca, and Charlotte,
the company employs over 5,500 people,
servicing seven states in the Southeast. It
maintains total billing in excess of
$86 million.
The company provides services for all types
of manufacturing, corporate headquarters,
distribution centers, healthcare organizations
and commercial clients in Alabama, Florida,
Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South
Carolina, and Tennessee. While that seems like
a large territory and client base, Harrison’s
vision does not stop there. “We plan to
generate more business by looking at a larger
client base, which will enable us to land more
contracts with corporate headquarters which
will put American Services, Inc. staff
throughout the nation.”
For more information on American Services,
please feel free to contact at (864)292-7450, toll
free (800)338-7217, 1300 Rutherford Road,
Greenville, South Carolina or on the Internet at
www.american-services-inc.com.
✧
Above: President Jim Ward and Chairman
and CEO Henry Harrison.
Below: President Jim Ward.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
121

VILLAGE AT
PELHAM
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
122
Village at Pelham’s history may be short;
but, the future is clear. The idea to build a
unique, multifaceted healthcare center has
been a dream for many at Spartanburg
Regional, but the idea took off at the turn-ofthe-century
when architects’ renderings
appeared on the drawing board.
Like tiny seedlings sown in the spring, this
state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind health park is
growing, brick-by-brick every day. The first
phase, the Surgery Center at Pelham, a freestanding
outpatient surgery center, opened in
2004. The center provides treatment in the
areas of orthopedics, podiatry, plastic surgery,
urology, obstetrics-gynecology, general surgery,
gastroenterology, pain management, colorectal
disorders and ear, nose and throat illnesses.
The facility is a joint venture between local
physicians and Spartanburg Regional. It
consists of four operating and two endoscopy
rooms. Area residents find it inviting as well as
functional, so much so it has received a 99.7
percent rating for patient care satisfaction.
The Village at Pelham is just that—a village!
Village at Pelham is a master-planned
development on beautifully landscaped ground
in the South Carolina foothills. It is located in
Greer, just off Interstate I-85 in Spartanburg
County. The Greer site was specifically selected
because census trends indicate the Pelham area
of Greer and Western Spartanburg County is
expected to experience a population growth of
nearly ten percent during the five years
between 2004 and 2009. Expanding into this
emerging area will enable Spartanburg
Regional to better meet the medical needs of
residents residing in the booming corridor that
is home to many who work for BMW and other
auto-related industries migrating to the area.
In 2005, South Carolina Department of
Health and Environmental Control (DHEC)
approved Spartanburg Regional’s request for a
certificate of need (CON) to proceed with
Phase Two of its master plan—a $51 million,
forty-eight-bed acute care hospital.
“Spartanburg Regional feels a responsibility
to provide the Greer area with the quality
healthcare it deserves. That responsibility will
continue to grow as the region grows,” says
Ingo Angemeier, president and CEO. “We are
prepared to make our services a vital part of
Greer’s development and economic viability.
“Upon completion, in the fall of 2008, the
Pelham facility will be a fully operational,
acute-care hospital focusing on medical,
surgical, and obstetrical patients.”
David Parks, administrator of the new
complex, reports that the patient room design
was created with assistance from the Clemson
University School of Architecture & Health—
one of only two healthcare architectural
specialty programs in the United States—
specifically to provide an optimally therapeutic
setting with comfort for the patient and family,
maximize functional efficiency and effectiveness
for physicians and the patient care team, and
provide an adaptable setting that accommodates
change for future needs.

With many distinctive characteristics built
into the design, the room design won a
national award for Professional Conceptual
Design from the Center for Health Design, a
division of Healthcare Design magazine.
Some of the most experienced healthcare
providers and academic minds in the region
worked together to create a “culture” for the
Village Hospital that is different from any
other. The new culture empowers every
member of the healthcare team with the end
result of making patients, families, physicians,
and staff experiences at the Village Hospital as
pleasant as possible.
The concept, design, and ultimate goal of
Village at Pelham is unrivaled anywhere else in
the state. The entire campus design imparts a
consumer-friendly concept, merging the
elements of daily living in a totally fresh
approach to healthcare. In addition to surgery
and inpatient care, there are physician offices, a
laboratory, state-of-the-art imaging equipment,
vascular services, occupational medicine and
physical therapy. A Minor Care facility in the
Medical Office Building offers treatment for
local residents when they have minor
emergencies or need to see a physician in the
evening or on the weekends.
The Village at Pelham’s Health Resource
Center is staffed by a community health
nurse-educator who has expertise in assisting
individuals with research about health
matters via literature or on the Internet.
Aside from the medical provisions, one of
the exceptional features is the Community
Center at the Village at Pelham. This venue
was designed with group meetings, social
events, educational activities and more in
mind. One meeting room will accommodate
up to eighty persons with high-tech audiovisual
equipment for educational lectures and
seminars. An adjoining patio will extend that
meeting and event capacity.
First-class healthcare has been offered at
the Village at Pelham since its flagship facility
opened in 2004, but the 119,500 square foot
center under construction will feature a Level
Three emergency department, as well as
cardiology, oncology, and more. Spartanburg
Regional Healthcare System’s vision is leading
the way as a provider of excellent healthcare
services—exactly what it is doing with the
Village at Pelham development. The Village at
Pelham is destined to become the benchmark
by which other hospitals and healthcare
providers measure their services.
Spartanburg Regional’s beliefs and dreams
for the Village at Pelham show that healthcare
is more than healing. It is wellness of the
body, mind and spirit.
It is no wonder, then, that both locations
are “committed to delivering quality of care
for life.”
SHARING THE HERITAGE
123

BOB JONES
UNIVERSITY
✧
Above: At Convocation in May 2005, Dr.
Stephen Jones (second from left) became the
fourth president of Bob Jones University. Dr.
Jones is pictured with Dave Chai, Keaau,
Hawaii; Andre Messier, Johnson City,
Tennessee; and Tammy Dye, Seymour, Iowa.
Below: Bob Jones University, c. 1948. Bob
Jones University moved to Greenville and
opened its doors to twenty-five hundred
students on October 1, 1947.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
124
In 1927, as evangelist Bob Jones, Sr.,
traveled across America, he saw the need for a
higher education environment that was
biblically-based. He witnessed college students
whose faith had been shaken—and in some
instances lost—at secular schools. That year he
founded what was to become one of the world’s
largest Christian liberal arts institutions. His
vision was to establish a college for Christian
youth from around the world that would be
recognized for academic excellence, refined
standards of behavior, and opportunities to
appreciate the performing and visual arts. His
goal was to make the college one where Christ
would be the primary focus of all thought and
conduct. His goal has been accomplished.
Founded as Bob Jones College in College
Point, Florida, the school relocated to Cleveland,
Tennessee, in 1933 before finally settling in
Greenville in 1947, the year it also became a
university. Today, Bob Jones University (BJU)
serves more than 4,000 students representing
every state and fifty countries. Dr. Stephen Jones,
who followed his father, Bob Jones, III, his
grandfather, Bob Jones, Jr., and his greatgrandfather
Bob Jones, Sr., says the university’s
combination of evangelism, culture, high
academic standards, and Christian discipline is
unmatched anywhere else in the nation.
Academically, BJU offers over 100
undergraduate majors and more than seventy
graduate programs in seven schools: the College
of Arts and Science, the School of Religion, the
School of Fine Arts, the School of Education, the
School of Business Administration, the School of
Applied Studies, and the Seminary and
Graduate School of Religion. The Transnational
Association of Christian Colleges and Schools
granted the university accreditation in 2006.
Many of the university’s students enter
some form of Christian ministry following
graduation, while others become professionals
in secular fields such as education, medicine,
law, and business.
The BJU campus occupies 210 beautifully
landscaped acres just inside the city limits
of Greenville. There are ten residence halls
wired for today’s technology, a 7,000-seat
amphitorium, a modern field house, and a
3,300-seat dining common. The Museum &
Gallery at Bob Jones University, founded by
Dr. Jones, Jr., in 1951, is recognized as one of
America’s finest collections of Italian paintings
and other Christian artifacts that are centuries
old. Elementary, junior high, and high schools
are housed on the same campus. BJU Press
provides full K-12 curriculum with an
integrated Christian philosophy for Christian
schools and home schooling families, as well
as books and Christian music and videos.
Over 300 student organizations include
numerous choirs and instrumental groups; a
campus newspaper and radio and television
stations; academic groups such as University
Business Association, Association of Christian
Teachers, Premed Forum, University Nursing
Association, Criminal Justice Association,

Family and Consumers Sciences Forum,
Writers’ Forum and Modern Language Clubs;
a community relations council; a student body
council; and intramural athletic competition
in a number of sports. A large number of
faculty and staff hold leadership roles in
community organizations, and students
regularly participate in community projects.
Each year, BJU produces two Shakespearean
plays and an opera on the well-equipped stage
of Rodeheaver Auditorium. With the assistance
of faculty, staff and students, the Museum &
Gallery launched the annual Living Gallery
production in 1998. A highlight of the Easter
season, this unique production presents the
gospel through music, drama, and live works of
art and draws guests from across the Southeast.
These and other outstanding fine arts
productions represent a tradition that defines
BJU among Christian colleges and are open to
the public.
In the area of spiritual training, BJU
conducts daily chapel services where students
are taught how to view life’s issues and how to
make Christian living decisions from a biblical
perspective. Each student takes a Bible course
each semester. In the residence halls, structured
programs help students grow spiritually and
develop leadership skills. Approximately twothirds
of the residence hall students participate
regularly in an outreach activity in the
Greenville area or neighboring states.
The university’s mission statement is
consistently followed: Within the cultural and
academic soil of liberal arts education, Bob Jones
University exists to grow Christlike character
that is scripturally disciplined; others-serving;
God-loving; Christ-proclaiming; and focused
above. Its institutional goals have the same
founding: To inspire students to know, love and
serve Jesus Christ; to strengthen their belief in
God’s Word; to help students develop Christlike
character through disciplined, Spirit-filled
living; to encourage students to become
involved in the life and ministry of a biblically
faithful local congregation; to instill in students
a compelling concern for reaching the
unconverted with the saving truth of the Gospel
of Christ, among others.
Going forward, Bob Jones University
remains committed to the Bible-based beliefs
upon which it was founded, to developing
Christlike character in students and to
sustaining its reputation for academic
excellence, evangelistic emphasis, spiritual
growth, and service opportunities for its
students, and the outstanding performance
track record of its graduates.
✧
Above: Teams of BJU students regularly
present music and drama programs in
churches and schools across the United
States. Pictured are the Chamber Singers on
their October 2006 New England tour.
Below: Bob Jones University, a Biblebelieving,
non-denominational Christian
institution is the largest private liberal arts
university in South Carolina.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
125

LLYN STRONG
FINE JEWELRY
✧
Above: Designer llyn strong.
Below and opposite: Samples of the beautiful
jewelry found at llyn strong fine jewelry.
Like yesteryear’s Georgia O’Keefe, local
artist llyn strong does her “own thing,”—
manufactures eclectic luxury jewelry.
Hers is a thriving enterprise, its products
a swath of unique pieces destined to
become tomorrow’s heirlooms, and the
kind of indelible imprint on Greenville’s
arts and business communities that few
others can claim.
Strong’s love of things creative
prompted her to enroll in an arts
program in college; when she fashioned
her first piece of jewelry, she was
hooked. “There is something magical
about artistic endeavors,” says strong.
“When I am designing, I can be as
creative as what I envision in my mind’s
eye. It allows me to understand and
express myself.”
Strong is an award-winning artist
whose creations “do more than just
adorn the latest fashions—they become
a way of life.” Boasting regular
customers from all over the world, strong’s
jewelry is treasured by everyone from local
residents to visitors and artists who perform
in Greenville. Her attention to detail and
fascination with the science of creativity has
garnered her attention for her modullyn
earring series—on which she holds a patent.
Strong is also a visionary when it comes to
business, and the community. When she
opened her original Main Street location in
1989, the transformation of Greenville’s
downtown was just beginning, but she became
an anchor of its growth. A Greenville native,
she remains dedicated to the continuing
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
126

downtown resurgence and will always
maintain her flagship location on Main Street,
in its current location since 1992. Her
business has become a source of pride and
inspiration for Greenville’s art community, as
well as for women entrepreneurs and
independent jewelers nationwide. strong and
her family reside in a chic urban loft above the
store, remodeled in 2006.
The llyn strong fine jewelry gallery has
enjoyed more than twenty-five percent growth
annually since its opening in 1989. Highlights
of the gallery’s inventory include specially
designed jewelry made of platinum, yellow,
white and rose gold, sterling silver and unique
metals like steel and oxidized iron, as well as
pearls, precious stones and diamonds designed
by strong and the nearly one hundred other
artists whom she represents. Some of those
artists provide the material for the gallery’s other
focus—blown glass art works and tableware,
including everything from hand-made
chandeliers to dramatic vases and exotic, oneof-a-kind
stemware.
She is a solid supporter of many
community organizations, enthusiastically
promoting Greenville’s arts community
overall, while also actively working on behalf
of The Children’s Museum. “I am privileged to
do something that is truly a pleasure for me, in
a community that I love,” says strong. “With
this type of inspiration, the future is limitless.”
SHARING THE HERITAGE
127

INTERIM
HEALTHCARE
✧
Ray Schroeder, JD, and his wife, Charyl
Schroeder, RN, use their legal and medical
training to manage Interim HealthCare.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
128
Healthcare is a growing concern for
many people, and residents of Upstate South
Carolina are no exception.
While modern medicine promotes
wellness, there are no guarantees for
everyone’s concerns. Individuals have
questions about treatment options, insurance
coverage, aging, and end-of-life issues.
Numerous challenges are on the horizon.
Since 1979 Interim HealthCare of
Greenville has provided solutions to the
healthcare challenges facing Upstate
residents. Interim knows firsthand the many
health problems facing people today and is
acutely aware of changes in the healthcare
delivery system. Interim’s professional staff
provides a multitude of services to assist
individuals and their families in receiving the
answers they want and the care they need.
Interim’s South Carolina founder and
present CEO, Ray Schroeder, made the trek
from Toronto, Canada, his birthplace, to
Hollywood, Florida, for his education at
Florida State University and University of
Miami’s School of Law, and then to Greenville
to open the first of his now six offices in
the Piedmont.
Prior to settling in Greenville, Ray joined a
prominent South Florida law firm and, while
earning a reputation in divorce litigation,
represented the famed actor Mickey Rooney’s
seventh wife in her settlement from him. By
the end of the 1970s, however, Ray became
disillusioned with the practice of divorce law,
something he describes as “not the most
pleasant way to live my life.”
It was at that time that Ray decided to open
Interim HealthCare in Greenville, recognizing
home health as “a trend of the future” but
more importantly “an opportunity to make a
positive difference in the lives of so many.” So,
by April 1979, he immersed himself into
home healthcare, opening his first office and
serving as the initial president of the South
Carolina Home Care Association, while
always explaining the benefits of home care to
anyone who would listen.
Today, out of six full-service offices in the
Upstate, Interim provides home healthcare
services to Medicare, Medicaid, and private
patients; staffing of medical positions to
hospitals, nursing facilities, and physician
practices; a complete home telemedicine
division; and a caring, compassionate Interim
HealthCare Hospice agency, which now serves
eight counties.
Interim’s hospice division was opened in
memory of Ray’s mother whose end-of-life
came in a hospice home which “completely
changed my outlook on death and dying from
one of fear and confusion to one of
understanding and acceptance.”
After Ray determined that not only those
with healthcare needs require assistance in
their home, he opened the HomeStyle
division to help provide non-medical
supportive services that help people remain
independent and in control. Sometimes,
simply helping with a meal, a bath, or
bringing control back into the home is all that
is needed to help the client meet the
challenges of everyday living.
Interim’s home care program is comprised of
skilled care and supportive services, which
includes nurses, therapists, and other
specialized caregivers. They provide clinical
intervention such as assistance with medication,
wound care, improved ambulation, or teaching
individuals and their families self management
of their special care needs. As need dictates, care
may be provided by home health aides, personal

care aides, companions or homemakers. The
need seems to consistently grow.
And how the agency has grown! Total
census approximates 3,500 on any given day,
with the highest percentage being Medicare
patients who receive care in 60-day episodes
to help them reach a stage of recovery. As the
number of patients receiving Interim’s allencompassing
realm of services grows, the
employee base needed to meet this growth has
continuously increased to a present day count
of over eleven hundred employees.
As individuals live longer, many live alone
and prefer to remain in their own homes.
Interim HealthCare makes that possible
through private duty skilled care via RNs,
LPNs, nursing assistants and companions. In
fact, Interim has made it possible for seniors
to continue to live safely in their own
homes and helps to ensure a better quality
of life. Personal care is provided when
needed in the areas of bathing, toileting,
feeding, light housekeeping and laundry,
medical transportation, grocery shopping,
meal preparation, and companionship.
Interim took on the heart of a ministry
in 1996 when Pastor Walt Handford and
his wife, Libby, joined the agency to
provide spiritual support and mentoring
to patients and employees alike and helped
the restating of the corporate mission
statement to, “We are dedicated to honoring
God through the enrichment of human life.”
As Ray notes, “With a company mission
statement like that, you most certainly must
walk your talk. No cutting financial corners,
taking advantage of employees, pirating of
software, or failing to meet the highest
possible standard of care for every patient,
every time.”
Interim has embarked on the cutting
edge of home healthcare by providing
personal emergency response systems and
vital sign monitoring systems to hundreds
of patients while providing employee training,
qualification, and placement programs
throughout the Upstate. Why?
“Why?” comments Ray. “Because it is
projected that by 2012, 77 million baby
boomers will reach Medicare age. Many will
need help. There simply will not be sufficient
numbers of people to help the people who
need the help. We, therefore, must think
outside of the box.”
✧
Interim HealthCare and its employees have
embarked on the cutting edge of home
healthcare to meet the tremendous need for
home healthcare in the future.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
129

KEMET
CORPORATION
✧
Above: A Clean Room technician holds
circuit boards with capacitors mounted
for testing.
Below: A technician programs the
reformation tank for the Organic Polymer
capacitor line in KEMET’s Tantalum
Innovation Center.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
130
The Upstate of South Carolina is home to
KEMET Corporation, a world-leading global
capacitor manufacturer.
Capacitors are electronic components—
some smaller than a grain of salt—that
store, filter, and regulate electrical energy and
current flow. They are found in virtually
all electronic applications and products used
today,includingcomputers,telecommunications,
automotive electronics, military and aerospace
electronics, medical electronics, and many
consumer electronics.
Established as KEMET Laboratories in
1919 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Union Carbide
Corporation (UCC), the company’s first
product was a high-temperature alloy used for
grid wires in vacuum tubes. In 1930, the
product line was expanded to include
barium-aluminum “getters,” a crucial element
in every vacuum tube. It is estimated that over
eighty percent of vacuum tubes used by the
United States and its allies during WWII
contained KEMET getters.
In the early 1950s, Bell Laboratories invented
the transistor and the solid tantalum capacitor,
changing the electronics industry, and KEMET’s
future, forever. The solid tantalum capacitor was
adopted by KEMET to complement the getter
product line and, as expected, the capacitor
business grew very rapidly.
To accommodate this rapid growth, a
50,000 square foot capacitor manufacturing
plant was built in Simpsonville, South
Carolina, in 1963. In less than a decade, the
company was established as a major U.S.
capacitor producer and enjoyed the leading
market share in solid tantalum capacitors.
KEMET entered the multilayer ceramic
capacitor business in 1969.
In 1987, KEMET’s existing management
team purchased the company from Union
Carbide Corporation in a leveraged buy-out
and formed KEMET Electronics Corporation
as a stand-alone company with its
headquarters in Simpsonville and David E.
Maguire as its first president and chief
executive officer. In December 1990, KEMET
severed all remaining ties with UCC and
formed the present-day KEMET Corporation.
The company went public with an Initial
Public Offering (IPO) in October 1992.
KEMET’s stock is sold on the New York Stock
Exchange under the symbol KEM.
Meanwhile, the company’s product
portfolio continued to expand, with the
addition of organic polymer capacitors (brand
name KO-CAP) in 1999 and the introduction
of solid aluminum capacitors (brand name
AO-CAP) in 2000.
Per-Olof Loof was named chief executive
officer in April 2005. Under his leadership, the
company acquired the tantalum business of
EPCOS AG in April 2006, the Evox Rifa family
of companies in April 2007, and Arcotronics
in October 2007. These acquisitions have
strengthened KEMET’s global position,
particularly in Europe, in addition to
expanding its current product portfolio with
additional capacitor types, broadening its
technologies, and allowing the company to
better service new and existing customers.
Today, KEMET offers the world’s most
complete line of surface-mount and throughhole
capacitor technologies across tantalum,

ceramic, aluminum, film, and paper
dielectrics. The company markets its
capacitors to a large and diverse group of
original equipment manufacturers (OEMs),
electronics manufacturing service providers
(contract manufacturers), and electronics
distributors around the world.
In addition to corporate headquarters and
two innovation centers in the Upstate,
KEMET has manufacturing facilities in
Matamoros, Monterrey, and Ciudad Victoria,
Mexico; Suzhou, Nantong, and Anting-
Shanghai, China; Sasso Marconi, Vergato, and
Monghidoro, Italy; Weymouth and Towcester,
England; Évora, Portugal; Suomussalmi,
Finland; Granna, Sweden; Batam, Indonesia;
Landsberg, Germany; and Kyustendil,
Bulgaria. Sales offices and distribution centers
are located around the world. KEMET
employs approximately 800 in the Greenville
area and nearly 11,500 worldwide.
KEMET’s vision is to be a valued and
trusted partner to its customers by providing
reliable, quality products with superior
service, performance, and on-time delivery.
“Moving forward,” says CEO Loof, “our
goal is to continue to evolve from
a capacitor manufacturer into ‘The Capacitance
Company.’ That concept goes beyond
capacitors to any type of capacitance solution,
regardless of technology, chemistry, form factor,
or manufacturing process. While a product is
limited, a solution has no boundaries.
“Becoming ‘The Capacitance Company’
means that KEMET would be the ‘supplier of
choice’ for any electronics manufacturer who
needs a capacitance solution—anything from
an existing product to design collaboration to
custom development,” adds Loof. “We want to
be recognized as the industry leader in
technology and product innovation, and to
have a worldwide reach that is second to none.”
KEMET is well on its way to attaining that
goal! In FY 2007, the company introduced
4,070 new products and was first-to-market
with 450 of those.
Committed to being a good corporate
citizen in all locations where its employees live,
work, and play, KEMET supports the United
Way, March of Dimes, and Relay for Life with
employee campaigns and participation teams.
The company is one of the sponsors of the
Jefferson Awards, which recognize individuals
for outstanding volunteer and community
service. It is also a major supporter of the
Invention Convention, the arts, and both the
American and International Red Cross.
✧
Above: A process engineer adjusts polymer
dipping recipes for ramping up a new part
type in KEMET’s manufacturing plant in
Évora, Portugal.
Below: KEMET’s Global Headquarters in
Simpsonville, South Carolina.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
131

THE FURMAN
COMPANY
✧
Above: Alester G. Furman, Sr.
Below: Alester G. Furman, Jr.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
132
In the spring of 1888, when twenty-yearold
Alester Garden Furman collected his first
insurance premium and set up a partnership
in a crowded office in the old Record
Building, he launched a 120-year Greenville
real estate tradition.
Furman had dropped out of the university
named for his great-grandfather in order to
study at a business college and read law. With
partner J. R. Mitchell, he started an insurance
agency and began to broker properties, and
with his father, Charles M. Furman, and,
cousin, Harry Haynsworth, to purchase land
for development.
Mitchell and Furman did a brisk walk-in
trade (they could not yet afford a telephone)
until the Silver Panic of 1893 stalled business,
closed mills, and ended the partnership.
Furman immediately started a new company
with a college friend, W. J. Thackston.
Starting in 1895, he became expert in
finding, assembling, and procuring options for
textile mill sites. In 1903, Furman went into
business for himself. In addition to developing
Paris Mountain, he brokered land and
buildings, expanded his insurance business,
and sold “gilt-edged” mill stocks and bonds.
In 1914, his son, Alester G. Furman, Jr.,
joined the business after graduating from
Furman University. After the war with
Germany was declared, the younger man,
now a partner, joined the army, returning to
Greenville in the spring of 1919. In the early
1920 the firm’s name changed to the Alester
G. Furman Company, and it became a charter
member of the Greenville Board of Realtors.
During the difficult years of the Great
Depression, Furman, Jr., took over the firm’s
management. Starting in 1939, and then
continuing after World War II, the company
earned a wide regional reputation by working
with textile mills from Delaware to Mississippi
to dismantle mill villages, eventually selling
more than 26,000 houses.
Alester G. Furman, III, joined the company
in 1946 and became chief executive officer in
1961, when his father retired. By 1969, when
its name changed to The Furman Co., fiftynine
employees worked in four related firms,
a life insurance brokerage, a general insurance
agency, Furman Securities, and Furman
Realty, headed by Junius Garrison.
In the 1970s, Garrison became president,
and the company returned to its roots in real
estate, selling its securities business to Frost,
Johnson & Read, and its insurance business to
Marsh-McLennan. In 1986, Garrison
purchased all outstanding stock in the
company and appointed Steve Navarro, a
young Californian, as executive vice president.
The new leaders knew that acquisitions,
mergers, and globalization were changing the
real estate industry. In-depth, accurate, and
immediately retrievable information was
essential. As a result, they immediately began
the Furman Space Report. Today the Furman
Report, available to clients both quarterly and
annually, is the most quoted source used by
local industry.
When seventy-five year old Garrison died
suddenly in April 2000, Navarro became chief
executive officer, and he and his experienced
management team prepared for the future by
establishing five distinct but interrelated

limited liability companies under the corporate
umbrella. The Furman Co. Insurance Agency,
LLC provides personal, business, and financial
planning services for clients. The Furman Co.
Development LLC identifies land to fit
corporate clients’ needs and constructs or
rehabilitates structures. Commercial Real
Estate, a separate division, offers enhanced
asset management through the Furman Co.
Facilities LLC and investment services as well
as retail, office, and industrial brokerage
through The Furman Co. Commercial LLC.
In 2000, in order to access national and
international commercial research and
management services, the independent
company affiliated with Grubb & Ellis, the
nation’s fifth largest commercial real estate
brokerage company. New technology, the
ability to put its brokers in direct collaboration
with over 2,000 national brokers, together
with more sophisticated research and data
collection, allowed The Furman Co. to
advise investors and major corporations about
changing markets and development
opportunities. Their market report was folded
into the Grubb & Ellis national report, and at
the same time the company added annual
seminars for invited clients, real estate lawyers,
bankers, and appraisers, where experts
discussed survey results and trends in detail.
In 2001 the company sold its long-established
residential real estate business in order to
concentrate its focus on commercial real estate
and development.
While current data, expertise, knowledge of
local market trends, and keen eyes for
development potential are essential in the real
estate business, success still depends on
personal relationships and trust. The Furman
Co. has built those relationships both with
local companies and international corporations
over the decades; their client list over the
period includes most of the upstate’s blue
ribbon firms. In addition, as the largest
commercial real estate firm in the upstate, they
are working in partnerships with public
entities—city, county, and state—on new
development opportunities.
The Furman Co. today is as a complex
multifunctional organization that works with
clients in more than a dozen states, Mexico,
and Canada. Although the firms it advises have
Greenville ties, company leaders are helping
them develop huge projects on an international
scale. And while yellow signs proclaiming
“leased and managed by The Furman Co.” are
ubiquitous around Greenville, its presence is
felt in Ontario and Mexico City, and in
California as well as South Carolina.
As Greenville digs the foundations and
raises the steel that will create the city of
tomorrow, The Furman Co. will be there as it
has been since 1888.
✧
Top, Left: Alester G. Furman, III.
Top, Right: Junius H. Garrison.
Below: Steve Navarro.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
133

GALLIVAN,
WHITE &
BOYD, P. A.
Located in the heart of Greenville’s
downtown business district, the law firm of
Gallivan, White & Boyd, P.A. (GWB) is known
throughout the region as a leading litigation
and business law firm. Embarking on its
sixtieth year of continuous service, the
Greenville-based firm is still “Leading the Way.”
South Carolina Lawyer’s Weekly has named the
firm one of “the fastest growing law firms in
South Carolina.” GWB has expanded in size
and scope to anticipate the needs of clients in
South Carolina, the Southeast, and beyond.
GWB’s talented staff includes forty-three
attorneys and more than sixty supporting
professionals who share a common goal, which
is to provide excellence in client service.
GWB employs a group and team-based
structure to manage its talents and resources
most effectively for clients. Managing
Shareholder, Mills Gallivan, says the firm
focuses exclusively on litigation cases. “In fact,
ours is one of the largest firms dedicated to this
type of law in South Carolina.” He points out
that GBW adjusts attorney-assignments as client
and case needs dictate. Practice areas are divided
into groups. The Litigation Group includes
product liability, drug and medical devices, toxic
torts, railroad, commercial transportation and
trucking. The Insurance Practice Group includes
insurance coverage and tort and personal injury.
The Business and Commercial Group includes
commercial litigation, design and construction,
professional negligence, government liability,
banking, bankruptcy, creditors’ rights, corporate
business planning, estate planning, real estate
law, intellectual property, healthcare and benefits,
and electronic discovery. The Workplace
Practices Group includes employment law and
workers’ compensation. GWB also provides
Alternative Dispute Resolution services to
clients, including arbitration and mediation.
GWB’s distinguished business and litigation
clients, including prominent publicly traded
and privately held corporations, represent
industries such as banking and finance,
professional services, energy and the
environment, design and construction,
transportation, manufacturing, insurance, and
healthcare. Clients also include governmental
entities and agencies as well as professional
associations. GWB has been lead counsel in the
only case multi-districted in South Carolina
and also is currently lead counsel in the largest
non-natural disaster in South Carolina history.
As a long-standing and respected member of
the community, GWB feels a strong
commitment to give back to Greenville and
surrounding areas. Individual attorneys and
staff members hold leadership positions in
civic, professional, and charitable organizations.
Moreover, members of the firm are involved in
local, state, and national issues that impact the
interests of the Greenville community, firm
clients, and the legal profession.
Gallivan, White & Boyd, P.A. (GWB)
attorneys are reliable and creative problem
solvers who lead their clients through challenges
and opportunities great and small. The firm’s
legal team and areas of expertise are outlined on
its website at www.gwblawfirm.com.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
134

The year was 1960. John Kennedy was
elected President. Mattel’s Chatty Cathy was
the doll of choice for many children.
Television sets were finding their way into
most U.S. homes. And in South Carolina,
Governor Ernest F. Hollings initiated the state
technical education system. Hollings felt that
if South Carolina could offer a well-trained
work force, the state would attract more
business and industry. This training was to
be provided by a statewide system of thirteen
technical centers.
In 1962 the first of those centers opened in
Greenville on the site of a former garbage
dump—eight acres of land on the corner of
Faris and South Pleasantburg Drive. An initial
building was constructed, serving 800 fulltime
and part-time students.
It did not take long for the college to
outgrow its facilities. The building was
expanded just two years later and again the
following year to meet demand. At the same
time, 122 acres of land surrounding the
original eight acres were acquired, giving the
college room to continue its growth.
In 1966 transfer courses were added under
the administration of Clemson University.
Later, the college would form its own Arts
and Sciences College Transfer Division,
offering courses for transfer to four-year
colleges and universities.
A busy year, 1966 also saw the
establishment of an Adult Education program
and the addition of a Health Careers division.
A news story from that time said that when
the college first considered training for
medical careers, a physician had warned
administrators to stick to welding.
In 1968 the college was accredited by the
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
to award associate degrees, diplomas, and
certificates, and the college began adding
buildings to meet growing enrollment. By
1987, fifteen buildings had been constructed.
In the late 1980s, it became obvious that
the once spacious campus had only a limited
amount of space left for expansion. So in
1988, the college established a Golden Strip
presence, and a year later, added a Greer
location. Permanent campuses in these
locations would come soon.
As the northwest area of the county added
residents, the college expanded once again. A
Northwest Campus, housed temporarily at
the former Berea Elementary School, became
the fourth satellite in 2000, and a permanent
location opened in 2008.
Along the way, growth has happened
through innovation. In 1999 the Greenville
Tech Foundation purchased McAlister Square
and turned the aging retail mall into a thriving
mixed use facility, today housing the
University Center, a partnership of seven
colleges and universities, Greenville Tech’s
Admissions and Registration Center, and a
variety of shops, offices, and restaurants.
Greenville Technical Charter High School
opened in 1999, giving students the chance to
earn college credit along with high school
requirements. The concept proved so popular
that in 2006 a second school, Brashier Middle
College, opened its doors. Plans call for a
charter school on each Greenville Tech
campus. In 2006 as the college approached its
forty-fifth anniversary, student housing was
added, giving Greenville Tech students the
chance to live a few steps from classes.
From 800 students and one building to
today’s four-campus system serving over
65,000 people including curriculum students
and continuing education registrations,
Greenville Tech is one of the reasons the
Upstate can now attract businesses from
around the world.
GREENVILLE
TECHNICAL
COLLEGE
✧
Dr. Tom Barton, president of Greenville
Tech, talks with students.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
135

ARBOR
ENGINEERING
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
136
Arbor Engineering has proven that
landscape architecture and civil engineering
can peacefully coexist in Greenville. However,
that was not always the case.
In 1976, James D. Martin, Jr. (better
known as JD) realized there was an obvious
disagreement between the professions. In fact,
the two were actually clashing. That
prompted him to do some brainstorming and
the result was an idea to blend the two to
create unique projects using the skills of
each discipline.
He thought there should be more planned
communities instead of standard housing. He
envisioned developing parcels of land where
both skill sets were needed to complete a
project and make sure it was successful. As a
result, Arbor Engineering, Inc., was born.
There was a close relationship between the
founders of Arbor and other founders of startup
companies. One such entity was The Print
Machine (TPM), which Jerry Cooper, had
opened in an abandoned filling station. That
was about the same time that Arbor opened in
a one-room rented space. Frequently JD and
Jerry threw darts “double or nothing” to pay
for the cost of prints. Winning meant paying
nothing for the prints and saving money,
while losing meant paying double and putting
extra money in Jerry’s pocket. The two may
not be throwing darts today, but they have
maintained a close working relationship.
In those early days, Arbor was
instrumental in assisting the newly
established Greenville County Recreation
District in developing its first four major
parks (Lakeside, Northside, Riverside, and
Southside) and in conducting the first
statistical survey for the county’s recreational
needs. In addition, Arbor planned and
implemented the Professional Mortgage
building at the corner of Park and Bennett
Streets; and planned and developed
Canebrake Subdivision, which served as
the model for most planned subdivisions
that followed.
Several projects for which the company
is known are: Falls Park, Liberty Plaza,
the Greenville Women’s Club; and
LEED’s certification work for Liberty
Property Trust, the Furman Company, and
Clemson University.
The biggest change for Arbor came in 1987
when Thomas (Tom) Keith, Jr., a landscape
architect and civil engineer, joined the
company. A year ago, it launched a
reorganization program. The firm felt it
needed to be more reflective of clients’
needs during a changing environment. While
Arbor continues to be successful in residential
and recreational design and development,
there is a growing demand for planning,
including urban planning, land planning
and smart growth, to adequately evaluate
potential projects and ensure success of the
company’s clients.
Today, Arbor Engineering has a staff of
seventeen and boasts revenues of $2.5
million. For additional information and
location, visit www.arborengineering.com on
the Internet.

It started from humble beginnings in
1941. With a donation of $50, the City of
Greenville began Greenville, South Carolina
City Employees Federal Credit Union (FCU),
a financial cooperative for employees and
their families.
Organizers of the credit union were
I. S. Barksdale, B. F. Dillard, M. L. Frick,
C. F. McCullough, W. G. Martin, Ben Sloan
and E. H. Turner. The first board of
directors included W. G. Martin, E. H. Turner,
B. F. Dillard, Lillian Seaborn, F. E. Donnald,
M. L. Frick and J. E. Smith.
In 2001, the name changed to Greenville
Heritage Federal Credit Union, but the
mission remains the same: To provide an
expanding range of financial services at
reasonable cost to meet members’ needs while
maintaining long-term financial stability. The
name change better reflects the organization’s
expanded field of membership, says Judith
Raines, president/CEO.
What started as a small financial institution
for City employees now offers services to a
much broader audience. In June 2002 the
National Credit Union Administration (NCUA)
approved a community charter to allow anyone
who lives, works, worships, or attends school
in Greenville County to gain membership.
It has been a steady growth for the FCU
since the forties. At that time, the maximum
unsecured loan amount was $25; secured,
$50; and the maximum deposit per member
was $300. By the end of the forties, however,
the maximum unsecured loan amount had
grown to $100; secured, $200; and the
maximum deposit increased to $2,000. A lot
has changed since then.
Today the credit union remains a not-forprofit
financial cooperative offering a variety of
savings plans and loan products including all
types of mortgage loans, as well as a wide range
of other services including checking, worldwide
ATM access, ATM/debit cards, home
banking, 24/7 instant teller and safe deposit
boxes. As of March 2007 it served over 6,900
members with assets of over $28 million.
The current board members are Tom
McDowell, Derrick Brown, Nadine Chasteen,
Leon Adams, Jeannie Grady, Dan Shirley, Earl
Watson, Hunter West, and Queen Wooden.
Because of its not-for-profit status,
Greenville Heritage continues to be involved
in various community activities through its
monetary contributions and staff support.
Among them are the Children’s Miracle
Network, the National Child ID Program, the
Katrina Relief Effort/Red Cross, staff blood
drive and the Thanksgiving Food Drive.
The main office has moved from City Hall
to Reedy View Drive. There are two other
Greenville locations and another in nearby
Simpsonville. A new office is now planned for
Greer. Greenville Heritage Federal Credit
Union is also located on the Internet at
www.greenvilleheritage.com.
GREENVILLE HERITAGE
FEDERAL CREDIT UNION
✧
Above: Greenville Heritage Federal Credit
Union’s main office is located at 75 Reedy
View Drive in downtown Greenville and
was built in 1994.
Below: W. D. Ables (left) makes a
presentation to B. F. Dillard who was one
of the Credit Union organizers and
board member.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
137

✧
BALDOR•
DODGE•
RELIANCE
Above: Reliance Electric Facility, c. 1920.
Reliance Electric Company manufactured
custom built motors at their facilities on
Ivanhoe Road in Cleveland, Ohio. The
motors shown here are being tested by
engineers before being shipped
to customers.
Below: Rope Drive Pulley, c. 1910.
At the turn of the twentieth century, power
was distributed to factories by means of belt
or rope drives bringing steam generated
power to line shafts. Dodge Manufacturing
Company built rope drives for small and
large applications. Some were made
completely of wood, matching Wallace
Dodge’s original design, while others were
made of cast iron.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
138
In 1878, forty-two years before Edwin
Ballman and Emil Doerr started a new
motor company in St. Louis that would
become Baldor Electric Company, Wallace
Dodge was constructing his revolutionary
Wood Split Pulley with an interchangeable
busing system. The Dodge Manufacturing
Company of Mishawaka, Indiana was soon
producing babbitted bearings, a splitfriction
clutch, shaft couplings, collars,
and cast iron gears. Just over two decades
later, in 1904, Reliance Electric Company
was born, when Cleveland industrialist Peter
Hitchcock and inventor John Lincoln opened
a shop for electrical experimentation and
development. Baldor Electric was founded in
1920 by Ballman, a young engineer and
prolific inventor, and Doerr, a talented
machinist. The combined name (Ball-Doerr)
became Baldor.
In 1980 the Dodge business, later
joined by the Reliance business, made
its new home-base in Greenville, South
Carolina and, in 2007 became part of
the Baldor Electric Company. Combined,
Baldor•Dodge•Reliance had annual sales of
$1.8 billion in 2006 with more than $275
million of that being sold outside of the
United States. The combined Baldor and
Reliance motor business makes Baldor the
largest industrial electric motor manufacturer
in North America and second largest in
the world.
Now, these three great brands of
Baldor•Dodge•Reliance work as one to serve
customers and develop new innovations that
will forge the next chapter of manufacturing
history. “The same entrepreneurial and
innovative spirit that served as the catalyst for
our company’s creation is still alive today and
positions us well for continued growth in the
industrial marketplace,” says Michael
Cinquemani, executive vice president, Dodge
and International for Baldor Electric.
Headquartered in Fort Smith, Arkansas,
Baldor Electric Company is a leading
manufacturer of industrial electric motors,
drives, generators, bearings, gearing, and
power transmission products. The company
has a combined history of over 311 years and
currently serves over 9,500 customers in
more than eighty countries. Baldor Electric
Company sells products to a diverse customer
base consisting of original equipment
manufacturers and distributors serving
markets throughout the world. By focusing on
providing value to customers through a
combination of quality products and
customer service, as well as short lead times
and lower total cost of ownership, Baldor has
become the leader in offering effective, energy
efficient product solutions to even the
toughest customer applications. Listed on
the NYSE as “BEZ,” the company has
over 8,300 employees, 26 worldwide
manufacturing facilities, a broad distribution
network, and a continuing commitment
to quality.

THE GREAT
ESCAPE
Norm Pace and partner, Joe Gillon, owe
thanks to the ancient Sumerians of 3500 B.C.,
the inventors of the wheel. That wheel has
evolved over the centuries to come to represent
the focus that Pace and Gillon are passionate to
share. Recreation, healthy lifestyles, supported
by quality and great service, provide the
emphasis of this unique business.
Pace, an engineer, and Gillon, a business
major, met while flying combat in a C-123K
with the 310th Air Commando Squadron,
during their service in Vietnam in 1968-69.
Later, while continuing their service from
Charleston AFB, they received their MBAs.
Pooling their savings, they decided to start a
bicycle shop in Greenville. Within a year, they
opened stores in Spartanburg and in Anderson.
The Great Escape is not an ordinary bike
store. It carries Trek and Giant bike brands
known the world over. Pace says the sport has
grown rapidly due to the fitness, quality
family time, and weight loss aspects of the
sport. Celebrities such as Lance Armstrong
and Greenville’s own George Hincapie give
recognition to both the sport and the Upstate.
A particular focus area for The Great
Escape is bikes for women. Women are among
the fastest growing group of riders. The Great
Escape recognizes the impact women have on
influencing their family and friends to
experience the benefits of cycling. The staff at
The Great Escape, which includes female
salespersons and mechanics, is committed to
supporting women as they enter this exciting
field. There are women’s departments in all
stores, including specific women’s cycling
clothing and accessories.
Greenville city and county, in a cooperative
venture, have undertaken the task of building
a seventeen mile bike trail and compatible
amenities, which will extend from north of
Travelers Rest, across Furman University, and
along the Reedy River to Lake Conestee. This
commitment by the community is fully in
synch with Pace and Gillon’s vision for
beautiful, family-friendly, and enjoyable
recreational environments. As another fun
diversion, all stores have hobby shops with
trained experts in all hobby fields. Intricate
train layouts, with a special train cave for the
kids in the Greenville store, make the stores a
popular hangout for young and old alike.
Radio controlled planes, helicopters,
cars, trucks, plastic models (even model
soap box derby racers) and rockets complete
the array of merchandise for leisure time.
The interesting setting of The Great Escape
has proven to be a great place to spend
an afternoon.
Fitness, weight loss, and quality time with
loved ones suit Pace and Gillon just fine.
✧
Above: Norm Pace in The Great Escape
bicycle shop.
Below: Joe Gillon in The Great Escape
hobby shop.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
139

FAMILY
LEGACY, INC.
✧
Christopher A. Brown (left) and
William W. Brown (right).
The folks at Family Legacy, Inc.
understand the value of skilled listening. “We
believe in listening to understand our client’s
values, dreams and vision,” says founder
William Brown, CPA, PFS.
“Drawing upon our planning process
and investment management expertise, we
aim to bring each client’s vision into clear
focus,” he adds.
Family Legacy is an independent,
registered investment advisory firm that
centers on providing quality, conservative
investment management. “We provide
additional planning services for many clients
in an effort to help them determine the
economic feasibility of their goals and work to
help them attain those goals,” he adds.
“Investments fuel the engine that turns their
dreams into reality.”
The firm encourages clients to think of the
potential impact their short-and-long term
financial decisions will have on their lives.
“We know from experience that wise choices
bridge the gaps to clients’ desired outcomes
and, thereby, create feelings of happiness
and satisfaction.”
In addition to the company’s planning and
advisory services, Family Legacy may include
such services as withdrawal planning and
cash management for new retirees who roll
over their 401(K) plans. The company assists
entrepreneurs in negotiating buy-sell
agreements and establishing retirement
accounts. It works closely with clients who
need multi-generational estate planning and
advanced asset transfer techniques.
Charitable-minded clients welcome assistance
in planning for significant contributions to
causes they support.
Family Legacy, Inc. is the outgrowth of
early financial planning by William Brown in
his CPA firm. After many attempts, he learned
that the best way to help clients plan for their
futures was to prepare the plan and be
responsible for the plan over the long-term.
To better assist clients, Family Legacy
draws upon the expertise of William’s
affiliated CPA firm for individual tax advice,
and an affiliated insurance agency for
insurance consulting services.
After years of working with business and
high net worth clients in the role of trusted
advisor, he and his oldest son, Christopher
(Chris) A. Brown, CPA, PFS, decided to
expand in 1995 and started a firm that could
handle a wealthier client base. They began
with one client with about $100,000, and, at
the end of 2006, managed over
$115,000,000. William and Chris purchased
and renovated the former site of Seven Oaks
Restaurant on Broadus Avenue taking care to
maintain and preserve its historic charm.
The firm has seven employees and plans
future growth. “Our business is about helping
people get more out of life. Our success is
measured by the long-term success of our
clients and their families,” says William.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
140

It is a known fact: The right location is
vital to a company’s success. Such is the case
with O’Neal, Inc.
The Greenville firm that plans, designs,
and constructs capital projects could not have
chosen a better site for its headquarters than
Greenville, one of the fastest-growing areas in
the South. It is as if founders Paul and Judy
O’Neal were holding a crystal ball in 1975 to
foresee Greenville’s (and the Upstate’s)
growth. “At that time, Greenville was home
to some of the largest design and construction
firms in the nation, which made it an
ideal location,” says the company’s founder
Paul O’Neal.
Allied Chemical (now Honeywell) was the
company’s first client and remains one today.
An alliance with Michelin began in 1986 and
still continues. Other projects with local
impact are the original Greenville Braves
Stadium, BMW’s Information Technology
Research Center with Design Strategies, the
first building on the Clemson University
International Automotive Research Center
(ICAR) campus, BMW Performance Center
and Test Track, and the O’Neal Computer
Training Center at Greenville Technical
College. O’Neal installed GE’s solar gallery on
Garlington Road as part of an onsite project
alliance that began in 2000.
O’Neal provides planning, design and
construction services, offering clients integrated
single-source management for capital projects.
Its focus is industrial manufacturing, including
chemical, automotive, pharmaceutical, general
manufacturing, and alternative fuels.
Originally known as O’Neal Engineering,
Inc., the structural consulting firm expanded
its business in 1980 to include electrical, civil,
and mechanical disciplines. Construction
services were added in 1998. The company
has grown from two employees to
approximately 350, with half of those located
at the corporate headquarters situated at I-385
and Pleasantburg Drive. O’Neal has additional
offices in Raleigh, Charleston, and Atlanta.
In 1987 the company became employeeowned,
offering stock ownership to key
employees. O’Neal’s commitment to employee
ownership is evident today, with thirty
percent of the company ownership held by an
ESOP and the remaining seventy percent held
by employees.
The company has delivered projects in
over thirty-five states, Mexico, Canada,
France, Belgium, and Brazil. Its long-term
plans are for growth on a national scale within
its current areas of expertise with an eye on
international work and emerging technologies
in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and powerrelated
industries. Annual revenues exceed
$100 million.
To support its mission of promoting a
positive image by furthering the causes of
community support, health, and education,
O’Neal’s employees are committed to projects
with Hands on Greenville (HOG), the United
Way, March of Dimes, Meals on Wheels, and
other charitable causes.
O’NEAL, INC.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
141

BENEFIT
CONTROLS
COMPANIES
✧
Benefit Controls Companies is located at
109 Laurens Road in Greenville and on the
Internet at www.benefitcontrols.com.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
142
In just a little over twenty years,
Benefit Controls Companies has
grown from a small, family-owned
business in Greenville to one with
eight offices serving approximately
850 organizations in the Southeast.
In addition to the founding
location, it has offices in Columbia
and Charleston, South Carolina,
Hickory, Charlotte and High Point,
North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia,
and Salt Lake City, Utah. Benefit
Controls is licensed in fortytwo
states representing over
400,000 employees.
The company was the brainchild of Bill
Gantt, who began offering advice about
employee plans to companies in Greenville. It
was he, and his twin brother, Dick, who had
the idea for the business after receiving officer
ranks in the ROTC and graduating from
Furman University. Both served in the U.S.
Army’s Security Agency—Bill retiring in the
reserves as a Major General and Dick as a
Colonel. They had developed the idea for the
business with Mike Hawkins, a business
associate. Early partners were Bill Foster, Doug
Dellinger of Charlotte, Bob Lassiter of Atlanta,
and Eddie Icard from Hickory, North Carolina.
Benefit Controls Companies, a national
insurance brokerage firm, has grown since its
innovative beginnings into one of the largest
privately held brokerage firms in the nation. It
provides creative and cost-effective business
solutions for its clients in the areas of
employee benefits, human resources,
communications, healthcare, employee
surveys, COBRA compliance, claim tracking
data, and human resource strategic planning,
among others. All services and deliverables
are tailored and customized to clients’ needs.
Rapid growth in the 1990s prompted staff
and location additions. Joining the firm were
Carl Sharpe in High Point and Don Ward in
Columbia; Bill’s sons, Scott and Matt, along
with Dick’s son, Rick, and Hawkins’ son, Alex.
The family tradition continued in Charlotte
with Foster’s sons, Andy and David; and Ward’s
son, Ken, and son-in-law, Larry in Columbia.
Many consultants and staff personnel joined
the company during growth periods.
Medical care cost for employers and
employees in the 1990s became a critical
problem. Benefit Controls has helped clients
manage their cost with innovative cash flow
self insured plans, captive insurance
companies, and plan innovations to continue
good healthcare at affordable levels.
Benefit Controls Companies are members
of many professional organizations including
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, South
Carolina Chamber of Commerce, local
chambers, the American Benefit Council in
Washington, Risk Insurance Management
Society, American Society of Pension Actuaries,
International Society of Certified Employee
Benefit Specialists, Southern Employee Benefit
Convention, Chartered Life underwriters,
South Carolina Manufacturer’s Alliance, and
National Association of Health Underwriters.
Benefit Controls is well positioned for
sustained growth with a forward-looking
group of consultants.

PRINTMASTERS
PROFESSIONAL
PRINTERS, INC.
Do not be fooled by the A-frame, front
entrance to the three-story building. It
houses one of the area’s most respected, fullservice
commercial printers. Founded in 1971,
the family-owned business known as
Printmasters, Inc., has seen many changes over
the years, including ownership and the name:
Printmasters, Professional Printers, Inc.
Purchased by Jim Sheets in 1993, the
Laurens Road facility also has operations in
Greenwood, offering a wide range of products
and services in digital and offset printing,
design/layout, mailing/fulfillment/distribution,
and document development. The company
serves the Upstate, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Printmasters has grown from five to twentytwo
employees since the days of manual
typesetting, layout, and paste-up to digital
typesetting and electronic design. Printmasters
has won kudos for excellence, receiving Gold
Printing Awards in the region and Bronze Awards
in the International Gallery of Superb Printing in
connection with International Association of
Printing House Craftsmen competitions. It has
also received PICA awards in various categories.
Printmasters is now the only locally owned
Greenville printer who promotes and supports
“green” printing. It offers post consumer wastes
paper, carbon neutral papers, wind power
papers, and ink made from vegetable matter.
Saving the planet, one print job at a time.
Sheets stresses the importance of quality
customer service. The company takes pride in
the many services it offers and focuses on WIIFY
(what’s in it for you, the customer, when you buy
printing) plus its cost-effective, quality, full-color
printing, and Second Set of EyesSM (whereby,
staff proofreads each and every document after
typesetting to check for grammar, typos, and
other deficiencies). “We make sure the work is
well-crafted and powerful. Going the extra mile
with proofreading and making suggestions to the
customer is the way we do business,” says Sheets.
“Our full color personalized printing is called
‘variable data digital printing’ meaning we can
individually personalize a unique message on
your marketing post cards or flyers. This is
especially beneficial in direct mail/marketing
campaigns, which eliminates the ‘junk’ mail
look.” And most importantly increases your ROI
on your mailing cost.
When it comes to books, Printmasters does
not blink at the job. It helps eliminate the wonder
from working with a big house publisher and not
seeing the final product until it is too late.
“Printmasters works with writers on copy style,
layout, dustjacket design, and either soft or hardbound
covers. It allows for local hands-on, fullservice
attention that many companies may not
provide,” he adds
Sheets grew up in Ohio, graduated from
Blackburn College in Illinois, and did graduate
work at Northwestern University. Prior to
acquiring Printmasters, he was a corporate and
manufacturing executive. A Vietnam veteran
with the Army, he was awarded a number of
commendations, including the Bronze Star.
Among Printmasters’ customers are names
you will recognize in the Upstate community.
✧
Above: Printmasters is located at 1700
Laurens Road in Greenville.
Below: Founder Jim Sheets.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
143

FIRST
PRESBYTERIAN
CHURCH
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
144
In the days when streets were as dusty as
mountain trails, homes were few, and the area
had transitioned from Pleasantburg to
Greenville Courthouse to Greenville, and the
establishment of churches was welcomed.
They served not only as places to worship
Christ, but venues for social and family
gatherings, as well.
First Presbyterian Church of Greenville and
four other downtown denominations owe their
birth to wealthy landowner Vardry McBee.
Known as the Father of Greenville, McBee
was an un-churched man who experienced
a spiritual birth, thanks to his wife. As a
result, he donated property for four different
denominations to build churches and stipulated
in his will that property be given for a Catholic
Church. The original churches formed a cross,
with the center being First Presbyterian.
The modern day church only hints of its
past. First Presbyterian was established as a
congregation in 1848, and sixteen founding
members oversaw the construction until it
was completed in 1851. Since that time, it has
undergone many changes. The original
church was demolished in 1882, and the
church’s 225 members welcomed a new
sanctuary in 1883.
As the area’s population grew, church
membership kept pace. In 1911 the sanctuary
was enlarged, and in 1928, a red brick church
building was added, and then extended
further to the west in 1958. In 1973 the
church expanded again, adding an
educational wing and the Symmes-Wilson
Building, a gymnasium to serve youth and
their families with other activities.
By the early 1980s, the sanctuary was no
longer adequate to serve the full membership
of 2,900. Only 800 could be seated for each
Sunday. An annex accommodated visitors
during worship services. Sunday school rooms
were filled to capacity, and the choir loft could
not seat a full complement of choir members
at a given time. Once again, the congregation
and its leadership were faced with spiritual
and fiscal decisions. After diligent prayer,
study and deliberation, it was once again, time
to build for the ministry of Christ.
Major construction and renovations began
in 1986 and completed in 1987, providing
1,400 seats for its members. For the duration
of the renovations, services were held in the
Downtown Baptist Church. Care was given to
the interior as well as the exterior. Five years
later, the church celebrated the elimination of
its building indebtedness.
In 1998 another expansion/renovation
program was undertaken. The 38,000-square
foot project known as the Kowalski Christian
Life Center was dedicated in 2004. It features
a new fellowship hall, library, youth floor,
kitchen, administrative offices and the Harper
Chapel, featuring modern stained glass
windows reflecting the city’s birth.
The church looks forward to the future
with confidence, knowing that God has
blessed its witness and ministry in the past.

They share places of importance in South
Carolina homes and homes throughout the
nation. They are prominently displayed in art
and historical museums everywhere. They
may even hold bread at mealtime, and,
perhaps, nick knacks or necessities. They are
Sweetgrass baskets.
One Upstate woman, Annette Richardson,
was so taken with the unique and historical
art form that she has opened Sweetgrass
Connections, a business dedicated to
maintaining her family’s tradition that
has been passed on to her by her mother
and grandparents.
While many people today are aware that
the baskets are predominantly made in the
Charleston area by African-Americans, they
usually are not aware of the history behind
the craft. Basket-making was born out of
necessity when Africans were brought to this
country in the dark holds of sailing ships to
work in the “slavers” (or owners) rice fields.
Coiled basketry is a traditional art form that
has been passed on to descendants of slaves from
Africa for more than 300 years ago and remains
an important part of Southern heritage and
culture. These authentically hand-woven baskets
are one of the oldest forms of African art in the
United States. Although the grass used here,
today, is not grown in Africa, the slaves who
worked on rice plantations in the coastal
Carolinas adapted native grasses and pine
needles, and began using techniques they
brought with them when they came from West
Africa.
Sweetgrass-Muhlenbergia Filipes, a cord
grass with an almost hay-like aroma which
grows behind the first dune along the shores
of South Carolina’s coast, is the main
ingredient. The baskets also contain pine
needles and are laced with palmetto fronds for
added color, design and strength. Finding
quality Sweetgrass has become a challenge
for modern artisans due to private real
estate developments of our coastal islands
and marshlands.
Sewn into each basket is a precious historical
cultural legacy and expression of perseverance.
The art of Sweetgrass basketry is a valuable
investment and the products are purchased by
museums such as the Smithsonian Institute and
art collectors throughout the world.
Owned by Richardson, she follows in her
ancestors’ footsteps. Generations of her family
have created a variety of authentic hand-woven
baskets and passed that special technique
down to her. She is keeping the art form alive
as a speaker, instructor, and artist, showing her
work through several art affiliations in the
Upstate, such as Pickens County Museum, Art
Connection, South Carolina’s ETV Program,
Impressions, hosted by Everett Powers, League
Academy, and Tempo Gallery. Her personal
goal is to keep the history alive by educating
others about the rich origin of basket weaving.
SWEETGRASS
CONNECTIONS
✧
Annette Richardson.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
145

LONG TRAILER
AND BODY
SERVICE
When opportunity knocked, Joe Long
opened the door. His early jobs were “stepping
stones” to something better. He knew what he
wanted to do…was a risk-taker…and grasped
the opportunity when it arose.
Born in 1916 in Dooly County, Georgia, he
moved to Walton County with his family
when he was a month old. At nineteen, he
moved to Americus to work in his uncle’s
blacksmith and machine shop. Seven years
later, during WW II, he wanted to work in a
defense plant, so he moved to Savannah to
work for Steel Products Company which had
a contract with the Ordinance Department
building Great Dane trailers.
It was there, he met Crystal, his wife,
and another door opened when his work
ethic and reputation became known at
Trailmobile in Charlotte, and he joined their
service department.
Opening a sub-branch in Greenville, South
Carolina, he was asked to manage it. When
the company closed in 1948, Long
approached management about buying their
equipment. In 1948, with $1,850 and two
employees, he started Long Trailer Service, a
two-bay metal building at Furman Hall Road
and Poinsett Highway.
In 1953, Long Trailer Service rented a
building with a five-bay service area, office
and parts department on Goldsmith and
McCoy Streets. When the owners wanted the
building for another use, Long relocated to
Henderson Road. He built a concrete block
building with five service bays, offices and
parts department. In 1968, he added an 80 by
120-foot building for truck bodies and truck
equipment, becoming Long Body Service. In
1989, he exchanged the Henderson Road
property for 7.5 acres of land and a 210 by
120-foot metal building with five bays,
offices, parts department and warehouse on
Augusta Road, the current location.
Long Trailer Service and Long Body Service
merged and became Long Trailer & Body
Service, Inc., with twenty-two employees.
When Long Trailer Service began, trailers
had single axles and the longest was twentyfour
feet. Today, trailers have tandems and
lengths up to fifty-seven feet.
Through the years, Long has employed
family members and loyal employees. He began
a profit-sharing retirement plan in 1968. When
the company showed a profit, contributions
were made to the plan. During “lean” years,
however, no contributions were made.
Long’s nephew Jerry Long is general
manager, and his son, Rick, is service manager.
It is the hope of the founder that the nephews,
who joined in 1960 and 1972, respectively,
will assume operation of the business.
The three have 140 years’ combined
experience—rarely found, in most companies.
The company mission continues: “Service—
Our first thought since 1948.”
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
146

Shannon Forest Christian School (SFCS) was
founded as a result of the passion of a church
family and its mission to carry God’s Word
beyond the walls of its building and into the
hearts of the community. Former Shannon Forest
Presbyterian Church (SFPC) Pastor Al Lutz had a
vision to provide a Christ-centered education to
nurture Christian values supported by the home
and in the church. It was 1968 when Lutz
shared that vision and led the SFPC session to
establish the school. While it accommodates
approximately 600 students in PK3 through 12
grades today, this was not always the case. SFCS
opened with twelve Kindergarten students.
Within two years, six grades had been added and
acreage was purchased on which to construct
a 9,000 square-foot classroom building.
Enrollment rose to 130 students that fall.
SFCS was on a fast growth track and, in
1971 a gymnasium and other classrooms were
added. By 1973, the school expanded again,
adding an additional 3,000 feet of space.
Under the leadership of a board of directors,
the school operates as an interdenominational
school with more than 130 churches and
twenty denominations represented. Its mission
is to support the Christian home and church by
providing quality education from an
evangelical, Biblical perspective in order to
equip and challenge students to influence
culture and society for Jesus Christ.
Over 500 students have received diplomas
since the school’s first graduating class in
1977. Many have received academic and
athletic scholarships and grants to further
their education. SFCS features a college
preparatory curriculum with nearly 100
percent of its graduating seniors going on to
attend the colleges of their choice. While
some prefer to study in the Upstate, others
have gone on to the U.S. Naval Academy,
Vanderbilt University, New York University,
and Harvard, to name a few.
SFCS is accredited by the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools and is a
member of the Association of Christian Schools
International. The school is located on a
spacious, thirty-six acre campus on Garlington
Road in Greenville’s thriving Eastside.
The school’s Key Club, part of the Kiwanis
International, is comprised of students in
SHANNON FOREST CHRISTIAN SCHOOL
ninth through twelfth grades. Through this
organization, students learn leadership and
personal enrichment that helps them in
college and beyond. As part of that
involvement, they are expected to become
involved in community service projects. Such
projects inform families on bike safety and
distribute car seat safety information at
sporting events, and students also visit with
residents at Eastside nursing homes.
Members participate in various other projects,
such as the Children’s Miracle Network, assisting
at the Special Olympics’ annual Harvest Festival,
restocking the food pantry at the Ronald
McDonald House, and much more.
In addition to the numerous Greenville
service projects, each summer, students,
teachers, and parents visit John’s Island, South
Carolina, for a mission trip, where they build
houses for Habitat for Humanity, minister to
local nursing home residents, and volunteer
at an inner city Charleston soup kitchen.
For additional information on Shannon
Forest Christian School, log on to
www.shannonforest.com.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
147

GREATER
GREENVILLE
CHAMBER OF
COMMERCE
For more than a century, the Greater
Greenville Chamber of Commerce has been at
the center of Greenville’s vision for the future.
Founded in 1879, the Chamber has fostered
new ideas and new organizations, and it has
been practical in its search for answers to
current problems and farsighted in its plans
for the future.
Major projects of the Chamber in the early
1900s included bringing the American Cigar
Factory to Greenville to diversify the city’s
cotton-centered economy and encouraging the
development of the Municipal League, which
worked for beautification and sanitation.
Members also worked to build Greenville’s
first YMCA; were given credit for helping
merchants avoid bankruptcy and business
failure during the depression of 1907; assisted
in the development of a beautification plan
for the city; published an illustrated guide to
Greenville in 1911; and organized the city’s
first credit report bureau.
In 1929 the Chamber turned its attention
to aviation, successfully bringing passenger
and airmail service to the city. Members also
began lobbying for a federal building and a
new city hall and celebrated the completion of
Shriners Hospital.
Post-World War II plans included working
for a veteran’s hospital, expanding Greenville
General Hospital, and establishing a naval
reserve armory.
In the 1950s the Chamber celebrated the
opening of Memorial Auditorium, saw Main
Street become the Upstate’s retail center, and
cooperated with the county and state in
establishing Greenville Technical College.
Combined efforts of volunteers and staff
brought Bob Jones University to Greenville in
1947, and the Chamber’s deepest continuing
interest was the opening of Greenville-
Spartanburg Airport in 1962.
The Chamber conducted an education
study in the 1960s that led to school
accreditation and integration. This gave
leaders of all Upstate communities the
opportunity to talk and compromise,
making integration of public accommodations
and schools among the most peaceful in
the South.
The Greenville Central Area Partnership,
the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and
Freedom Weekend Aloft all began with
Chamber leadership in the 1980s and have
continued to function on their own.
With the 1990s came such developments as
the Peace Center for the Performing Arts and
the BI-LO Center, as well as the establishment
of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the
Arts and Humanities in downtown Greenville.
The twenty-first century has seen the
Chamber as a major supporter of the establishment
of the Clemson University International
Center for Automotive Research in Greenville.
As the new millennium continues, the
Chamber focuses on moving forward in
support of entrepreneurialism, high-tech
businesses and a strengthening workforce.
For more information, please visit
www.greenvillechamber.org.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
148

THE
WOODLANDS
AT FURMAN
Imagine living the good life of retirement
in the midst of a beautiful community where
there are a lot of extracurricular activities. The
Woodlands at Furman, Greenville’s newest
Continuing Care Retirement Community
(CCRC), when complete in 2009, will offer
just that.
This unique concept in retirement living
is developed for those who seek an active,
independent lifestyle, but who also want the
added security of onsite healthcare, should
they ever need it. The Woodlands is designed
to include 144 independent living residences
with twelve different floor plans varying in
size from 717 square feet to over 2,060 square
feet. The Healthcare Center includes thirtytwo
assisted living apartments that offer oneand-two-bedroom
floor plans; sixteen
apartments for residents who may require
memory support; and thirty private nursing
home beds designed to be a home-like setting.
The forty-six acre site is adjacent to the
Furman University golf course on Old Roe
Ford Road. Residents can enjoy the lush green
campus of nearby Furman University, view
the rolling foothills and tranquility of peaceful
living from their balconies and covered
porches, play a few rounds of golf on a nearby
course, and engage in wellness activities,
such as those at its state-of-the-art fitness
center. The Woodlands provides many
services that are at residents’ fingertips,
including scheduled transportation and
twenty-four hour security.
Empty nesters find they no longer need
large houses, and the challenges of upkeep
they had during earlier years. As people live
longer, they are healthier, more mobile, and
prefer fewer problems associated with
upkeep. The Woodlands helps them attain
that through maintenance-free living, giving
them more time to explore a variety of
amenities, such as reading or doing research
in the library, and enjoying arts-and-crafts
right onsite.
The driving force behind The Woodlands
is Upstate Senior Living, Inc. (USL), a
not-for-profit group comprised of local
leaders dedicated to bringing this quality
retirement living option to Greenville and is
also supported by the sponsorship of Furman
University. The Cliffs Communities, Inc., a
developer of luxury residential communities
throughout the leading edge of the Blue
Ridge Mountains is an investor and partner in
the development.
Working in harmony with USL, Greystone
Communities, Inc. of Irving, Texas, is
responsible for developing and marketing
The Woodlands.
Founded in 1982, Greystone has delivered
tailored planning, development, and marketing
and management services to more
than 400 owners and sponsors of senior
living communities in 40 states. Greystone
has assisted their clients in securing over
$3.5 billion in capital to finance senior
living communities, and has committed
more than $45 million in pre-construction
risk capital.
Additional information may be found on the
Internet at www.thewoodlandsatfurman.org.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
149

REEL VIDEO &
STILLS, INC.
✧
Above: Falls Park at night.
Below: Reel Video & Stills studio.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
150
Reel Video & Stills, Inc. was established in
2005 to meet the needs of the business
community. President Brian Erkens and his
staff pride themselves on excellent customer
service and the visually stunning products that
they produce to meet their clients’ needs.
This experienced photography and video
studio offers a wide range of services including,
but not limited to: aerial, architectural,
industrial, commercial, catalog, annual report,
people and brochure photography. In addition,
this one stop studio offers video editing
including CD or DVD duplication from tape or
old movie reels and wide format printing.
Reel Video & Stills is also involved in event
photography and video. Utilizing the latest
equipment and techniques, they can provide
an exceptional piece to showcase your
business. Event videography such as
weddings and corporate functions are edited
to include music and may even involve a
photo montage showcasing the history of the
individuals or company.
Brian attended Apollo High School in
Minnesota, where his homeroom teacher, who
was also the yearbook advisor, introduced him
to what would become his passion and career.
His love for photography eventually found
him in Greenville, South Carolina, where he
obtained a degree in Cinema Photography.
While utilizing his remarkable talent and
strong work ethic at an ad agency, the door
opened on a career as a commercial
photographer with Studio D Photographers in
1992. Brian’s mentor, Jim Domnitz, brought
the young Brian under his wings and allowed
him to seize this opportunity. Brian has
worked for several companies and ad agencies:
Shorey & Associates, GE, Michelin, BMW,
Span America, Itron, B2B, and many others.
After fifteen years with Studio D, Brian’s
reputation as one of Greenville’s well-known
and respected photographers enabled him to
branch out on his own. His studio, Reel Video
& Stills is located on Garlington Road in
Garlington Crossing near the intersection of
Roper Mountain Road.
What sets this studio apart is their ability to
not only resolve any issues that are encountered
during a photography shoot but also in their
ability to utilize lighting and creative camera
angles in order to showcase their subjects with a
highly positive and professional result.

Like father and grandfather, East Broad
Trust Company CEO F. Jordan Earle
inherited a passion and vision for creating
business opportunities.
The Earle family has long-term, successful
business ties to the Upstate. Jordan’s father’s
family came to Carolina in the 1700s. It was
his father, though, who set the precedent in
Greenville’s early financial world for Jordan.
“My father, who died in 2005 at ninetyone,
drew from the challenges of Depression
Era experiences to become one of Greenville’s
prominent bankers. When he returned from
WW II, he and several investors organized
General Mortgage, a locally owned and
managed commercial mortgage banking
operation. The company was
sold to Cameron Brown
Mortgage in North Carolina
(later acquired by First Union).
It’s only natural that I grew up
with the influence and desire to
live by the principles that
brought vocational fulfillment
and financial success many
of my relatives enjoyed.”
(His maternal grandfather and
namesake, Fletcher Jordan,
was a family practice physician
in Greenville.)
Financial creativity runs in
the family. In the midst of a
consolidating industry that
many thought would become
completely dominated by only
a few, super-regional banks,
Jordan’s older brother, O. Perry
Earle, III, organized locally
owned Greenville National
Bank. He honored the fiduciary
duty quality leadership adheres
to by creating significant shareholder value.
Earle’s vision, experience, and character
attracted many investors who realized a
handsome return when the bank was sold for a
premium fifteen years after inception.
Jordan and partner, Steve Fisher are cofounders
of East Broad Trust Company.
Greenville natives and Citadel graduates with
master’s degrees, both spent three decades in
trust and lending at larger banks before
stepping out to gain regulatory approval to
organize their new venture in May 2000. Earle
is chief executive officer, while Fisher is
president and corporate secretary.
As many institutions remain entrenched
in selling tightly bundled, prepackaged,
proprietary services, East Broad Trust
Company is capturing a developing,
underserved niche in the marketplace for
sophisticated and specialized financial
services. Surrounded by dedicated staff
and supportive stakeholders, Earle and Fisher
take pride in being the leaders of an enterprise
that delivers highly personalized, innovative
trust services. “We expect to further sharpen
our focus and adhere to the deliberate
strategy of our business plan to capitalize on
profitable opportunities ahead,” says Earle.
Following the sound leadership principles,
resourcefulness, and passion for excellence
that define the legacies of those who inspire
us, we envision East Broad Trust Company
becoming the most desirable source for
trust services and ultimately providing
shareholders with a rewarding return on
their investment.
EAST BROAD
TRUST
COMPANY
✧
Trust can be a beautiful thing.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
151

BON SECOURS
ST. FRANCIS
HEALTH
SYSTEM
✧
Above: A cardiac catheterization procedure
in progress at St. Francis downtown.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE GREENVILLE NEWS.
Below: May 17, 1932. Healthcare ‘pioneers’
from St. Clare Convent in Cincinnati—
Reverend Sister Mary Alacoque and
Reverend Sister Aniceta, Franciscan Sisters
of the Poor—arrive in Greenville.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
152
God speaks—and works—in wonderful,
mysterious ways. In July 1932 the arrival of
their first patient, a “poor country girl” with
acute appendicitis, may have affirmed the two
Franciscan Sisters of the Poor of their call to
open a Catholic community hospital in a small
southern town. Their faith was the genesis of
today’s Bon Secours St. Francis Health System.
As Greenville became a hub for textile
commerce after the Depression, so did St.
Francis develop into a leader in healthcare. It
was the first hospital with ambulance service,
and, by 1971, among the first Southeastern
hospitals with all-private rooms. In 1990, it
opened the state’s first hospital for women.
The legacy of those devoted Sisters
and community leaders grew into a
leading, multi-campus healthcare system.
St. Francis consistently garners national
recognition for outstanding quality, patient
satisfaction, technological, and programmatic
achievements ,including:
• The region’s only fully accredited bone
marrow transplant program;
• The state’s first and only Geriatric Fracture
Center;
• The first in the Upstate with advanced
diagnostics such as digital mammography,
a 64-slice CT scanner and Stealth
computer-guided imagery;
• The Upstate’s first minimally invasive
surgery (MINIsurgery) center; and
• Through Open Arms Hospice, opening
Greenville’s only residential hospice facility,
the thirty-bed McCall Hospice House.
The system is comprised of two acute
care hospitals—St. Francis downtown and
St. Francis eastside—plus outpatient and
ambulatory surgery centers, with 800
affiliated physicians and specialists providing
cardiovascular services/surgery, general
surgery, pulmonology, orthopedics, primary
care, rehabilitation, and women’s services.
The St. Francis Optimum Health Network
provides cost-effective, quality health
insurance options to its 35,000 members.
With more than 500 providers, it is among
the Upstate’s largest managed care networks.
Addressing the holistic needs of patients
and their families, the faith-based ministry of
St. Francis Mission Services includes the
Emmanuel Program healing therapies,
Spiritual Care, LifeWise for seniors and the
SMILES Mobile Dental Clinic. Parish Nursing
works with local churches to bring healthcare
resources to the community. Palliative Care
offers relief to patients suffering debilitating
or serious illnesses.
The St. Francis Foundation supports the
system’s mission within the hospital and the
community. To perpetuate the St. Francis
ministry, it helped purchase the sixty-acre
Millennium property for a third campus.
As with the Sisters’ first charitable act
seventy-five years ago, St. Francis is heeding
the call to provide access to the highest
quality, compassionate healthcare to all
Upstate residents.
To find out how St. Francis continues
to make history, visit www.stfrancishealth.org.

In 1959, in three small frame houses on East
Washington Street, Christ Church Episcopal
School opened with 212 students in
kindergarten through sixth grade. Today the
coeducational, college-preparatory day school
serves more than 1,000 students in grades
primer to twelve on a seventy-two acre campus
on Cavalier Drive, helps attract relocating
executives from around the world to the Upstate
of South Carolina, and engages students in all
grades with the community through its Service
Learning program. Since its beginnings, CCES
alumni have become respected leaders in the
community, business, and government.
Under its first headmaster, the Reverend
Dr. Claude E. Guthrie, grades seven and eight
were added in 1960, and grade nine in 1961.
It was not until 1969, under Headmaster
Rufus Bethea, that CCES added grade ten; in
1970, with the opening of grade eleven,
students in grades ten and eleven attended
“Christ High at the Y,” held in the Cleveland
Street YMCA. In 1971, Upper and Middle
School classes were held at Textile Hall for
two months while the new Upper School
building was readied on the Cavalier campus.
In 1972, CCES graduated its first class of
twenty-six students and received official
accreditation from the Southern Association
of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
The Cavalier campus continued to take
shape in 1973 as groundbreaking ceremonies
were held for the auditorium and McCall Field
House, but it would be two decades later, under
Headmaster Emeritus James K. Rumrill, before
the campus would again change, with the 1995
addition of the current Middle School.
In a nod to the growing internationalism of
the Greenville community, Ellen Y. Moceri, the
school’s first female Head of School, initiated the
process of becoming an International
Baccalaureate (IB) World School to enhance the
school’s strong academic credentials. In 1999,
CCES was authorized to offer the IB Diploma
and Middle Years Programs and two years later
received authorization for the IB Primary Years
Program, making CCES the first school in South
Carolina and one of only a handful of
independent schools in North America to offer
the full IB continuum in grades kindergarten
through twelve.
CHRIST CHURCH EPISCOPAL SCHOOL
Under Headmaster Dr. Leland Cox, Jr., a
new three-story Upper School building was
completed in 2002. Later that year the former
Upper School building was renovated for the
Lower School, which moved from its historical
location downtown. Today all grades share the
Cavalier campus, where, in 2005, the Chapel
of the Good Shepherd was dedicated, a
powerful symbol at the center of campus of
the school’s Christian foundations and
enduring commitment to educating students
not only in mind and body, but spirit too.
Christ Church Episcopal School is located
at 245 Cavalier Drive in Greenville and on the
Internet at www.cces.org.
✧
Above: Since its first graduating class in
1972, CCES has held formal commencement
ceremonies at Christ Church Episcopal in
downtown Greenville in recognition of the
link between the church and school. Here,
the Class of 2007 portrait.
Below: One of three frame houses on East
Washington Street, where Christ Church
Episcopal School opened in 1959 for
students in grades primer through six.
Today the school serves more than 1,000
students on its 72-acre Cavalier campus.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
153

✧
Above: Prudential C. Dan Joyner Co. Left
to Right, Danny Joyner, C. Dan Joyner and
David Crigler.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHER ERNEST
RAWLINGS, 2006.
Below: C. Dan Joyner.
PRUDENTIAL C. DAN JOYNER CO.
If reaching $1 billion in residential sales in
one year, or being one of sixty individuals in
the United States to receive the Distinguished
Service Award by the National Association of
REALTORS®, or named to the Prudential
Hall of Fame is any measure of success, then
C. Dan Joyner and the company that bears his
name, have reached that goal.
Attribute much of that success to Joyner’s
bigger-than-life smile, know-everybody-intown
personality, positive attitude, dedication
to business, and the importance he places on
community involvement.
Joyner, a native Greenvillian, served in the
military for three years following graduation
(1959) from Furman University, where he
majored in business administration, minored
in political science, and was president of the
student body. As a young man and, at a time,
father of one, he entered real estate sales in
1962 upon his return from Germany. Recalling
the early days in real estate as “tough,” he felt
he made the right decision. Apparently, he had!
He explains the growth of his business
as three-pronged. Merrill-Lynch bought his
small company in 1985, signing a fiveyear
management contract. In 1990, Prudential
acquired Merrill-Lynch. He and fellow
REALTORS® formed Prudential-Carolinas
Realty, covering both South and North
Carolina. In 1997 he bought out his partners
and assumed 100 percent ownership of
Prudential throughout Upstate South Carolina.
The company that handles commercial as
well as residential sales has continued to
thrive under his leadership and, today,
ranks eighty-seventh out of all Prudential
Companies in the United States. Given the
current interest rates on a thirty-year loan, he
says, “Greenville’s real estate market is as
positive as anyplace in the nation.” Prudential
C. Dan Joyner Co. is positioned to take
advantage of future growth because of the
individuals migrating to the state for the
wealth of high tech, automotive, research,
healthcare and white collar jobs. “Dan” as he
is known to everyone, has seen to that. The
company now features 12 offices, 87
employees and 400 independent agents.
The company’s mission statement is largely
responsible for employee morale and
profitability. “Our mission is to be the highest
quality, most respected, aggressive, innovative
and successful real estate services firm in the
world, while being a genuinely enjoyable place
to work.” To that end, he believes in a team
concept, leadership and provides valuable inservice
training, encouraging everyone to
build market share by focusing on the client.
Because of his own community involvement,
which he believes is vital to any organization,
he advocates the same for his employees. “I tell
them to get involved, volunteer. Give
something back to the community because it
has been so good to you.”
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
154

It is fact: A company’s success depends on
its employees. That’s why FGP International
(Find Great People) believes in introducing
great people to great companies.
“The Greenville-based company with an
additional Columbia office works hard to
exceed clients’ expectations,” says John
Uprichard, president and a co-investor. “We
take the time to get to know a company and
its philosophy before we assist with a
candidate search. As a performance-based
recruitment organization, we are a
stakeholder in our clients’ success.”
Originally known as Phillips International,
the company evolved from executive
placement in the apparel/textile industry to
eventually adding Information Technology as
a niche area in response to industry growth.
In 2002 the company was acquired by Quest
Capital and John Uprichard.
There is no doubt that FGP’s mission is to
find great people to build great companies.
For example, FGP does not operate on a
resume only basis where it sends IT
experienced candidates for an interview. FGP’s
experienced consultants look at specific skills
a client is seeking and screens the candidates
and their resumes until there is a perceived fit.
Only then does the consultant connect the
two in a face-to-face interview.
FGP works on behalf of the career-seeker
as well. Consultants attempt to place
candidates in positions where they will be
successful and happy, in addition to satisfying
their financial needs. With more than 300
field employees in the Upstate and Midlands
regions, FGP works hard to ensure
professional growth through recruiting,
staffing and career counseling. It is heavily
involved in internal recruitment and
succession management. When a company
cites the need to downsize, FGP works in
tandem with exiting individuals by providing
them with the right tools and training to
secure an equally promising position. It also
provides consulting services relating to hiring
and human resources issues.
The FGP staff takes teamwork to heart.
When anyone in the organization enjoys a
success, they all share the triumph. There
are game tables, birthday celebrations, and
family nights out. “We know for a fact
that when employees are happy, they are
more productive,” adds Uprichard. “We
communicate that to our clients, as well.”
Among the company’s philanthropic efforts
is its partnership with Goodwill Industries in
which it solicits donations of quality clothing
for out-of-work job seekers needing to look
their best for interviews. Its recent collection
resulted in 5,520 pounds!
In 2002, when the company FGP was
formed, it had thirteen employees and $1.2M
in revenue. In FY 2006, it had grown to
thirty-six employees and $10.8 million in
gross revenue and is on track to have revenues
greater than $14 million in 2007.
FGP
INTERNATIONAL
SHARING THE HERITAGE
155

GENERAL
WHOLESALE
DISTRIBUTORS,
LLC
✧
Above: (From left to right) Jon McKnight
has been a GWD territory manager in
Greenville for the past thirty-two years.
Vice President of Pricing Sam Williams has
been with GWD for thirty years.
Below: GWD Management Team Photo.
(Pictured left to right) Vice President of
Operations David Walker, CFO Scott
Hocking, Executive Vice President Marty
Harrison, Vice President of Sales Pete
Arsenault, and CEO Tee Hooper.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
156
In the days before there was central
heat and air, people relied on
conventional heating and cooling systems
such as wood stoves, oil heaters, furnaces,
hand-held fans and portable electric
fans—tools of their respective eras.
Over the last fifty years, when air
conditioning was introduced into the
market, General Wholesale Distributors
(GWD) has become the premier source of
HVAC equipment across the state of
South Carolina.
In 1950, Kirby Hammond incorporated
General Wholesale Distributors, Inc. as a
distributor of General Electric heating,
ventilation and air conditioning systems
(HVAC). The distributorship was
purchased two years later by B. K. Bryan
and R. L. Jones, making it the first
independent, full line HVAC Distributor in
the state. Bryan eventually bought out Jones,
and under his leadership, GWD became known
as one of South Carolina’s finest and most
successful companies. In 1985, Trane acquired
General Electric’s manufacturing operations
thereby making GWD an independent Trane
distributor for South Carolina. In 1996, after
forty-six years of owning GWD, Bryan sold the
company to his son; Bill, Jr. Bill successfully
continued the quest to distribute the best HVAC
product available and to build the strongest and
most professional dealer network in the state.
GWD was purchased in January 2006 by
Tee Hooper and Marty Harrison. Business
partners for over twenty-five years, Tee and
Marty worked together to build MOM (Modern
Office Machines), which was headquartered in
Greenville. In 1992, MOM was sold to IKON,
and the duo remained there until 2002. Now
owners of GWD, they are committed to
continuing the Bryans’ philosophy of being the
best distributor of quality HVAC products and
services in South Carolina. With locations in
Columbia, Charleston, and Myrtle Beach, as
well as the Greenville headquarters, GWD
provides dealers and contractors with
convenient access to parts and equipment,
which allows them to service their customers
faster and more efficiently. In 2005, Trane
recognized General Wholesale Distributors as
their top independent distributor in the
United States, and in 2006 the company was
ranked in the “South Carolina Top 100” of
privately-held companies.
The company’s strongest asset is its fiftyfour
employees statewide. Many employees,
as well as the company, are actively involved
in the community by volunteering with local
civic and charitable organizations. General
Wholesale Distributors is proud to call
Greenville “home.”

For many years, Greenville and the Upstate
survived as a sleepy Southern region comprised
of workers with little education and few work
skills except those learned in the mills where
they worked. In the early 1960s, the community
was open to change, as mills closed, and
residents looked for other employment.
The area slowly transformed into one of hightech,
higher education and white-collar jobs,
thereby offering greater career opportunities.
Clemson University began offering some
undergraduate courses on Greenville Tech’s
campus, but it was not until the 1980s that
higher education became a major focus.
Clemson, in collaboration with Tech and the
Greenville Chamber of Commerce, found a
solution that eventually became the force behind
the University Center of Greenville. Clemson
began offering graduate-level courses during
evening hours, drawing many adults back into
the classroom to expand their knowledge, with
sights set on moving up the career ladder.
Because the county did not have a fouryear
public college or university, legislators
and other community leaders saw the need
for greater access, inviting other statesupported
institutions to form a consortium.
A charter was drafted by the South Carolina
Commission on Higher Education and the
Greenville Higher Education Consortium
opened on Tech’s campus in 1987.
In 1989 the name was changed to the
University Center of Greenville. Originally,
there were five member universities, but that
number grew to seven by 1989, including
Clemson University, Furman University,
Lander University, the Medical University of
South Carolina, South Carolina State
University, the University of South Carolina,
and the University of South Carolina Upstate.
Rapid growth demonstrated the need for a
larger facility, and in 1989 Tech assisted the
new organization in renovating and equipping
a vacant building adjacent to its campus at a
cost of $3.5 million.
In 1995, the University Center leased a
renovated building donated to Greenville Tech
by T. Walter Brashier. Again, it outgrew its
quarters, and in 2001, moved into the former
Dillards’ 124,000-square-foot building in
McAlister Square Mall. Based on current growth
UNIVERSITY CENTER OF GREENVILLE
projections, the University Center will need
more space within the next three to five years.
According to Fred Baus, the University
Center’s president, “virtually all sectors of
South Carolina public and private higher
education are reflected in its member
institutions. Students no longer have to drive
great distances for many baccalaureate and
graduate courses. We offer day and evening
courses, distance learning opportunities, and
offer more than 600 course sections,
representing twenty-six undergraduate and
thirty-nine graduate programs, including the
doctorate. Enrollment has grown fifty-five
percent in just six years.
“Without a doubt, we have responded to the
need; and, with our twenty year anniversary on
the horizon, the best is yet to come,” he adds.
✧
Above: This group represents the seven
University Center member institutions.
Below: The University Center is a fullservice
campus, offering a library with work
stations and study rooms to all students.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
157

SUPER DUPER ®
PUBLICATIONS
When Thomas and Sharon Webber sat in
their Don Drive living room some twenty-one
years ago filling their first orders for
educational workbooks and stickers, they did
not imagine that their future included
building a 144,000 square foot “castle” on
Pelham Road, holding meetings in their King
Tut conference room, decorating twenty-two
“theme” bathrooms (Moose Lodge, Hippie
Heaven...), employing 115 local residents,
having $28 million in annual sales, or
enjoying the challenges of raising six children.
Back in 1985, Sharon was a speechlanguage
pathologist teaching at a local
school, and Thomas operated his law practice
in downtown Greenville on Boyce Avenue.
The couple had met five years earlier in
Columbia, South Carolina while Sharon was
finishing up her USC Masters degree and
Thomas (a JL Mann graduate) completed law
school. Now, about to have their first child,
the couple decided to venture into the world
of educational mail order publishing.
Sharon pulled out her boxes of “doodles”
from her college and teaching days and went
to work. Armed only with boundless
enthusiasm, her drawing pen, and her line
tape, Sharon created two books for speech
therapists and two “reward stickers” for
speech students. The Webbers then took all of
their savings, bought a mailing list, printed an
ad brochure, mailed it, and waited.
The rest is history. The part-time company
was a hit! With its expanding line of unique
board games, Fun Deck® cards, workbooks,
magnetic manipulatives, CD-ROMs, and
assessments, Super Duper © Publications
brought fun, color, and excitement to the
speech-pathology world. Along the way, the
Webbers were also blessed with six
miracles—Abby, Abe, Samantha, Gabe,
Maddy, and Nate. By 1997, Thomas had
decided it was time to run Super Duper full
time with Sharon.
The next year the couple built the 60,000
square feet Webber Place on Pelham Road and
in 2004 completed its neighbor, The Castle.
(Why a castle? Thomas used to tease Sharon
at work by calling her “the Queen.”) This is
probably the only workplace in the world
where employees get personalized medieval
parking spots like Royal Highness Mr. Webber
(Thomas’ dad), Archduke Mark, and Princess
Molly; enjoy lunch in a 1950s style café; relax
on a sofa massage in the Fun Room; or have
“Fluffy Slipper Fridays.”
Today, Super Duper ® has almost 1,000
special needs products found everywhere
from Japan to England and Australia to Brazil.
This contribution to Greenville lore is the
result of the courage to take a chance and
hard work to make it work by two local
dreamers—President Sharon and Chairman-
CEO Thomas Webber.
✧
President Sharon and Chairman and CEO
Thomas Webber.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
158

“When one door closes, another opens,” so
the saying goes. Such is the case of University
of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate).
It was the closing of Spartanburg General
Hospital’s diploma program for nurses
in the 1960s that prompted Dr. G. B. Hodge
and fellow members of the Spartanburg
County Commission for Higher Education
to develop an alternative to prevent
a potential shortage of nurses. Their
foresight eventually paved the way for
USC Spartanburg that eventually became
USC Upstate.
A citizen’s committee investigated
the situation and sought inclusion in the
University of South Carolina System. The
regional campus in Spartanburg opened in the
fall of 1967 with 177 students on the first
floor at Spartanburg General Hospital’s
nursing residence.
The effort proved to be one with merit. The
institution grew quickly, adding baccalaureate
degree programs in several disciplines,
including nursing, within four years of its
opening. Under the leadership of Dr. Olin
Sansbury, USC Spartanburg, as it was then
know, grew to include the College of Arts and
Sciences, and the Schools of Business,
Education, and Nursing.
In 1994, Dr. John C. Stockwell was
named chancellor. He led the adoption of
the “metropolitan mission” for the institution
and implemented a ten-year strategic plan
to establish additional degree programs,
further develop the main campus in
Spartanburg, broaden academic offerings at
the University Center of Greenville, and
significantly expand the size of the
University’s faculty and student body. His
plans have been realized. The University is
one of the fastest growing in the state with
enrollment nearing 5,000 students. The
campus master plan is well underway. And
over seventy percent of the students enrolled
as undergraduates at the University Center of
Greenville are majoring in USC Upstate
degree programs.
Now in its fortieth year, USC Upstate
continues to expand its curriculum and
campus. It is increasingly identified as
one of the Southeast’s leading urban
universities, recognized for its positive
relationship with surrounding cities,
connecting corridors, and their exploding
populations. It aims to be recognized
nationally among peer institutions for
excellence in education and commitment
to students, its involvement in the
Upstate area, operational and managerial
effectiveness, civility and common purpose,
and the clarity and integrity of its mission. In
so doing, its primary responsibilities are to
offer baccalaureate education to the citizens of
the Upstate, as well as selected master’s
degrees in response to regional demand.
Since those early days when the University
was dedicated primarily to nursing, it has
grown from a small, two-year campus to a
robust four-year regional university with
high academic standards, very competitive
admissions standards, and a rich array of
baccalaureate degree programs. In 1995, USC
Upstate offered its first graduate programs in
elementary and early childhood education,
and has recently added other graduate
offerings. Three years later, the Metropolitan
Studies Institute was founded to coordinate
outreach initiatives between USC Upstate and
the Upstate region it serves.
Athletics has a strong tradition at USC
Upstate, including a national men’s basketball
championship in 1978, as a member of the
NAIA. In years since, the University has
competed in the NCAA Division II with a
history of national rankings in most sports;
and, with the beginning of the 2007-08
academic year, the University moves to
Division I in all sports.
Seventy-one nations are represented
among the student body, reflecting the
Upstate’s international character and the
University’s dedication to diversity, a
dedication further reflected by its minority
enrollment, which exceeds thirty percent.
USC Upstate serves one of the fastest
growing regions in the nation, along the
I-85 corridor connecting Spartanburg and
Greenville to Charlotte, North Carolina and
Atlanta, Georgia, home to one million people
and boasting the highest per capita
international investment of any corridor in
the nation.
UNIVERSITY OF
SOUTH
CAROLINA
UPSTATE
SHARING THE HERITAGE
159

BOWATER
INCORPORATED
✧
Above: Bowater is proud to be an industry
leader in their commitment to sustainable
forest management.
Below: Bowater’s Catawba Operation is
located near Rock Hill, South Carolina and
is home to one of the largest coated
mechanical paper machines in the world.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
160
Chances are—when you read
your morning newspaper, weekly
news magazine, the most recent
installment in your favorite novel
series or a mail-order catalog—the
paper used to print it was produced
by Bowater Incorporated.
Bowater’s history spans more
than 100 years of operations around
the world. It was W. V. Bowater who,
in 1881, founded a paper merchant
business in London. In just over a
century, Bowater evolved into an
international publicly traded company and a
leader in the forest products industry.
In 1984, Bowater North America
Corporation became Bowater Incorporated,
headquartered in Darien, Connecticut. In
1992 the headquarters moved to downtown
Greenville, South Carolina.
In 1998, Bowater grew with the acquisition
of Avenor Inc, headquartered in Montreal,
Quebec. The acquisition added four paper
mills and one sawmill to Bowater’s operations.
Later in the year, Bowater also acquired a 100
percent recycled content mill in Mokpo,
South Korea.
In 2001, Bowater continued its growth by
acquiring Alliance Forest Products,
headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, adding
three paper mills and ten sawmills in Canada,
and one paper mill in the U.S.
Bowater has always believed that
environmental stewardship is an ethical
obligation as well as a business imperative. In
2005, Bowater signed a Memorandum of
Understanding between the Natural
Resources Defense Council and the Dogwood
Alliance. The accord enhances the protection
of the forests of the Cumberland Plateau and
other parts of the Southeastern United States,
and it promotes a strong, sustainable forest
products economy for generations to come. In
addition to this protection effort, Bowater has
set aside forestland for conservation on its
property and through donations in Canada
and the United States. At its operations, the
company strives to minimize environmental
impacts through environmental management
plans independently certified to international
recognized standards.
In 2006, David J. Paterson joined Bowater
as Chairman, President and Chief Executive
Officer. Today, the company sells coated
and specialty papers, newsprint, bleached
market pulp and lumber products, with
twelve pulp and paper mills in the United
States, Canada and South Korea. In North
America, it also operates a converting facility
and eight sawmills. The company’s six
recycling plants make Bowater one of the
world’s largest recyclers of newspapers and
magazines. The business is supported by
timberlands owned or leased in the U.S. and
Canada, and 28 million acres of timber
cutting rights in Canada.
On January 29, 2007, the company
announced another major step in its
evolution. Bowater proposes to combine with
Abitibi-Consolidated, a leader in newsprint,
commercial printing papers and wood
products, to form AbitibiBowater.

In 1921 several citizens, including Thomas
Parker and J.W. Norwood, realized the need
for a free public library and established the
Greenville Public Library Association. The
first library opened in a store building on East
Coffee Street. Soon after, the library placed a
collection of new books at the Phillis
Wheatley Building to serve Greenville’s
African-American citizens.
Because the library was intended to serve
all people regardless of race or residence, the
first mobile library began visiting rural
schools and mill villages in 1923. Privately
financed at first, it was taken on by the county
four years later. The city and county
departments operated under a single board
and director, but the county contracted with
the city for some services. Branch libraries in
Greer, Fountain Inn, Simpsonville, and
Tigerville opened in 1926. During the 1930s
the stately Park School was purchased for a
main library. The McBee Avenue Branch
replaced the Phillis Wheatley Branch in 1952.
Big changes soon followed. In 1960 the
Friends of the Library was organized to assist
in library improvement efforts with Greenville
businessman and philanthropist Arthur
Magill as president. (He and his wife later
donated a large rotating geophysical globe,
which remains one of the main library’s most
visited attractions.) In 1961 the state
legislature formed a consolidated Greenville
County Library and approved a 2.25 mill tax
levy countywide, which allowed expanded
services. New branches in Travelers Rest
and Mauldin opened. The McBee Avenue
Branch closed in 1965 after the County
Library was fully integrated.
Between 1965 and 1968 the Symmes
Foundation gave $600,000 to the library—
the largest private donation ever made to a
Greenville County institution at the time. The
donation was combined with local, state, and
federal funds to purchase land and construct
a new main library, which opened in 1970.
Over the next several years, five additional
branches were established in Berea, Taylors,
Augusta Road, and East and West Greenville.
In the early 1980s, the library system
began automating its services and today is
considered a technological leader among
GREENVILLE COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM
public libraries in the state. County Council
approved a program in 1993 to replace nine
branches and the main library and build a
future branch. The new Hughes Main Library
adorned Heritage Green by 2002, and the last
of the replacement branches opened in 2005.
Today, more than half of Greenville
County’s residents borrow over three million
items annually from eleven modern library
facilities and the bookmobile, which receive
more than 1.7 million visits each year. Library
services include free Internet access, online
databases, genealogical resources, public
meeting spaces, wireless access, books, music,
videos, and programs for all ages.
✧
Above: The Greenville Public Library began
service to rural schools and mill villages
with a bookmobile in 1923. The first
bookmobile, called the Pathfinder, is shown
at the Monaghan Mill stop in 1928.
Below: The Hughes Main Library on
Heritage Green is an award-winning
public library. It is the second largest in
the state and offers an inviting facility
for reading, taking advantage of the latest
technology, performing research, and
exploring your world.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
161

PENDLETON
STREET
BAPTIST
CHURCH
✧
Top: The first church building, 1890.
Middle: The corner of Pendleton Street and
Perry Avenue, 1940.
Bottom: The Pendleton Street Baptist
Church today.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF HUGH CURETON.
Life was simple, bridges were nil and paved
streets were only a vision of the future—at least,
in Greenville in 1889. Settlers were migrating to
the area, and business was beginning to
develop, however, the number of churches in
“downtown” could be counted on one hand.
Pendleton Street Baptist Church (PSBC)
was the outgrowth of the burgeoning
population on the west side of the Reedy
River, the stream flowing through the village
that was once marked only by Indian trading
posts and a grist mill.
There was no bridge connecting West
Greenville to downtown, so residents forded
the river to attend worship services at
Greenville’s First Baptist Church on West
McBee Street. It was evident that those on the
Westside needed their own church.
On March 3 of that year, parishioners from
First Baptist decided to meet upstairs over
Gibbs Grocery Story on Pendleton Street to
form a mission Sunday school.
The mission grew quickly, and on March 30,
1890, ninety-seven individuals established West
End Baptist Church, the forerunner to Pendleton
Street Baptist. Dr. J. C. Furman preached the first
sermon, taken from Psalms 84:1; “How amiable
are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts.” The charter
members stood to affirm their acceptance of
doctrine and belief after the service.
The original sanctuary was demolished in
1972, and the Rivers Building (gymnasium)
was built. Over the years, the church
purchased additional property and now
covers the entire block except for the corner
lot at Markley and South Main, which is
occupied by St. Andrew Episcopal Church.
(The City of Greenville recently changed the
entire block to South Main Street, making the
church’s address 1100 South Main Street.)
During its 115-year history, Pendleton
Street Baptist Church has called fourteen
pastors and four supply or “interim” pastors.
Since 1914, B. D. Hahn, began his ministry at
PSBC, J. Dean Crain followed in 1931, D. M.
Rivers in 1952, R. W. (Jack) Causey in 1974,
W. R. (Bill) West in 1988, Larry E. Jones in
1997 and T. M. (Marty) Price in 2002.
From those first ninety-seven members in
1890 until today, Pendleton Street Baptist
Church members have sought diligently to
know and follow God’s will. PSBC is a family
of faith with a rich heritage steeped in the love
of God, who is passionate about helping
people exchange ordinary lives for
“extraordinary” living in Jesus today.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
162

INDEX
A
Abbeville, 11, 34
Abolitionists, 29, 31
Academy Spring, 35
Adams, John, 25
African Americans, 45-46 (see also freedmen),
56, 61-62, 69, 73-74
Airlift, 71
Airline Railroad (Charlotte and Atlanta
Airline RR), 37, 44, 51 (see also
Southern Railroad)
Alexander, Thomas, 14
Allen, James B., 35-36
Allen Temple AME Church, 36
Alston, Joseph, 14
Alston, Theodosia Burr, 14
Alston, Lemuel, 13-15
Alta Vista, 59
Amalgamated Textile Union (ACTWU), 81
American Bank, 43
American Revolution, 7-9
American Spinning Co., 39
Anderson, (S. C,) 25, 29, 34, 52
Ansel, Martin, 85
Appalache Mill, 51
Archer, John, 14
Armistice, 59
Armory (State Military Works), 33
Arnold, Shubal, 25
Arrington, John, 40
Arrington, Richard, 59
Asbury, Francis, 13
Augusta Road, 25, 37, 39, 43, 53, 69
Austin (family), 6
Avenue Street (McBee Avenue), 14, 36
B
BMW, 81, 84
Bank of Commerce, 63-64, 79
Baptists, 27, 29
Barr, George, 63
Barton, Thomas, 75
Bates, William, 25
Batesville Mill, 25, 39
Battle of the Great Canebrake, 8
Beacham & LeGrand, 62
Beattie, Hamlin, 34, 37
Beaverdam Creek, 25
Bell Tower Mall, 76
Bergamo, Italy, 81
Berry’s Mill, 25
Best Friend of Charleston, 25
Bi-Lo Center, 80
Birnie Street, 39
Blackman, John, 14
Blanding, Abram, 17
Board of Trade, 46
Bob Jones University, 70-72, 83-84
Bookends, 80-81
Bookmobile, 62
Boundaries, 5, 7-8, 35, 69
Boy Scouts, 40, 66, 72
Boyce, James, 28, 33, 44,
Boyce Lawn, 33
Brandon Mill, 39-40, 50, 59, 64, 66, 81
Brandon, Thomas, 11, 13
Broad Street, 39
Broadus, John, 28
Brooks Calvary, 33
Brooks, Preston, 30
Brutontown, 45
Bucknertown, 45
Buist, Edward, 33
Buncombe Road, 12, 14, 39, 41, 45
Burgiss, Walter I., 63
Butler, Andrew, 30
Butler, Emmalia, 30
Butler Guards, 33
Butler, Harriet, 30
Butler, Jane P., 20
Butler, Mathew, 30
Butler, William, 30
Bulter’s Crossroads, 51
Byrum, Turner, 22
C
Calhoun, John C., 5, 11, 21, 25
Camp Sevier, 56-57, 59
Camp Wetherill, 44-45
Campbell, Carroll, 85
Campbell, Walter H., 29-31
Camperdown Bridge, 86
Camperdown Mill, 33, 37, 39, 69, 75
Capers, A. J., 49
Carolina First Bank, 79
Carolina Foothills Garden Club, 77
Carolina-Georgia Blood Center, 83
Carolina Mill (see Poinsett Mill), 39, 50
Carolina Power Company, 45
Carolina Supply Co., 54
Carolina Theatre, 67
Carruth, Adam, 15, 20
Catawba Indians, 5
Cauble Building, 64
Cauble, Peter, 18, 34
Cedar Lane Road, 63
Cedar Mountain, 5, 59
Central School, 56
Centre Stage, 84
Chamber of Commerce, 46, 59, 62-63, 65,
79, 81, 86
Chautauqua, 84
Cherokees, 5-8, 11
Cherrydale (Green Farm), 33-35
Christ Church, 20, 22-23, 29, 44
Chick, Burwell, 52, 54
Chick Springs, 5, 51-52, 54
Chicola Mills, 67
Chicora College, 43-44
Children’s Theater, 84
Cigar Factory, 65, 80
City Hall, 66, 77, 79
City Park, 49
Civil Rights, 73-74
Civil War, 33-34
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 65-66
Clemson College, 59; Clemson University,
81, 84
Cleveland, Jeremiah, 15, 18, 20
Cleveland Hall, 56
Cleveland Park, 33, 50, 66, 73
Cleveland, W. C., 62
Coach factory, 7, 25, 34, 43, 53, 59, 77,
80, 86 (See also, Gower & Cox)
Code, Merl, 86
Colonial Pipeline, 86
Conestee, 15, 25, 27, 69, 86
Confederate Memorial, 40, 59
Confederate Museum, 84
Constitutional Convention, 35
Cooke, Wilson, 35
Corbett Sanitarium, 49
Cotton, 36
County Dispensary, 39
County Home, 49
Courthouse, 17, 51, 80
Cowpens, 9
Cox, Thomas, 25
Crescent Avenue, 34
Crittenden, S. S., 21
Croft, Edward, 20
Cultural Exchange Center, 84
Cunningham, “Bloody Bill,”9
Cunningham, Patrick, 8
D
Daniel, Charles, 73-74, 76-77
Daniel Construction Company, 69, 79
Dark Corner, 33, 52
Davis, Jefferson, 34
DeBow’s Review, 25
DeForest, John W., 36
Depot Green, 29, 33, 36
Derring-Milliken, 69
Design Strategies, 80
INDEX
163

DeWitt’s Corners, 5, 8
Dickerson, Rudolphus, 20
Dill (family), 6
Donaldson Air Base, 69, 72
Donaldson, T. Q., 35
Donaldson Center, 76
Downtown Baptist Church (see also First
Baptist Church) 80-81
Downtowner Motel, 76
D’Oyley, Charles, 22
Duckett, Hattie L., 61
Duke, Eugenia, 56, 59
Duke, James B., 40, 45, 52, 63
Duke’s Mayonnaise, 59, 77, 80
Dunbar Farm, 44
Duncan Chapel, 59
Duncan, Perry, 31
Duncan, Mrs. Perry, 34-35
Dunean Mill, 50, 59, 67, 69, 81
E
Earle, Baylis, 6, 20
Earle, Elias, 12-15
Earle Street, 44-45
Earle, Willie, 72-73
Easley, William King, 31
Edgar, Walter, 74
Edgefield, 11, 22, 27
Enoree River, 5, 8, 11, 13, 17, 25
Estridge, Larry, 86
F
Fairview Presbyterian Church, 12-13
Fall for Greenville, 80
Falls Park, 86
Fire companies, 43
First National Bank, 79
First Presbyterian Church, 81
Fleming, George, 20
Fletcher, George, 86
Ford, John, 12, 13
Ford cars, 54-55
Fork Shoals, 25
Fountain Inn, 51-52, 61, 74
Fountain Inn Mill, 52
Fountain Inn Tribune, 52
Franklin Process, 59
Freedmen, 35-36
Freeman, David, 80
Freetown, 45
Furman Academy and Theological
Institution, 22
Furman, Alester, 44-46, 49,
Furman, Alester, Jr., 69, 74, 79
Furman, James C., 27-29, 31, 33-35
Furman, Richard, 27 (Hall), 28
Furman University, 27, 29, 33, 35-37, 51, 55,
57, 59, 63, 65, 69-72, 76-77, 82-83, 85
Furman University Rifles, 31
G
Gassaway Mansion, 77
Gassaway, Walter, 59, 64
Geer, Bennette, 50
General Electric Co., 75-76
General Textile Strike, 66
Glassy Mountain, 61
Glider base, 69
Golden Grove, 12
Goldsmith Company, 44
Goodlett Hotel, 29-30, 34-35, 63
Gower & Cox Coach Factory, 25, 27, 34
Gower, Ebenezer, 25
Gower, Thomas, 25, 34, 37, 43
Grady, Henry, 39, 45
Great Depression, 64-67
Great Plains Plantation, 7
Green, Isaac, 11
Greene, Nathanael, 9, 11
Greenville, name, 11; population, 12, 15,
35, 37, 82
Greenville Academies, 18-19, 21, 29-30,
33, 35
Greenville Army Air Base, 69, 71 (see also
Donaldson Air Base)
Greenville Art League, 67
Greenville Art Museum, 77
Greenville Artists Guild, 67
Greenville Baptist Church, 20, 36
Greenville Baptist Female College, 29-30,
33, 35, 54 (see also Greenville Woman’s
College)
Greenville Boy’s Choir, 67
Greenville County Redevelopment
Authority, 81
Greenville Drive, 87
Greenville Central Area Partnership, 80, 86
Greenville Chorale, 84
Greenville High School, 56, 66
Greenville Hospital, 49, 76, 82-83
Greenville Humane Society, 54
Greenville Ladies Association, 33
Greenville & Laurens Railroad, 51
Greenville Mall, 85
Greenville Methodist Church, 20-21
Greenville Mountaineer, 22, 31, 33
Greenville National Bank, 37, 63 (see also
First National Bank)
Greenville News, 54, 80
Greenville Public Library System, 60-61,
64, 77, 82
Greenville Presbyterian Church, 33
Greenville Republican, 21
Greenville-Spartanburg Jetport, 74-75
Greenville Symphony Orchestra, 67, 83-84
Greenville Technical College, 75, 83
Greenville University Center, 83
Greenville Woman’s College, 55-57, 60,
67, 77
Greenville & Columbia Railroad, 25, 27, 29,
34, 54; Columbia & Greenville RR, 37
Gridley, Mrs. Mary, 49
Grist mills, 7, 8, 14, 17
Greer, (S C.), 51-53, 55, 81-85
Gunter, Dorothy Hipp, 80
H
Hall, George, 37
Halprin, Lawrence, 79
Hamburg, 25
Hammett, Henry, 37
Hammond, Dempsy, 86
Hampton Avenue, 44
Hampton-Pinckney, 45
Hampton, Wade, 37
Harper’s Ferry, 30
Harrill, Ernest, 74
Harrison, James, 12-13, 31
Haynsworth, Mrs. Harry, 49
Haywood Mall, 85
Heller, Max, 79-80
Heritage Green, 84
Hipp, Francis, 74
Hitachi, 81
Hite, Jacob, 6, 8
Hooker, Edward, 15
Hollings, Fritz, 74
Hollingsworth, J. D., 80, 84
Hollis, Lawrence Peter, 40, 59
Hopewell Tuberculosis Hospital, 49, 52
Hopkins, Charles, 36
Huff, A. V., 12, 25, 33
Huguenot Mill, 39-40, 80
Hyatt Regency, 79, 80
I
ICAR, 82, 84
Ideal Laundry, 72, 74
Imperial Hotel, (The Summit) 49, 81
Isaqueena, 59
Iselin, William & Co., 64
J
Jackson, Jesse, 73, 85
Jackson, “Shoeless” Joe, 39-41
Jail, 49 (see also Old Siberia)
Jim Crow Laws, 45, 73
Johnson, William B., 18-20, 22
John Wesley Methodist Church, 36 (see
also Silver Hill Methodist Chuch)
Jolley, Robert, 74
Jones & Lee, 28
Jubilee Baptist Church, 36
Judson, Charles, 28, 33, 51
Judson, Mary Camilla, 54, 56
Judson Mill, 51, 59, 64, 69, 81
Junior Charity League, 69
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
164

K
Kelsey, Harlan (Kelsey & Guild), 47, 49
Kent Place, 80
Keowee, 5,7
King’s Mountain, 9
L
Land grants, 11
Langston, Dicey, 9
Lanneau, Charles, 39
Laurens (S.C.), 25
Leadership Greenville, 86
Lee, Robert E., 34
Lester’s Factory, 25
Liberty Bridge, 86
Liberty Life Insurance Co., 62, 65
Lickville, 5
Lincoln, Abraham, 30
Little Theatre, 67, 77
Lockwood, Greene & Co., 39
Loggins, William, 71
Loyalists (Tories), 7-9
Lusby, Lennie, 67
M
McAlister Square, 76, 83
McBee, Alexander, 43
McBee, Frank, 44
McBee, Luther Kirk, 61
McBee, Pinkney, 25, 30, 44
McBee, Vardry, 15, 17-18, 20-21, 25, 27,
29, 35, 43-44, 69
McBee’s Chapel, 27
McDaniel Avenue, 59
McBee’s Hall, 17
McBeth, Alexander, 12-13
McBeth, John, 14
McDaniel Avenue, 27
McCool’s Cotton Factory, 25
McLane, Robert, 77
McLeod, Francis, 18, 22
Mackey, George, 67
Main Street, 29, 31, 41-42, 46, 49, 59, 62,
69, 79-80
Main Street Bridge, 43, 53
Manly, Basil, 28
Mann, J. L., 56
Mansion House, 17-18, 22, 30, 46, 49, 62
Markley, H. C., 25
Martin, Judge Robert, 74
Mattoon Presbyterian Church, 36
Mauldin (S.C.), 51-52, 74, 82
Maxwell, Robert, 12
Mayre, Thornton, 49
Memorial Auditorium, 71, 80
Mickel, Buck, 79
Milliken, Roger, 74
Mills Mill, 39, 64, 81-82
Mills, O. P. 39
Mills, Robert, 11, 17, 25, 27, 29
Minter Homes, 59
Minute Men, 31
Mitsubishi, 81
Monaghan Mill, 39-40, 42, 46, 51, 66, 81
Montague, A. P., 55
Moore, Walter, 39
Mosteller’s Mill, 14
Municipal Airport, 63-64, 69, 73-74
Municipal League, 47, 49
N
Neblett, Viola, 46
Newberry, 25
Nicholtown, 45
Ninety Six District, 7, 9, 11-12
North Greenville High School, 52
North Greenville College, 83
Norwood, John W., 60-61
Nullifiers, 22
O
Ocean Forest Hotel, 64
Old College, 27-28
Old Hickory Division, 56
Old Siberia, 46, 49
Opera House, 49
Ottaray Hotel, 49, 51, 69, 76
P
Palmetto Exposition Center, 76 (see also
Textile Hall)
Panic of 1907, 49
Paris (S.C.), 52
Paris Mountain, 9, 56
Paris Mountain State Park, 65-66
Paris Mountain Water Company, 57
Parker Cotton Co., 51-52
Parker High School, 60-61
Parker, Lewis, 40, 46, 51
Parker School District, 59, 61, 71
Parker, Thomas, 40, 45, 47, 59, 61
Patriots, 7-9, 11
Peabody Fund, 35
Peace, B. H. 54
Peace Center for the Performing Arts, 79-
80, 84
Peace, Roger, 74, 77
Pearis, Richard, 5-9, 11, 14
Pearl of the Piedmont, 46
Pelham Mill, 25, 39
Pendleton Street Baptist Church, 43
Perry, Benjamin F., 19, 21, 23, 29-31, 33,
35, 47, 85
Perry, James (Miss Jim), 54
Pettigru, James, 31
Phillis Wheatley Center, 61, 65
Pickens County, 73
Piedmont Mill, 37, 39, 41, 59, 81
Piedmont Plush, 59
Pleasantburg, 13-14
Poe, Francis, 39
Poe Manufacturing Co., 39-40, 64, 71, 81
Poinsett, Joel, 17, 19-20
Poinsett Highway, 27, 70
Poinsett Hotel, 69, 80
Poole, Gabriel, 36
Poplars, The, 12
Porter, Annie, 60
Poteet, Edwin M., 55
Prospect Hill, 14, 21, 44
Q
Quillen, Robert, 52
R
Ramsay, David, 55
Reconstruction, 24-27, 44
Record Building, 17, 21, 29, 46, 49, 62
Red Cross, 70
Reeds, 6
Reedy Fork Church, 13
Reedy River, 5-8, 11, 13-15, 17, 23, 25, 27,
29, 33, 37, 39-40, 44, 49, 53, 62, 66, 69,
77, 86-87
Reedy River Church, 13
Reedy River Factory, 25
Renfrew Bleachery, 52, 59
Refugees, 33
Rhode Island, 25
Richardson, James, 11, 14, 18, 44
Riley, Richard, 85
River Falls, 49
RiverPlace, 79, 86-87
Robinson, W. B., 35
Rocky Creek, 25
Rosemund, Jim, 36
Rowland, Emily, 20
Runion, J. M., 35
Ryobi, 81
S
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 43
St. Francis Hospital, 83
St. James Mission, 20 (see also Christ Church)
St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 37, 57
St. Paul’s Methodist Church, 45
Saluda Gap, 11
Saluda Lake Dam, 45, 52
Saluda River, 5-6, 25
Salvation Army, 65
Sampson, Oscar, 37, 39
Sans Souci, 47, 52
Schools, 18, 35, 36, 56, 59, 65, 71, 83
Secession, 29-31
Second Presbyterian Church, 43
Seidenberg Cigar Manufacturing Co., 46-
47 (see also cigar factory)
INDEX
165

Selvy, Frank, 70, 73
Shaw, Minor M., 86
Sherman, Gen. William, 34
Shi, David, 83, 86
Shives, Courtney, 79, 80
Shriners’ Hospital, 63, 83
Silver Hill Methodist Church, 45
Simpsonville, 51, 52, 74, 82
Simpsonville Manufacturing Co., 52, 81
Sirrine, Joseph E., 39, 46, 56, 62
Sirrine Stadium, 66
Sister Cities, 81
Slater Mill, 59-60, 69, 81
Slaves, 7, 12-13, 33
Slavery, 28-30, 35
Smiley, A. S. , 11
Smith, Roy McBee, 25
Smith, Vern, 85
Smyth, Ellison, 50
Snow Campaign, 8
Soby’s Restaurant, 79
South Carolina Baptist Convention, 27-28, 83
South Carolina Governor’s School for the
Arts, 84
South Financial Group, 82
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 28,
33, 44
Southern Bleachery, 52, 81
Southern Patriot, 29
Southern Railroad, 39, 53
Southern Sentinel, 22
Southern Textile Basketball League, 57, 59
Southern Textile Exposition, 56
Southern Utilities Co. (Duke Power), 52
Southern Worsted, 59
Spanish-American War, 44
Spanish flu, 57
Spartanburg (County), 9, 11, 15, 52, 81
Springfield Baptist Church, 36
Springwood Cemetery, 23, 31, 34, 59
Sterling Industrial College (later Sterling
High School), 45, 62
Stevens, J. P. & Co., 69, 81
Stevens, Robert, 69
Stretch-out, 64
Strikes, 64
Stone Avenue, 45
Stone estate, 44
Sumner, Sen. Charles, 30
Swamp Rabbit Railroad (Greenville &
Knoxville RR), 52
T
TNS Mills, 81
Talley, Dudley, 36
Tanglewood, 17
Taylor, Alfred, 52
Taylor, John 14
Taylors (S.C.), 52
Tchivzhel, Edward, 84
Textile Crescent, 39
Textile Hall, 56-57, 59, 71, 75, 81
Textile workers, 41, 42, 59
Thomas, Jane, 9
Thomas, John, 8, 9
Thompson, Waddy, 30
Thurston, Lee, 31
Thurston, Richard, 20
Tigerville, 52
Timmons, William 59
Townes, Charles H., 73
Townes, Alexander, 37
Toy, Hayden, 28, 44
Travelers Rest, 52, 84
Trolley service, 39, 52
Turpin, Maria, 20
U
Uldrick, Virginia, 84
Union Bleaching & Finishing Co.,
(Bleachery), 39-40
Unionists, 22, 25, 29, 30
Upcountry History Museum, 84
Upstate Forever, 86
Verdae, 82
V
Victor Mill, 51
Victor-Monaghan Co., 52, 59-60, 69
Vision 2025, 86
N
WFBC, 67, WFBC-TV, 74
Waddell, Edmund, 17
Wade Hampton Boulevard, 44, 69, 85
Walker, Fred, 80
Walker, Tandy, 18
Warehouse Theatre, 84
Washington (District), 12
Washington Street, 29, 44
Water system, 46, 57, 63
Watts, Alexander, 6
West End, 43, 45, 54, 69, 77, 84, 86-87
Westervelt, J. I., 39, 50
Westfield, John, 44
White, Knox, 86
Whitehall, 44
Whitsett, William, 28, 44
Whittle, Mack, 79, 86
Wickliffe, Isaac, 14
Wilkins, David, 85, 86
Williams, J. T., 44
Williams, Walter, 28, 44
Winnsboro (S.C.), 27-28
Wittenburg, A. J., 74
Wood, John, 14
Woodside, Edgar F., 52
Woodside, John T., 62, 64
Woodside Mill, 39-40, 50, 59, 64, 66, 81
Woodside National Bank, 62
Woodward, Joanne, 77
Working Benevolent Temple, 61
Workman, W. D., 86
World War I, 56
World War II, 69
Wyche, Bradford, 86
Wyche, Tommy, 79, 86
Y
YMCA, 40, 42, 46, 49-50, 53, 82
YWCA, 49-50
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
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American Services, Inc. .....................................................................................................................................................................120
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Bob Jones University .........................................................................................................................................................................124
Bon Secours St. Francis Health System..............................................................................................................................................152
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Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce ........................................................................................................................................148
Greenville County Library System .....................................................................................................................................................161
Greenville County Schools ................................................................................................................................................................106
Greenville Heritage Federal Credit Union..........................................................................................................................................137
Greenville Symphony Orchestra ........................................................................................................................................................105
Greenville Technical College .............................................................................................................................................................135
Hubbell Lighting, Inc........................................................................................................................................................................112
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KEMET Corporation .........................................................................................................................................................................130
llyn strong fine jewelry......................................................................................................................................................................126
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Long Trailer and Body Service...........................................................................................................................................................146
O’Neal, Inc........................................................................................................................................................................................141
Pendleton Street Baptist Church........................................................................................................................................................162
Printmasters Professional Printers, Inc...............................................................................................................................................143
Prudential C. Dan Joyner Co.............................................................................................................................................................154
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Super Duper® Publications...............................................................................................................................................................158
Sweetgrass Connections ....................................................................................................................................................................145
Thornblade Park .................................................................................................................................................................................90
University Center of Greenville .........................................................................................................................................................157
University of South Carolina Upstate.................................................................................................................................................159
Village at Pelham...............................................................................................................................................................................122
The Woodlands at Furman................................................................................................................................................................149
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J UDITH
B AINBRIDGE
Judith Bainbridge retired in 2007 from Furman University as professor of English Emerita. A Greenville resident since
1976, she is a native of New Jersey. She graduated from Mary Washington College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
in English from the University of Iowa. A historic preservationist who has extensively researched local history, Judy is
the author of books on the West End, the Greenville Women’s College, and Greenville’s Heritage, a collection of her
articles on the county’s history that she has written for the City People section of the Greenville News since 1999.
ABOUT THE COVER
B ETTY
B ROWN
Betty (Bell) Brown, a native of Greenville, began studying painting and drawing in 1975. Although Betty has lived in Wilmington,
North Carolina, since 1965, her roots and those of her ancestors grow deeply into Greenville, SC, soil. She studied with many
nationally recognized teachers and holds degrees from Queens College in Charlotte, NC, and the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington where she graduated with Honors in Art. She currently lives in Wilmington.
The cover painting, Main Street in the ’30s, is from the collection of Professional Mortgage Company, Greenville, South Carolina.
HISTORIC GREENVILLE
168

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ISBN: 9781893619852