By Russell Stall
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
By the time Greenville began to take shape as a place on the map, the most violent part of its story had already happened.
One of the clearest examples came on Feb. 1, 1760, during the Anglo-Cherokee War. A Cherokee war party attacked a wagon train of settlers fleeing the Long Cane Creek settlement in what is now Abbeville County, about 50 miles southwest of present-day Greenville. Around 150 settlers were trying to reach Augusta as violence spread across the backcountry. When the attack ended, at least 23 people were dead, most of them women and children.
For generations, Long Cane was remembered as one of the great tragedies of the Carolina frontier. And it was. Families were shattered. Survivors carried that memory for the rest of their lives.
That is part of the story. It is not the whole story.
Long Cane was not a story of settlers attacked in an empty wilderness. By 1760, colonial settlement had been pushing deeper into Cherokee territory for decades. What settlers saw as opportunity, Cherokee communities experienced as encroachment and loss. The violence at Long Cane did not come out of nowhere. It grew out of a longer struggle over land, power and survival.
The British response made that plain. Cherokee towns were burned. Food stores were destroyed. Cornfields were cut down. Those were not simply military reprisals. They were attacks on the foundations of Cherokee life, meant to bring hunger, displacement and surrender.
Accounts of frontier attacks spread through letters, militia reports and family recollections. The fear was real. So was the grief. But those memories also became part of the case for retaliation and, eventually, possession of the land. Settlers suffered. Later, that suffering was used to justify the dispossession of Cherokee people.
The legal turning point came in 1777 with the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner, when the Cherokee were forced to cede most of their remaining South Carolina land, including what would become Greenville County. We should be careful with the word treaty. It sounds mutual. DeWitt’s Corner was not. It gave legal cover to a transfer of land that violence had already made possible.
Long Cane belongs in Greenville’s history because it helps explain what had to happen before Greenville could exist. Before Greenville could be built, Cherokee land was taken.
Up next: Follow Richard Pearis to the Reedy River, where ambition, uncertainty and contested land shaped the earliest white settlement in what would become Greenville.
Russell Stall is a Greenville native, former at-large Greenville City Council member, and certified city planner. He serves as executive director of the Greenville County Historical Society. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
