By Russell Stall
Editor’s note: This is the second in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
Greenville is an open book. Most people just don’t know they’re reading it.
Every time you cross the Reedy River on the pedestrian bridge, you are standing above the reason this city exists. Every time you pass through Hampton-Pinckney, Haynie-Sirrine, or Southernside and sense that something older is present beneath the surface, you’re right.
The past isn’t behind you. It’s underneath you.
Cities don’t just happen. They accumulate. Every street, every building, every vacant lot carries the residue of decisions made by people long gone whose choices still govern the present. Once you learn to read that accumulation, you can’t stop seeing it.
Streets tell you where power went. Church Street and Academy Street laid out the bones of early Greenville, showing civic, religious and educational institutions clustered together, telling you exactly who the city was organized around. The interstate entrances into Greenville tell a different story about which neighborhoods had the political power to protect themselves and which didn’t.
Buildings tell you what a generation valued. For every structure that still stands, there are others that don’t – the Black-owned businesses on East McBee, the homes in Little Texas cleared for urban renewal. Surface parking lots downtown are not empty space. They are the footprints of what was erased. They are evidence of Greenville’s past.
Absences tell you the most. When the Greenville Eight sat down at the Kress lunch counter on Main Street in 1960, they were confronting a geography deliberately built to exclude them. Learning to ask what was here before, and who was pushed out, is how you begin to read the city honestly.
The Greenville County Historical Society has been asking those questions for decades. This series in the Greenville Journal is an invitation to look around you with new eyes. New eyes on the streets, the buildings, the rivers and streams, and the empty lots.
Once you know how to read Greenville, you’ll never see it the same way again.
Up next: The Cherokee Nation and the Upcountry: The indigenous peoples who lived here first, as Greenville’s story begins long before the city itself.
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, and is a faculty member in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Clemson University. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
Photo caption: The old Greenville City Hall and Masonic at the corner of Main and Broad Streets 1970. From the Jordan Collection, Greenville County Historical Society.
