Chandra Dillard is fixing up an old house.
This is not just any old house, however. It’s the house that has been in her family for generations. The house her grandfather built. The house that sits upon land her great grandfather earned. The house that, like so much in the Nicholtown neighborhood in the city of Greenville, has proved resilient for so long.
So the job of fixing up a house like that can be intimidating, Dillard said.
“You should’ve seen me harass the contractor when we started. I was constantly saying, ‘Hey, don’t tear that out! Don’t mess with that! Grandaddy put that in!’” she says, laughing. “I just gave them the hardest time.”
For 56-year-old Dillard, who represents the 23rd District in the South Carolina House of Representatives, that pressure is only heightened by the fact that she grew up in Nicholtown.
The neighborhood is unique in Greenville, both for its history and its character.
Located about a mile and a half from downtown, west of Laurens Road and east of Nicholtown Road at the base of the southwest ridge that bounds part of the Cleveland Park community, the eastern portion of the neighborhood overlooks the Reedy River. As a self-contained area, it traces its roots all the way back to 1849, when plantation owner Elisha Green willed a portion of his plantation to his daughter, Dorcas Green. Over the next three decades, that land was subdivided, seized and sold off to other families to pay Green’s debts, according the City of Greenville Historic Resources Survey. By the 1870s, nine Black families had settled in what was later named Nicholtown.
Most of these early Nicholtown residents had been slaves, and now found themselves building a new community together.
Dillard’s family, the Hall family, were among those early residents. Her grandfather, Sumler Hall, built the home that Dillard is now fixing up. He was a plasterer by trade but an entrepreneur in practice, living in a community that was home to a diverse workforce — bricklayers and rock masons, but also lawyers and doctors, elected officials and store owners. Dillard remembers the stories her grandmother told of people coming together to build each other’s houses.
“The house-raisings – they called them – when all the people with those skills would come out and build the house, while the women would come and bring food and help out and watch over the kids,” she said.
By the time Dillard was a young girl, Nicholtown had become a place where “vegetable gardens filled with collards, berries, pole beans and cucumbers grew beside the small houses,” according to author Jacqueline Woodson, who based her National Book Award-winning novel “Brown Girl Dreaming” on her own childhood in Nicholtown.
“Raised flowers beds brightened front yards,” Woodson writes. “And, always, the smell of honeysuckle beckoned my siblings and me to its vine where we sipped sweet nectar from the flowers… Greenville, S.C., is a rolling green dream in my memory now … We were safe. We were home.”
Businesses flourished. There was a gas station, grocery stores, restaurants, hairdressers and barber shops. Anything Dillard or her family needed or wanted could be found just by walking around the neighborhood.
“There was a sense of community. I mean real community,” she said. “A place where people are concerned about you genuinely. And it’s still that way.”
But there have been challenges, especially as the housing market continues to risk pricing longtime residents out of the neighborhood.
“The need for affordable housing is very present and it’s a real challenge,” Dillard said. “We don’t want to become exclusive. We don’t want to run any local folks who’ve been there for years.”
Two new affordable housing developments aim to address those concerns. The Alliance, an affordable housing apartment development, will bring more than 100 apartments to households earning less than $50,000. Heritage Hills, developed by Habitat for Humanity of Greenville County, spans 5 acres on Webster Road and will bring 29 homes to Nicholtown. Both projects will allow another generation of young children to grow up in the neighborhood that has shaped generations of Greenvillians, according to Glenda Morrison-Fair, board of trustees member for Greenville County Schools.
“And we do proudly proclaim the motto that it is a lifelong advantage to have been a young child growing up in Nicholtown,” said Morrison-Fair.
Monroe Free, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greenville County, said the Heritage Hills development in particular, with its focus on single-family homes, was planned as one small way to address longstanding historical injustices faced by Nicholtown residents — namely unfair housing practices wrought by Jim Crow laws.
“You had all these restrictions and realtor associations that prevented people from developing wealth that they could pass on to their families,” Free said. “This is an opportunity through home ownership to invest back in some of these families.”
Dillard’s work of fixing up her old family house is another small way individuals are reinvesting in the community. By restoring and keeping hold of her family home, she said she is able to pass on not just a historical legacy, but also wealth earned from one generation to the next.
By the time her home restoration is complete, spring will have arrived. The flowers will bloom anew. The streets will be busier with people out on front porches and walking around.
Already, though, she said that sense of community has never left, no matter the time of year.
“One day I came and checked on the contractor, and he said, ‘Miss Dillard, I have never worked in a community like this,’” Dillard said. “And he told me everyone would be driving by honking their horns, saying hello constantly. They got meals delivered to them, sandwiches and a little dessert, something to drink. I said, ‘I’ll just be doggonit.’ It’s one thing to know about Nicholtown. But it’s another thing to really see it. That community, it still exists.”
