The Moments That Shaped Greenville

As Greenville continues to top the charts as one of the country's most livable cities, its rapid growth threatens to erase the fascinating - and sometimes complicated - history that built it. In this episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County, Katy Smith sits down with Russell Stall, President of the Greenville County Historical Society, to explore the pivotal moments that shaped the region. Listeners will discover how understanding our local history empowers us to make better, more informed civic decisions for our community's future.

Russell unpacks his top five defining moments in Greenville's timeline, starting with its complex Cherokee origins and moving through Mayor Max Heller’s transformative downtown vision to the ambitious GVL 2040 comprehensive plan. He also pulls back the curtain on the Historical Society's ongoing archival revitalization, sharing the serendipitous discovery of an original land deed hidden in a stack of papers and their groundbreaking use of AI to digitize tens of thousands of historical photographs. How exactly did a 1907 urban planning blueprint pave the way for today's award-winning downtown, and what challenging lessons must we still learn from our segregated textile mill past? Tune in to uncover the hidden stories resting right in your own backyard.

If you want to help preserve Greenville's rich heritage, check the show notes for links to the Greenville County Historical Society and learn how your family’s attic treasures might belong in their archives. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review if you enjoyed this deep dive into local history!

Episode Resources:

• Greenville County Historical Society Official Site

• GVL 2040 Comprehensive Plan

• Biography of Mayor Max Heller

• Historical Overview of Greenville, SC

• History and Vision of Unity Park

Five Defining Moments in Greenville’s History

Katy Smith:

The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future. This quote from Theodore Roosevelt informs the work of the Greenville County Historical Society, which aims to help us discover the history of this place that we Greenville County residents love.

I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County, I talk with Russell Stall, president of the Greenville County Historical Society. Russell is a Greenville native, a former Greenville City Council member, a certified city planner on faculty at Clemson University, and someone who is passionate about history. 

Russell and I will cover his top five moments in Greenville County's history, although he would note there are many, many more, why understanding our history is important, and resources you can access at the Greenville County Historical Society. Russell, what a treat to have you join us. I can't imagine a better person to talk about Greenville's history and the importance of remembering history. So thanks for being here.

Russell Stall:

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Katy Smith:

All right. Well, before we get into the Greenville Historical Society and why history matters, imagine that you get to put up five historical markers in Greenville. Maybe they're already there and you're just putting a bow on it, but maybe you're putting in a brand new one. I'd love to know what Russell Stall's historical markers in Greenville would be.

Russell Stall:

Well, there are many. When you look at history in Greenville, Charleston doesn't own history in this state. When we look at history, there's so many events that have been crucial in shaping who we are today. 

Probably the first tipping point in Greenville's history would be when Richard Pearis came to town. He was a fur trader. He came in the late 1700s, set up shop in what was then Cherokee land. Our history did not begin with Richard Pearis. It began with the Cherokees thousands of years ago. But the significance of Pearis in our history is he set up his hunting ground.

At the time, the Cherokees were the only people that could own land in what is now Greenville County. So Richard married a Cherokee. They had a son, George, and a daughter. And his son, George, since George was half Cherokee, could buy land. So George bought Greenville from the Cherokee at a nominal price. 

There is a marker on Main Street about Richard Pearis and his purchase of the land on the banks of the Reedy River, probably a couple thousand acres. What's interesting about the sign is it doesn't talk a whole lot about the way in which he got the land. 

The beauty about history is it's important on how we capture it and how we share it. The marker is a little bit vanilla. I think what's intriguing to me is that very first lesson is a lesson in inclusion—or exclusion, maybe, is the way we look at it. As wonderful as the city is, we still have a foundation that was created on excluding people. That's challenging. 

The second marker would be in 1907. Kelsey and Guild did a plan for downtown Greenville, and this is at a time when other cities were looking at a time in history called the City Beautiful Movement. Chicago was probably the key city in the City Beautiful Movement, but Greenville was also there. 

Kelsey and Guild did a plan for downtown, and parts of that plan included a civic center, which is where the Peace Center is now. It included the Greenville Athletic Fields, which is where Unity Park is now. So some of the things only took us 100 years to actually put in place, but they happened. 

I couldn't have this conversation, Katy, without talking about Max Heller and the impact that Mayor Heller had in the late 70s and early 80s when he wanted to create a downtown that was very similar to an Austrian village with cafes and where people were walkable. It was just a place where people wanted to be. That led to just recently, a couple of years ago, GVL 2040.

This is our comprehensive plan, which is, I think, one of the best comprehensive plans in the country. Of course, it focuses on inclusion. It focuses on mobility. It focuses on housing affordability. It's a brilliant plan. 

The fifth is, how are we looking at the future, Katy? What's next? Greenville's won all these awards. We're the fourth most livable city in the country. We're the tide for the number one most optimistic. What's next? What's the next great project for Greenville? 

The way we get there is by looking at the successes that we had in the past. Very few cities look at the decisions that were made by their forefathers and foremothers that came before them. I think Greenville has done a pretty good job with that.

The Value of Understanding the Past

Katy Smith:

Those are just five of many, many highlights from Greenville's storied history that really informs what we're doing today. Why do you believe it is important that we capture and study history?

Russell Stall:

Well, Katy, I am very concerned that we are losing Greenville's history. As more and more people move in from out of town, as some of our older residents who experienced a lot of this are dying, we're losing our history and we're losing the stories that are so important in understanding who we are and what's in our DNA. 

I took over my role at the Historical Society about a year ago. At the time, the Historical Society was relatively insignificant. We had great collections, but nobody knew who we were, nobody knew where we were, nobody knew what we had. And we have almost 200 collections in this society.

A lot of photography collections, the Joe Jordan collection, Elrod. The Jordan collection itself is 28,000 photographs. But we have captured Greenville's history since the late 1700s. Our goal is to make it accessible and to make it available to people to use and understand history and to make history relevant again. 

You can't find out what the history of a community is unless you have an organization that is pushing it and educating. That's a big role of what we're doing and giving history life again and making history relevant to our everyday lives and the future of Greenville. 

There's some darkness to some of our past that we need to learn from. We struggled with integration, for example. We struggled with segregated schools. The textile mills and the textile villages were as glorious as we make them out to be. They were difficult places because the mill villages were controlled primarily by the textile companies with their own script.

They housed people. So if somebody lost their job, they lost everything. They lost their vocation. They lost their house. But it's examples like that that we can learn from. Things like the Pete Hollis Highway that separated people, the lower-income neighborhoods, and Church Street Bridge, which is being reconstructed now. 

There are so many things that we can learn from. But what it also takes is a vibrant public participation process like what you're doing here and educating the community about the importance of some of these issues that we're dealing with. 

Not everybody's going to be an expert, but that's okay. I want people to be at least knowledgeable enough to make an informed decision on whether they are supportive or not supportive of this kind of process that's going through. So when you go to city council and county council and make your voice be heard, it's an informed decision and it makes sense.

Treasures from the Archives

Katy Smith:

I know before we're done, we'll talk about how people can access the amazing resources that you have. As you've gone through everything, Russell, are there a couple of things you found that have completely surprised or delighted you that listeners might want to hear about?

Russell Stall:

Well, one thing to be a little bit nerdy. We just moved about six weeks ago into a historic home on East Washington Street. The move we made probably took three times longer than it should have because we sit there and as you touch parts of the collection, you say, "Oh, this is cool. Let me watch this one." 

An example of one of those is we were casually going through some of our boxes. The president of our board and I were looking at these documents and kind of looked at each other and said, "Is this what we think it is?" 

What we found was the original deed for the sale of Greenville to Vardry McBee from Lemuel J. Alston. Just in a stack of papers. That's what's really cool because you're finding these needles in the haystacks that are so significant in Greenville's history. It's just in a stack of papers. 

That's from the Vardry McBee collection. We also have some of Vardry McBee's diaries where the first entry on January 1st is, "I rode my horse to Spartanburg." And we're like, "From where?"

Katy Smith:

I find it always interesting to look at old photos of the city of Greenville. Even just the Augusta Road neighborhood 100 years ago wasn't a neighborhood. It was rural farmland. 

Accessing Records and Leveraging AI

Well, all right, so how can people access the wonderful resources of the Greenville Historical Society?

Russell Stall:

We've been hidden for a long time. We're now in the process of curating and digitizing our collections. We have a great partnership with the South Carolina Room at the library. We've just donated the Joe Jordan collection to them. 

That's a partnership of shared resources where we're scanning documents and curating them. One thing that's really exciting to me is we're probably the only historical society in the country that's aggressively using AI to help generate descriptions of photographs, to help generate keywords and searchability. 

The main problem with historical documents is finding them. We have to have really good search engines, really good keywords, and search capabilities. AI does a fantastic job of describing what's in a photograph. 

If you can show it a picture of Nick Theodore, for example, it will recognize Nick Theodore and other photographs as you're going along. It takes the work of years down to doing it in days probably. 

We're moving very aggressively there. People will be able to access those collections on our website, which is GreenvilleHistory.org. As I said before, we've just moved into a historical house, the Brockman House on East Washington Street. 

We don't have formal hours because right now we're a 100% volunteer organization. We're operating on appointment only, but we'd love to have people come and wander through some of these archives. It's fantastic. 

We just acquired the mill whistle from Mills Mill, the employee whistle. I joke with my board, get your lungs ready because you're going to have to blow that whistle at some point. It's so exciting seeing history live and creating a home for history at the Historical Society.

Contributing to the Collection

Katy Smith:

It sounds like you welcome people to engage with the website and in person. The best way to do that is to go to greenvillehistory.org and either check out the hours when they're available or make an appointment to come by. 

I assume that if people have resources that they'd like to share that are part of their family's history, but also Greenville's history, they can reach out.

Russell Stall:

Go through your attic. Go through your grandmother's attic. We just acquired some documents and photographs of Jesse Jackson when he kicked off his presidential campaign at the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center. 

We just acquired those photographs from the sister of Ruth Ann Butler, who was getting ready to throw them away. So, please go through your attics. Go over to your grandmom's house and say, "Grandmom, what you got?" We would love to capture some of that history before it literally goes in the dump.

Katy Smith:

Well, Russell, thank you so much for the important role that you and your family have played in Greenville's history and for what you're doing to preserve it and help create the next chapter.

Russell Stall:

That's exciting, Katy. Thank you.