The Fair

October 23, 2023

“Fall for Greenville” brought thousands of people, we heard 250,000, to Main Street. The weather for the three days was glorious. Something like 60 local restaurants had booths, 80 bands performed, 50 beer vendors and vineyards showed up.

Like most of the crowd we strolled the length of Main to the West End, beyond the Reedy River, which flows through downtown. We listened for a while to soft country played by “Remember Me,” who call themselves a “Willie Nelson Tribute Band.” We stepped out and danced to a few Willie and Kris Kristoferson tunes, then got some Greek food and ate it sitting on a wall near Falls Park and watched the people flow by.

“Fall” seemed a little bit of a dream. The Main Street foliage swayed in a soft breeze, the sun shone brilliantly, the temperature stayed mild. The shimmer of the tents and canopies and the kaleidoscope of colors elevated the crowd. Rides had been set up for kids on side streets. Restaurants and bars were packed. The world we live in seemed very far away.

The day was a moment in the history of the place that, like anywhere else, creates its own rhythms of life. The energy of the city rushed forward, as if extricating itself from the three timeworn features of Southern life: fundamentalist religion, textiles, and segregation. You turn your head, everywhere you see steeples. Everywhere you see those billboard-like signs with the tacked-up invitations to attend Protestant services of every strain.

Greenville is probably the only American city that has honored a Revolutionary War British soldier. Paris Mountain State Park, within the city limits, remembers Richard Pearis, an Irish immigrant who first settled in Virginia. He served with the British during the French and Indian War, then moved to South Carolina. He tried to sell Cherokee land to white settlers, and in 1770 built a home near the Reedy. In 1775 he became a Tory officer and fought with the British, was captured by the Colonials, then escaped to the Bahamas.

The town has a gritty industrial past. Gristmills for processing grain were built as early as 1816, the hulk of the Vardry-McBee Mill remains on the river near Falls Park. A statue on Main Street recalls McBee (1775-1864), who in 1815 owned most of the town. Greenville once was called, or called itself, the “textile capital of the world.” The textile business drifted into town before the Civil War. In the early 20th century the city produced 10 percent of the nation’s textiles. Forty-three mill presidents lived in Greenville.

The Reedy offered a setting for new mills. Camperdown No.1 was built on the river in 1874 by three Massachusetts men after a fire destroyed their Boston mill. Camperdown No. 2 started operations in 1876 farther upstream. No.1 failed but was put back into service around 1900. Soon eight mills were running within two miles of downtown producing thirty thousand bales of cloth a year, with dozens more on the outskirts. A Farmers Alliance cotton warehouse was built in 1890.

By the 1950s Japanese competition had put the mills out of business, leaving hundreds without work. Some were demolished, a few still stand. No. 2 was torn down in 1959.

An artifact of the textile business is represented by the Milliken & Company corporate headquarters outside Spartanburg, 30 miles north. Milliken lobbied for decades for government protection against foreign competition and fought an organizing campaign by the United Textile Workers of America, closing its Darlington, S.C., plant to avoid the union. In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled against the company. Fifteen years later the company paid the affected workers and sold off most of its textile business.

Greenville has its sliver of high-tech fame. Albert Einstein came to town several times to visit his son, Hans Albert Einstein, who in 1938 worked for the city’s Soil Conservation Service. Einstein Sr. delivered several lectures at nearby Furman University.

Charles H. Townes, inventor of the laser, grew up on a farm near Greenville, attended Greenville High, and graduated from Furman in 1935. He did graduate research at Columbia and developed the maser, an earlier technology, and then the laser in 1960. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964. Later he led the effort to calculate the mass of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. A statue of Townes stands at the corner of South Main Street and Falls Park Drive.

Local cheerleading doesn’t obscure the hard past. On the corner of Main and Washington Streets statues of two Black students represent those who in the late 1960s demonstrated and marched to desegregate Greenville’s schools.

Sterling High started as Greenville Academy early in the 20th century, a school for African-American students financed by local White businessmen. It was renamed Sterling in 1929. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson graduated from Sterling in 1959. A president of the student body became the first Black student admitted to Furman when the university desegregated in 1965.

The Main-Washington street statue, dedicated in November 2006, recognizes the campaign by Sterling students to achieve racial integration. The corner is adjacent to the former site of a Woolworth’s store, where students began in July 1960 to demonstrate peacefully to protest segregation, following the lead of students in Greensboro, N.C. Students also conducted sit-ins at W.T. Grant’s and S.H. Kress & Co. All the stores shut down their lunch counters, refusing to serve the students.

Sterling High burned to the ground in 1967. City fire officials and other experts investigated the suspicious circumstances.  In 1968 the state Supreme Court ruled that the state schools must desegregate. Greenville schools began to integrate black and white students in 1970.

A few days after “Fall” we walked by the statues. An elderly woman stood reading the inscriptions. “I was in the class of ’67,” she said in a soft voice. “It was arson. But the community came together.”

She motioned at the inscriptions of names of contributors to the site. “Anyway, we have this,” she said. We looked at the inscribed bricks. I remembered the party feel of “Fall,” and the grim events now tormenting the country. Later, recalling the woman, I thought, we can move forward.