By Russell Stall
Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
If Richard Pearis represents Greenville’s uncertain beginnings, Vardry McBee represents something very different: direction.
The first paper ever presented to the Greenville County Historical Society, in 1961, focused on McBee – and for good reason. Few people shaped this city more deliberately or more deeply.
When McBee purchased more than 11,000 acres from Lemuel James Alston in 1815, Greenville was still a small courthouse village with little to suggest it would become the economic and cultural center of the Upcountry. McBee saw possibilities that others did not. He understood water power, transportation routes and geography long before Greenville became a city.
Born in 1775 near present-day Gaffney, McBee came from a family whose finances had been badly damaged during the Revolutionary War. He received little formal education, apprenticed as a saddler in Lincolnton, North Carolina, and gradually built a reputation as a merchant with unusual discipline and financial judgment. By the time he turned his attention to Greenville, he had already proven himself.
He spent decades laying what we might call the infrastructure of ambition. He built mills along the Reedy River, operated stores, invested in roads and railroads, and promoted Greenville as a place of commerce and stability. In 1820 he donated land for the Greenville Male and Female Academies. He gave land for churches that still anchor downtown today — Christ Church Episcopal, First Baptist, Buncombe Street Methodist, First Presbyterian. He later supported the founding of Furman University and backed the railroad connection to Columbia completed in 1853.
But Greenville’s early growth came with contradictions that deserve to be named. McBee was not simply a civic benefactor. By 1860 he had become the district’s largest enslaver, holding fifty-six people in bondage according to the federal census. The prosperity he built, and the city that prosperity made possible, rested on that foundation.
Greenville still reflects systems McBee helped put into place. The city’s growth was never accidental. From the beginning, it was shaped by a remarkably small circle of landowners, merchants, and financiers who controlled both the economy and civic life. That concentration of power set patterns that have never fully disappeared.
The questions Greenville still wrestles with – who benefits from growth, whose stories get told, whose labor gets counted – trace directly back to this period. McBee gave Greenville direction. What we do with that inheritance is still being decided.
Next: The role of enslaved people in the founding and building of 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.
