Long before Greenville earned its reputation as an award-winning destination, it served as a summer refuge for wealthy Lowcountry families fleeing the heat and disease of coastal South Carolina.

During the antebellum era, planters from Charleston and the rice coast traveled to the Upcountry seeking relief from malaria, yellow fever and brutal summer conditions. Greenville’s elevation, cooler air and mineral springs made it a fashionable seasonal retreat. One of the most important destinations was Chick Springs, near present-day Taylors.

Developed in the late 1830s by Dr. Burwell Chick, the resort quickly became one of the best-known watering places in the region. Contemporary accounts noted that many Lowcountry families built cottages on the surrounding hills.

These visitors did not arrive alone.

Planter families traveled with enslaved cooks, nurses, carriage drivers, laundresses and domestic servants who recreated plantation life away from the coast. Advertisements for Chick Springs charged “children and servants” half-price for board, a small detail that revealed how completely enslaved labor remained embedded in the resort economy.

Greenville lacked the vast plantation landscapes of the Lowcountry but it was drawn into the same slave-based economy that generated coastal wealth. Money produced through rice and cotton flowed into Upcountry hotels, merchants, transportation systems and landowners.

Transportation improvements deepened the connection. Early visitors endured long stagecoach rides from Columbia, but railroad expansion transformed travel by the 1850s. A traveler could leave Charleston in the morning and reach Greenville by afternoon, integrating the Upcountry into a broader Southern tourism economy.

Chick Springs also functioned as a social center for the planter class. Guests attended dances, concerts and dinners in an environment that preserved coastal hierarchies while offering escape from coastal conditions.

Much of this history has faded from view. Greenville often presents itself as distinct from the plantation culture that defined much of antebellum South Carolina. Chick Springs tells a more complicated story.

The Upcountry looked different from Charleston and the rice coast. But it remained connected to the same systems of wealth, slavery and power that shaped the 19th-century South – benefiting from them, accommodating them, and in some ways depending on them.

Next: Before Furman University became one of Greenville’s defining institutions, its origins were tied to Baptist theology, cotton wealth, and slavery — a story of how faith, education and human bondage coexisted and reinforced one another in the antebellum South.

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.

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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.

One of the most persistent myths about South Carolina history is that slavery belonged to the Lowcountry, while the Upcountry stood somehow apart from it. Charleston had the plantations, the rice fields and enormous enslaved populations. Greenville and the foothills, many people still assume, were different.

They were different. But they were not separate.

By 1860, nearly 35 percent of Greenville County’s population was enslaved. Thousands of African Americans lived and labored throughout the county, not only on larger farms but in homes, mills, hotels, workshops and construction projects. Enslaved people built roads, maintained property, prepared food, cared for children, and created much of the wealth that helped establish early Greenville.

Slavery was not peripheral to the local economy. It was woven into much of daily life.

Vardry McBee offers one of the clearest examples. After purchasing more than 11,000 acres around the village in 1815 – the original deed is on display at the Greenville County Historical Society – McBee helped develop mills, businesses, churches and commercial enterprises that accelerated Greenville’s growth. Those operations depended heavily on enslaved labor. Many of the men who shaped Greenville’s civic, religious and political leadership were enslavers themselves. Difference from the Lowcountry did not mean distance from slavery.

Outside influences strengthened these ties. Wealthy coastal families began traveling to Greenville during the summer months, seeking cooler weather and relief from disease outbreaks along the coast. They brought investment, social connections, and the assumptions of the plantation South with them. Greenville became increasingly tied, economically and culturally, to the broader slaveholding world around it.

For much of the 20th century, public memory in Greenville emphasized progress, industry and civic growth while saying relatively little about the enslaved people whose labor made much of that development possible. That silence helped shape what many residents still believe about the Upcountry’s origins.

The Upcountry did not stand outside the slave South. It occupied a different place within it. Understanding Greenville’s early history honestly means placing slavery near the center of the story – not as a footnote, but as part of the foundation on which the community was built.

Next: Lowcountry planter families retreat to Greenville for seasonal relief from heat, disease.

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.

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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.

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Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.

Most people around here have at least heard the name Richard Pearis, the man who claimed land along the Reedy River and who is often called Greenville’s first white settler. For those who haven’t heard the full story, it’s worth a brief telling, because it sounds like a beginning, even if it didn’t become one.

Pearis arrived in the South Carolina backcountry in the mid-18th century, when this region was still largely Cherokee land. He worked as a trader and interpreter, moving between colonial settlers and the Cherokee, and he married into Cherokee society. His Cherokee wife, Patchy, often described as the daughter of a Cherokee leader, gave him access, influence and a working knowledge of the foothills that few outsiders possessed. The historical record is less certain about whether he maintained a separate European wife at the same time.

After the Anglo-Cherokee War, treaties forced the Cherokee to cede large portions of land to colonial authorities. Pearis moved quickly, claiming thousands of acres along the Reedy, including land near what is now downtown Greenville. On paper, he had the ingredients of a founder: land, relationships, timing and vision.

But the ground beneath him was never stable.

Pearis did not establish a town or a lasting community. What he created was a foothold in a place that remained remote, contested and unsettled. His position depended on fragile relationships between Cherokee communities, colonial governments and a frontier still being reshaped by force. He could move between worlds, but he never fully belonged to either one.

Then came the American Revolutionary War, and everything shifted. Pearis sided with the British as a Loyalist. When the Patriots prevailed, his land was confiscated, his influence collapsed, and his claims along the Reedy vanished. The settlement he imagined never took hold.

That’s why it may be more useful to see Pearis not as Greenville’s founder but as its first failed attempt.

Even the way we remember him reflects that ambiguity. In 1962, the Greenville County Historical Society proposed renaming Paris Mountain to “Pearis Mountain.” The proposal never took hold.

Pearis’s story reminds us that early Greenville was not a clear beginning. It was uncertain, improvised and shaped by plans that did not always last.

Next: We turn to the story of Vardry McBee, the man who did more than anyone else to shape early Greenville, using land, capital, religion and paternal authority to lay the foundations of the town that followed.

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.

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Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.

By the time Greenville began to take shape as a place on the map, the most violent part of its story had already happened.

One of the clearest examples came on Feb. 1, 1760, during the Anglo-Cherokee War. A Cherokee war party attacked a wagon train of settlers fleeing the Long Cane Creek settlement in what is now Abbeville County, about 50 miles southwest of present-day Greenville. Around 150 settlers were trying to reach Augusta as violence spread across the backcountry. When the attack ended, at least 23 people were dead, most of them women and children.

For generations, Long Cane was remembered as one of the great tragedies of the Carolina frontier. And it was. Families were shattered. Survivors carried that memory for the rest of their lives.

That is part of the story. It is not the whole story.

Long Cane was not a story of settlers attacked in an empty wilderness. By 1760, colonial settlement had been pushing deeper into Cherokee territory for decades. What settlers saw as opportunity, Cherokee communities experienced as encroachment and loss. The violence at Long Cane did not come out of nowhere. It grew out of a longer struggle over land, power and survival.

The British response made that plain. Cherokee towns were burned. Food stores were destroyed. Cornfields were cut down. Those were not simply military reprisals. They were attacks on the foundations of Cherokee life, meant to bring hunger, displacement and surrender.

Accounts of frontier attacks spread through letters, militia reports and family recollections. The fear was real. So was the grief. But those memories also became part of the case for retaliation and, eventually, possession of the land. Settlers suffered. Later, that suffering was used to justify the dispossession of Cherokee people.

The legal turning point came in 1777 with the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner, when the Cherokee were forced to cede most of their remaining South Carolina land, including what would become Greenville County. We should be careful with the word treaty. It sounds mutual. DeWitt’s Corner was not. It gave legal cover to a transfer of land that violence had already made possible.

Long Cane belongs in Greenville’s history because it helps explain what had to happen before Greenville could exist. Before Greenville could be built, Cherokee land was taken.

Up next: Follow Richard Pearis to the Reedy River, where ambition, uncertainty and contested land shaped the earliest white settlement in what would become 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.

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Editor’s note: This is the third in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.

If we want to understand Greenville honestly, we have to begin before Greenville existed.

Before there was a county line, a courthouse, a Main Street, or a mill village, this was Cherokee land. That is not symbolic language. It is historical fact. Long before Greenville had an English name, the rivers, ridges, valleys and hunting grounds of the Upcountry were part of a Cherokee world that was old, organized, and deeply rooted in place.

Too often, local history begins when white settlers arrive. The effect is subtle but powerful. It makes everything before that moment feel like background or empty space waiting for development. But Greenville did not begin on empty ground.

The Cherokee were one of the most powerful Indigenous nations in the Southeast. Their homeland stretched across what is now western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, north Georgia and the northwestern corner of South Carolina. What we now call the Upcountry was part of that larger world.

The rivers we now call the Reedy, the Saluda and the Enoree were not simply scenic features or future industrial assets. They were routes of travel, sources of food and anchors of settlement. The falls of the Reedy were part of a landscape already full of meaning long before they became a civic symbol. The ridges that later guided roads and the bottomlands that later drew farms were already known terrain.

Cherokee life here was agricultural, political and ceremonial. Towns were centers of council, kinship, trade, and spiritual life. The land was not simply property. It was relationship.

That matters because the familiar story of Greenville often begins too late. It begins with Richard Pearis, Vardry McBee, the courthouse, or the mills. But those are not true beginnings. They are only the first chapters of white Greenville.

Before Greenville was Greenville, this was Cherokee land. The city we know today rose on land that had a prior history, a prior people and a prior meaning. The transformation of that world into a settler landscape did not happen naturally or peacefully. That is the story of the next article.

Next week: Violence on the frontier

Part 1:Greenville’s History: How to read the city

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.

The post Greenville’s History: The Cherokee people and the Upcountry appeared first on GREENVILLE JOURNAL.

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.

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It is pretty obvious. Greenville County is changing rapidly. Today, Greenville hardly resembles the city it was 20 or 30 years ago. Every week, newcomers arrive who have never heard of the Tommy Wyche, the Reedy River, Sterling High School, or the textile mill villages that once defined entire communities. At times like this, understanding the past becomes essential and important.

That’s why the Greenville Journal and the Greenville County Historical Society are boldly introducing a year-long, week-by-week look at Greenville County’s history. The series begins with a journey through Greenville’s history – with the Cherokee homelands and frontier settlements and continues through the textile era, the civil rights movement, and the ongoing pressures shaping the county and its towns and cities. This is a bold endeavor. But if Greenville wants to remain one of the most livable places in America, we must understand what brought us here.

This is not about nostalgia. It is applied history. Applied history means knowing how a place’s past helps us ask better questions about its future. Applied history uses past decisions to better inform current ones. Think about the roads you drive, the neighborhoods you know, the schools your children attend, the parks where you spend a Sunday afternoon. None of that happened by accident. They are a result of generational choices: land, labor, race, investment, and power. Those choices shaped the Greenville we inherited and still shape us today.

You don’t have to be born here to join this story about Greenville. If you live in Greenville now, you are part of our history. History isn’t just for those with deep roots, but for anyone who wants to understand the place they call home.

Over the next year, we will celebrate what merits celebration while voicing harder truths where honesty requires. A place that remembers only its triumphs does not know itself. Greenville County’s history is still being written. Decisions made now will be someone else’s inheritance.

These articles invite you to know this place more fully, tell its story more honestly and use what we learn to help shape what comes next. If something resonates with you this year, take action. Add your story.

I encourage you to join the Greenville County Historical Society on April 18 at 11 a.m. for the ribbon-cutting of our new home at 644 E. Washington St. in downtown Greenville. More information is available at GCHS_Open_House.eventbrite.com.

Up next: How to read the city. An introduction to seeing streets, buildings, rivers, neighborhoods and absences as evidence of the past.

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.

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Camp Sevier Remembered Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to establish a permanent memorial to the roughly 1,900-acre training facility built in 1917 in the Mountain Creek area at the foot of Paris Mountain.

A community collaborative session is being planned to bring together veterans’ groups, descendants, historians, civic leaders, and anyone who shares a passion for preserving Camp Sevier’s legacy.

Organizers are asking anyone with an interest in preserving the camp’s legacy to get involved. Anyone interested in becoming a Camp Sevier Remembered board or planning team member or in sharing a family or community connection with the camp is asked to reach out to campsevierremembered@gmail.com.

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A couple of weeks ago, my wife, Jane, and I had an unusual experience — one that we are still talking about.

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While the facility showcases many artifacts, there are various pieces located in its basement, and it is up to museum staff to safely store them when they are not displayed.

What’s in the basement

Located in the museum is its collections room, a climate- and humidity-controlled space with no natural light, is a treasure trove of donated items with a connection to Upstate or South Carolina history, such as sewing machines, doll houses, a Dixie Drive-In sign, various textiles, furniture and a horse-drawn hearse.

To ensure the integrity of these items, the room’s lights are off when no one is inside, an exterminator regularly treats the museum and newly donated items like textiles are kept in a separate space for several weeks to ensure that no bugs are introduced.

“Sometimes we get big boxes of things from people’s attics or basements, so before we bring anything into this room, we make sure it’s clean as it can be for what it is,” said Martha Wiley, collections manager with the Upcountry History Museum.

Calling in an expert

Since the collections room houses items not regularly seen by the public, museum staff will evaluate what is on hand when planning to supplement visiting exhibitions with local items.

Sometimes, an item might need to be worked on before it can be displayed, and an expert is called in.

For the horse-drawn hearse, which dates back to around the 1890s and was used by the former R.D. Jones and Sons funeral home in Simpsonville, the museum contracted conservator Sharon Penton to work with this item so it would be ready to go on display.

Penton came to the museum to preserve the hearse in its current condition by cleaning and painstakingly removing electrical tape from its wheels and stabilizing the torn leather flap on its driver’s seat.

“There’s a blurred line between conservation and restoration,” Penton said. “In restoration, people are thinking of restoring it and making it shiny and new looking like it originally did. In conservation, you’re just taking it back so far. You want to stabilize it, but you don’t want to change the history of the object.”

Following Penton’s work, she was able to secure all four wheels with black cotton twill tape and the hearse is slated to make its first appearance at the museum’s upcoming “Beyond Halloween Land: Tim Burton’s ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’” exhibition, which will open Oct. 18.

The hearse will be on display from Oct. 28 to Nov. 9. For more information, visit upcountryhistory.org.

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This summer, more than six decades after he spent 13 months at the South Pole, Fries handed the child-sized shirt, emblazoned with “Operation Deep Freeze,” to Isaac King. The 88-year-old retired Anderson University astronomy and physics professor, and King, a 24-year-old filmmaker from Landrum, met at a gas station in Anderson. King had purchased the T-shirt from Fries on Facebook Marketplace.

Then King got the real treasure — 1,400 feet of film Fries shot documenting his polar experiences in 1962 and ’63.

“We got to talking, and the subject of the film came up,” said Fries, whose last name is pronounced like the name of the operation. “I don’t know why I mentioned it, but I did. And then it turned out he was a filmmaker.”

“I was really pretty blown away at some of the stuff included in the footage,” said King, who also works in film restoration. Of the Kodachrome frames, he added: “They are spectacular.”

The effort it took to get those images could easily have left Fries and his 21 fellow scientists and U.S. Navy sailors dead.

“It was minus-80 degrees and a wind chill that doesn’t even compute, doesn’t even make any sense,” Fries said of the temperatures outside Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

As the “aurora scientist,” he studied the ionospheric light shows that can wreak havoc on long-range communications and manned spaceflight — a top priority during the Cold War.

The expedition began in October 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Russians pointed nuclear weapons at the U.S. from the island nation just 90 miles from Key West, Florida.

“There was no question that we were still on the verge of war. And that was very sobering,” he said. On the plane trip south, the person sitting next to him on the plane said: “‘Well, where we’re going, we should be safe, but will anybody be alive to retrieve us a year later?’”

Likewise, rescue was impossible. Aviation fuel congeals in those temperatures.

“We had many things go wrong that could have been fatal. But we persevered through it,” he said. He applauded the leadership of then-Lt. Col. Don Bessinger Jr., the officer-in-charge and a Navy doctor who retired as a colonel and died in Greenville in 2021.

In a land where the sun sets in March and doesn’t rise again for six months, Fries and his military and civilian counterparts worked, researched and even played — they organized a “South Pole Bowl,” a football game with a basketball. Outdoors. Navy’s team iced the scientists.

Fries also remembered some special downtime.

“I had a chance to do a lot of reading, including the spiritual side. I do remember thinking about the passages in the Bible where it speaks about God being with us in the outermost parts of the world,” he said. “And I thought, the writer couldn’t have imagined that there actually would be people in such a place — but there are, and I’m one of them.”

King plans to send his film-restoration work to a colleague at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections in Columbia. The result, he said, should run approximately 50 minutes.

Meanwhile, Fries relishes replaying his time at the bottom of the world with people at the top of their game.

“One of the things that I thought was very notable was the friendliness of all the people, one to the other, a cooperative attitude,” he said. “We all knew it was a difficult environment, and we all did our part.”

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Mark Garrison, president of the Travelers Rest Historical Society, said the Spring Park Inn is a cultural and education destination that offers a rare window into the past. The 19th-century inn and residence sits along the Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail at 301 Old Buncombe Road. 

According to the Travelers Rest Historical Society, the Spring Park Inn was built in the 1820s as a private residence. It was converted into an inn and later expanded in 1850. The Travelers Rest Historical Society spent the last several years restoring the inn to its late 19th- and early 20th-century appearance.

Read more about the Spring Park Inn

Those visiting the preserved Spring Park Inn can learn about its original residents and historical significance in Travelers Rest. Nell Anderson Gibson was the house’s final owner who donated the land and building to the Travelers Rest Historical Society in 2020.

Public tours of Spring Park Inn are held Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with scheduled guided tours at 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Visitors can also explore the inn’s free public exhibit rooms featuring authentic furnishings and artifacts Fridays from 5 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

“Through these tours, we hope to connect visitors with the stories, structures and spirit that shaped Travelers Rest,” Garrison said.

Visitors can purchased tickets for the guided tours online or on-site at the Spring Park Inn. Tickets cost $10 for adults and $5 for students ages seven to 17. For group tours and educational field trips, contact Deanna Houston at events@travelersresthistoricalsociety.org or 864-483-8554. 

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The exhibition tells stories of perseverance, bravery and sacrifice through eight wounded warrior and two canine war dog sculptures designed and created by Ohio Master Craftsman James Mellick.

“I am moved by the physical and emotional sacrifice by the men and women of the United States military,” said Mellick. “I want to pay tribute to the soldiers who served with great sacrifice by creating the sculptural allegory of wounded warrior dogs who were the soldier’s best friend and companion in battle.”

“War Dogs: K9 Military Heroes” also features a collection of objects and combat art on loan from the National Museum of the Marine Corps and the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as from private collections.

The exhibition will be on display through Feb. 21, 2026.

For more information, call 864-467-3100 or visit upcountryhistory.org.

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Our Pet Dairy milkman in the Slater-Marietta area was Mickey Allman. He lived over on Baker Street, and he knew everybody on the mill village. He knew who worked in the mill, what shift they worked, how many children were in the family, and how much milk they needed for a week. He had to know because it determined when he arrived and what he left at the front door.

We also subscribed to the Rich Plan, which provided an assortment of frozen, breaded butterfly shrimp, fish sticks, assorted steaks, burger patties and other meats on a monthly basis. You had to buy their commercial-grade freezer, but it was worth it. Until recently, our old Rich Plan freezer was still running.

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