Upcountry History in Greenville, South Carolina

It hadn’t really occurred to me that there was another half to South Carolina’s Low Country until a museum docent in Charlotte pointed me to the Upcountry History Museum in Greenville, South Carolina.

The museum tells a fascinating story of a region that has spent over 250 years in conflict of one sort or another with Native Americans, with the Low Country, with the North, and internally.

While the Low Country along the coast developed as a region of tobacco and rice plantations using forced labor of enslaved people, Upcountry developed as a region of small farms, along with hunting and trapping. But before that happened, there was the first conflict—the land that white settlers moved into was already occupied by Native American tribes including Cherokee and Catawba peoples.

The white incursions into that area, in the Piedmont foothills and mountains, was actually banned by the provincial government to avoid conflict, but poorer colonists seeking land for themselves, went anyway. Over years of conflict involving both violence and in some cases treachery, by 1777 most of the tribal land was in settler hands.

Many of the Upcountry settlers were Protestant Scots-Irish, leaving behind crop failures and political-religious conflict in Ireland. About 15 to 20 thousand made the trek in the 1760s. In those days, the area was referred to as “the back country;” it renamed itself after the Revolution.

In the 1760s, the Upcountry was something of a lawless frontier; farmers and villagers complained of outlaw gangs that preyed on them, and that they had no representation in Charleston, and no funding for peace officers or local courts from the government. An organized vigilante movement calling itself Regulators developed, both to confront the gangs, and to confront the planter-dominated government. Their demands, including courts, jails, roads, schools were met at a point just short of a threatened armed march on the capital.

As the Revolution approached and tensions with England grew, Low Country and Upcountry found themselves in opposition again: rebellious feelings were greater among the Anglican gentlemen planters than among the Baptist and Presbyterian smallholders who saw little to be gained by rebellion. That changed quickly and dramatically in 1775 when Low Country troops rounded up Upcountry Loyalists and marched them to Charleston in 15 inches of snow. British troops then arrived, and began forcing many of the remaining men into military service.

Even after the Revolution, tension between the two regions continued, including over representation in government. Low Country planters were afraid Upcountry sentiment would abolish the slavery their wealth depended on. The invention of the cotton gin changed the economy of both areas, including spreading slavery and plantations into the lower part of Upcountry. By 1808, Upcountry had gained a fairer share of representation.

But while Low and Up were now somewhat more in tune with each other, more conflict soon arose as Congress passed tariffs on imported manufactured goods to protect and encourage northern industry. The result was higher prices paid for those goods in the south. South Carolina was in the forefront of attempts to ‘nullify’ Federal law—an attempt that almost led to armed action 30 years before the Civil war. The issue of whether states retained independence within the union, and the different economic interests of North and South made this an omen of the conflict to come.

As the conflicts over economics and slavery that led to the Civil War increased over the years, the discussion played out throughout the region, including in local newspapers across the state, some urging caution, others calling for quick action. These newspapers are from 1856. In 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede, although in the Upcountry, many saw it as a move to protect wealthy planters.

Perhaps ironically, the Upcountry was the scene of the last battles: After Lee’s surrender, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled south, pursued by Union cavalry, who raided the Upcountry towns of Spartanburg, Greenville and Anderson. Just ahead of the raiders, Davis held his last cabinet meeting in Abbeville and reluctantly dissolved the government.

The end of the Civil War brought first Reconstruction, under guidance of Union forces. Confederate officials were banned from office, the Freedmen’s Bureau helped freed slaves and poor whites with food, shelter, jobs, education—and the right to vote. But Reconstruction did not entirely mean peace, and it was in Upcountry counties that the Ku Klux Klan began its campaign of terror in 1870. After Federal troops were withdrawn in 1876, the planter class was able to regain control of the state government in a movement they called ‘Redemption,’ and much of the gain for poor whites and former slaves was reversed.

But not everyone was redeemed by the Redeemers, and in the Upcountry, as cotton prices dropped and small farmers couldn’t buy or keep their land, resentment grew again against the ‘aristocratic’ Low Country politicians. Many of them united in a Farmers’ Alliance, in a kind of agrarian revolt, led by an Upcountry man, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, who became governor in 1890. His vision of a “Revolution for the Common Man,” though, only included whites; he built support across the state by inflaming anti-Black feeling and ending what common cause between Upcountry poor white and black farmers had existed. In this period, racism and segregation were written into a new series of Jim Crow laws.

Through all those periods of conflict, there were many changes in daily life; towns grew, commerce changed, railroads arrived, and many forms of social ties developed. The railroads in particular connected the region and its products to wider areas and markets, and the region’s cities became hubs for small manufacturing and retail; McBee and Irvine, recreated in the image below, had fingers in nearly every pot, and created a market for locally-made goods.

Religious and musical movements found echoes in the Upcountry, involving both black and white South Carolinians, but seldom together.area

In the 20th century, more big change came to the Upcountry, including becoming one of the main U.S. centers for the textile industry as manufacturers moved from Northern cities to the South, where they looked for cheaper labor costs, away from increasingly unionized northern factories. That development was marked by extensive use of child labor, low wages and poor working conditions.

By the time of the Great Depression, unrest in the Upcountry focused on the mills and union organizing in the Carolinas. Not only were wages low, but workers were often dependent on company housing and company stores which kept them in constant debt. As the depression deepened and mill-owners demanded more hours at lower wages, there were a number of major strikes.

A strike wave in 1934 was broken when the state governor sent National Guard troops with shoot-to-kill orders to open the mills. Seven strikers were killed, a settlement was agreed to, and promptly violated by the companies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Upcountry was the scene of significant action for civil rights, reflecting and sometimes leading a movement that was challenging Jim Crow across the country. College students were arrested in Greenville in June 1960 for attempting to use the white-only public library; the protests, among the first in the nation, continued at local lunch counters—among the first in the nation and widely-publicized.

Although they succeeded in integrating the lunch counter, progress was not always peaceful; not far away in Rock Hill, less than a year later, Freedom Riders were beaten by a mob when they attempted to integrate the local bus station and its restroom.

When I visited the museum, it was featuring a small special exhibition of contemporary quilts featuring themes of Black history.

NUTS AND BOLTS
The Upcountry History Museum is on a campus in the center of the city, surrounded by the Sigal Music Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of the Upstate, the Greenville Theater and the Greenville County Library system’s main building. It’s open 10-5 every day but Monday.