The history of Greenville

Mill brick rose along the Reedy River valley

On open ground near Greenville, you're standing close to Sans Souci, a mill village whose French name means "no worries." The quiet is recent. For most of a century this valley ran on cotton.

About three quarters of a mile away, workers raised American Spinning Company Mill No. 2 in 1902, one more brick mill feeding Greenville's cotton trade. Less than a mile off stood the F. W. Poe Manufacturing Company Cotton Mill, built in 1896 and torn down in 2003 after more than a century of spinning thread. A little further, Monaghan Mill opened in 1900, anchoring the mill town of Monaghan, founded in 1894.

The mills are mostly gone or silent now. The houses built for their workers still line these streets, and Sans Souci still carries the name.

Patriots surprised Loyalists camped in a cane thicket

Long before any mill, this stretch of the Carolina backcountry saw a Revolutionary War fight. The Battle of Great Cane Brake was fought in Greenville County in 1775, when a mounted patrol of South Carolina patriots surprised a camp of Loyalists hiding in a cane thicket along the Reedy River. It was one of the first armed clashes of the Revolution in South Carolina, fought years before cotton or mills ever came to this valley.

A governor's burned estate gave the village its name

Before any of these mills carried the name Sans Souci into the twentieth century, the name itself came from a house. Benjamin F. Perry, a South Carolina governor, built an estate near this coordinate that he called Sans Souci. The house burned down in 1927, and the mill community that grew up around its ruins kept the name for itself.

Striking Poe Mill workers won a pay raise

Down at the Poe Mill, workers walked out more than once in 1933 and 1934, part of a wave of textile strikes that swept mill towns across the South. Their protests at Poe Mill won them a 15 percent pay raise, a rare concession from mill owners during the hardest years of the Depression.

A spinning mill ran for almost ninety years

Florence Mills bought the American Spinning Company's Mill No. 2 in 1926, keeping the plant running through the Depression and beyond. The mill finally shut down on June 27, 1990, after close to ninety years of spinning thread, making it one of the longest-running textile mills Greenville ever had. Its brick walls still stand three quarters of a mile from here, now home to a furniture maker.

Fire destroyed the Poe Mill after years empty

Less than a mile from here, the Poe Mill itself met a harder end. The plant had run from 1896 until 1977, then sat empty for 25 years before fire tore through it in 2003. Only its twin smokestacks are still standing on A Street, the rest of the mill gone.

An old spinning mill joined the National Register

The old spinning mill earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. The listing recognized a building that had outlasted nearly every other mill in the valley, even after the machines inside it went quiet.

Greenville County weathered repeated federal disaster declarations

Greenville County has taken its share of federal disaster declarations in recent years. The county was declared a disaster area for Hurricane Ian in 2022, for Hurricane Idalia in 2023, for Hurricane Helene in 2024, and for the Table Rock Fire Complex in 2025. None of these struck Sans Souci by name, but each closed out a stretch of hard weather across the county that holds it.

Officials proposed narrowing Old Buncombe Road to three lanes

In December 2024, state transportation officials came to Sans Souci Church on Old Buncombe Road, a few hundred feet from where you stand, to talk about a safety project. The plan would narrow the four-lane road to three lanes, aiming to slow traffic and cut down on crashes along a street that has carried cars, wagons, and mill workers for well over a century.

A mill-era valley became a subdivision and trail

The lot you're standing near was platted as part of the McCullough Heights subdivision, recorded with the county in 1995, a century after the first mill village rose along this river. Sans Souci, South Carolina itself has kept growing, counting 7,869 residents in the 2010 census and climbing past 8,500 by 2020, even as the industry that gave the village its start faded out.

Just over a mile from here, the Swamp Rabbit Trail now runs along an old railroad bed, part of a nearly twenty-mile path for walkers and cyclists that threads through Greenville and past Furman University. The rail line it follows once hauled the cotton these mills turned into cloth.