Reedy River Falls: Where the City Began

You are standing at the heart of everything. The Reedy River drops about thirty feet here at these falls, and that plunge of water is the reason Greenville exists at all.

Long before any colonial settler arrived, the Cherokee people hunted and moved through this valley. The falls marked a crossing point, a landmark in a landscape the Catawba and Cherokee both knew well. European traders followed those paths into the Piedmont foothills in the mid-seventeen hundreds, and one of them, a Virginia fur trader named Richard Pearis, understood immediately what the falls meant: power. Around seventeen seventy, Pearis cleared about a hundred acres near these banks, planted grain and orchards, built a grist mill and a sawmill on the river, and called the place Great Plains. He had married into Cherokee society, which gave him access to land and trade routes few outsiders possessed. Then the American Revolution came, and Pearis chose the wrong side. He was a Loyalist. When the Patriots prevailed, the state of South Carolina confiscated everything he had built, and Pearis spent his final years as a planter in the Bahamas. The falls he had recognized as a prize passed to others.

The next critical figure was Vardry McBee, a saddlemaker and entrepreneur who purchased more than eleven thousand acres here in eighteen fifteen. McBee donated land for the first churches and schools, built flour and paper mills along the Reedy, and essentially scaffolded the civic skeleton of the city. Historians have called him the father of Greenville, South Carolina, and that is not an overstatement.

The river powered grist mills, then textile mills, then became an industrial drain running rank through a downtown that had turned its back on it. By the nineteen seventies these falls were hidden under a four-lane highway overpass. A garden club started buying land and clearing overgrowth in nineteen sixty-seven. Eventually a mayor, Knox White, pushed through the demolition of that bridge in two thousand one. Falls Park opened in two thousand four, and the city that had once forgotten this water was suddenly organizing its entire identity around it.

The single-cable Liberty Bridge above you, completed in two thousand four, spans three hundred fifty-five feet and is anchored entirely from one side. It cost thirteen and a half million dollars to build the park. Within a few years, that investment had catalyzed nearly six hundred million dollars in surrounding development.