The Swamp Rabbit: A Railroad's Second Life
Near Greenville, South Carolina
The trail you might be riding or walking along follows a railroad that most people alive today never saw run. The Greenville and Northern Railway operated a twenty-three-mile route from downtown Greenville north to a logging camp called River Falls, passing through particularly swampy terrain in the foothills below the Blue Ridge. The line was cheaply built, and locals started calling it the Swamp Rabbit sometime in the eighteen eighties. A newspaper article from July eighteen ninety mentions a day trip on the Swamp Rabbit to Paris Mountain. The name stuck the way good names do.
The railroad traced its origins even further back to the Carolina, Knoxville and Western Railroad, incorporated in the eighteen eighties by investors who imagined connecting Augusta, Georgia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, via Greenville. The grand plan collapsed when funding ran out before the line reached River Falls. Those twenty-three miles were as far as it ever went. Reorganized in nineteen twenty as the Greenville and Northern, the line hauled forest products and general freight until traffic dried up and the rails went quiet.
Greenville County purchased the abandoned corridor in nineteen ninety-nine. After years of planning and a one-million-dollar donation from the Greenville Health System toward a two-point-seven-million-dollar budget, the trail opened in two thousand nine, running twenty-two miles from downtown Greenville north to Travelers Rest. Cyclists, walkers, runners, and families use it daily. The Swamp Rabbit name survived the transition from locomotive to sneakers and bicycle tires, carrying the history of a scrappy little railroad that never got where it was going but left something useful in its wake.
