Recovering the Piedmont Past: Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877–1941

Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2

RECOVERING THE PIEDMONT PAST, VOLUME 2

Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877–1941

Edited by Timothy P. Grady and Andrew H. Myers

Foreword by Melissa Walker

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2019 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-61117-922-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-61117-923-1 (ebook)

Front cover photograph: Main St., Greenville, South Carolina, c. 1902, courtesy of the Greenville County Library System

Contents

Foreword

The New South’s Encounters with the Nation and the World—Insights from the South Carolina Upcountry

Melissa Walker

Introduction

Andrew H. Myers and Timothy P. Grady

The Circus Is Coming to Town

The Golden Age of the Circus in the South Carolina Upcountry

Timothy P. Grady

Booker T. Washington, Spartanburg, and the Cherokee Springs Hotel

Andrew H. Myers

Paternalism run mad

The Subtreasury Debate, Ben Tillman, and the Farmers’ Alliance in the South Carolina Upcountry

Kevin Krause

The Scourge of the South

Pellagra and Poverty in Spartanburg’s Mill Villages

Diane C. Vecchio

Oh, my God, prosper this work

William Plumer Jacobs and the Thornwell Orphanage

Nancy Snell Griffith

Better Babies

Dr. Daniel Lesesne Smith, His Baby Hospitals, and the Southern Pediatric Seminar

Alexia Jones Helsley

From Sparta to Spartanburg

The Experience of Greek Americans in Spartanburg, South Carolina

Catherine G. Canino

Robert Quillen

An Upcountry Apostle for Small-Town Life

Marvin L. Cann

Crazed mystic in the White House

W. P. Beard, White Supremacy, and Opposition to World War I

Robert B. McCormick

From Fifth Avenue to the Dark Corner

The New York National Guard in Glassy Mountain Township, 1917–18

Jonathan K. Brooke

New Deal Communities

Table Rock State Park, Pickens County, and the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression

Christopher M. Bishop

Notes

Contributors

Index

Foreword

The New South’s Encounters with the Nation and the World—Insights from the South Carolina Upcountry

Melissa Walker

In 1886 the Atlanta Constitution’s managing editor Henry W. Grady delivered an address to the New England Club of New York City. He told the assembled business and political leaders that a new South had emerged, a South that embraced a diverse economy and racial moderation. Rising out of the ashes of the old South, which rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth, Grady proclaimed, a new South was enamored of her new work. That new work was nothing short of a complete modernization of the southern economy and social system. According to Henry Grady and other boosters, the South would soon take her place in the American mainstream. Grady became known as one of the leading advocates of a New South that, bolstered by northern investment in the South’s growing industrial economy, would achieve a full reintegration with the nation.¹

Historians have dubbed the period of southern history from the end of Reconstruction through World War II as the New South period. During this time southern farmers suffered grinding poverty born of volatile cotton prices, a scarcity of credit, and the rising costs of agricultural inputs and marketing. Southern leaders sought to relieve agricultural woes by recruiting industry to the region. The South also had shifts in local and state leadership during this period. Although the old planter class maintained much of its influence over southern states, economic and political leadership gradually shifted from rural to urban areas, and a new middle class of entrepreneurs, newspapermen, and businessmen emerged as the region’s most influential men. The New South became increasingly linked to national and international markets and transportation networks.²

Historians have spilled buckets of ink evaluating just how new this New South was. The historian Edward Ayers wrote, The New South appears far newer when we measure change by paying close attention to concrete differences in people’s lives instead of contrasting the region with the North’s more fortunate history or the claims of Southern boosters. The essays in this volume bear out Ayers’s assertion. While many elements of life in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Carolina upcountry echoed long-standing themes, old concerns played out in new ways, and many profound changes occurred. This book, the second collection inspired by Timothy P. Grady’s vision that examining unexplored moments in local history in light of the larger historiography can provide us with new and more complex insights into the southern past, proves that there is much more to learn about the New South. Ayers said that the history of the New South was … a history of continual redefinition and renegotiation, of unintended and unanticipated consequences, [and] of unresolved tensions. The essays in this volume demonstrate the complexity that Ayers described, sometimes confirming and sometimes overturning our notions about life in the South after redemption. A number of themes emerge.³

Of course, race is the most persistent theme in southern history. From the time of European contact and the opening of the Atlantic slave trade to the present time, contests over the meaning of race have shaped southern society. Numerous historians have illuminated the ways that white supremacy was reinforced during the New South period and in particular the extent to which concerns about race shaped reforms during the Progressive Era. After 1877 federal efforts to manage race relations in the South effectively ended, and the region’s whites set about to restore white supremacy and white control of the political order in southern states. Over the next twenty-five years, a series of legal maneuvers and social practices reinforced by racial violence stripped African Americans of political and economic rights.

These essays affirm the extent to which racial boundaries remained a central preoccupation for whites in the South Carolina upcountry and survey the many settings in which concerns about the meaning of race could play out. For example, Catherine G. Canino shows how Greek immigrants’ efforts to assimilate took place in the context of Ku Klux Klan campaigns against newcomers from southern and eastern Europe. Greek immigrants sought to prove they were ethnically white and assimilated to such a degree that white leaders openly praised them as model citizens. Timothy P. Grady demonstrates that circuses, symbols of modern forms of mass entertainment, also became a battlefield on which racial conflicts were fought. Andrew H. Myers explores the evolution of racial views in Spartanburg County as Jim Crow segregation became entrenched and racial tensions escalated throughout the South. Robert B. McCormick introduces us to William P. Beard, an outspokenly racist Abbeville newspaper editor whose World War I–era pro-German sentiments were rooted in multiple types of racial anxieties. Beard believed that allying with France and Britain, two nations that relied in part on mongrel colonial forces to fight Germany, posed a threat to white supremacy around the world, and he feared that at home war-time service would bring African Americans closer to full citizenship.

Another theme that is evident in these essays is the influence of religion in the New South. Evangelicalism was a growing force in the New South, and in spite of the segregation of churches and variations in worship practices, blacks and whites shared many Protestant beliefs. Churches exerted a strong influence over daily life in the New South, and religious concerns shaped many of the reforms of the Progressive Era. Whether it was in shaping rules of behavior at the circus or molding the pioneering approach to caring for orphans advanced by William Plumer Jacobs, evangelical churches wielded strong influence on life in the upcountry during the New South years.⁴

The case of Jacobs and the Thornwell orphanage offers one example of the preoccupation with modernization in the upcountry. Drawing on social-gospel ideas that Christians had an obligation to go beyond gaining converts and care for the material needs of people in their midst, a notion that gained steam in Europe and in the North during the Progressive Era, Jacobs rejected impersonal institutional approaches to caring for orphaned children. In her essay Nancy Snell Griffith shows how Jacobs fashioned a new type of orphanage, one modeled on those founded by German reformers that sought to re-create the nuclear family. He also adopted modern methods of ensuring funding for his orphanage, insisting on seeking national benefactors and establishing an endowment. Diane C. Vecchio and Alexia Jones Helsley explore similar concern with modernization evident in the work of public health reformers who sought to address the scourge of pellagra and to improve pediatric health in the upcountry. As these studies demonstrate, folks in the upcountry shared the faith in scientific expertise that characterized national Progressive reforms, and they sought out that expertise from places as distant as Europe.

The early twentieth-century South is often portrayed as an insular and parochial place, but as Canino demonstrates with Spartanburg’s Greek community, even outsiders could find a home in the New South upcountry, and those outsiders often came to exercise considerable influence over local life. Marvin L. Cann explores the life and work of Robert Quillen, a Kansas native who became a Fountain Inn newspaper publisher and editor as well as a columnist for national publications. Quillen embodied the conflicted relationship many upcountry residents had with a modernizing society. He extolled the virtues of small-town life but also rejected many traditional small-town values. Quillen did not practice evangelical Christianity, and he was openly critical of religious hypocrisy that he observed among many of his neighbors. He was also critical of the excessive influence wielded by many of Fountain Inn’s leading citizens.

Some of the essays in this volume explore the myriad ways that upcountry residents negotiated their relationships with the nation as a whole. Southerners often feared that the embrace of federal government aid would be a slippery slope to a resumption of federal intervention in the region’s race relations, but these essays demonstrate that southerners did not reject all forms of federal intervention outright. Not only did Spartanburg leaders seek out federal funding in the fight against pellagra, but in addition, many upcountry members of the Southern Farmers Alliance defied politicians such as South Carolina governor Ben Tillman by advocating the establishment of federal subtreasury warehouses for farm commodities throughout the state. Kevin Krause’s essay on the subtreasury debates in South Carolina and Vecchio’s on the establishment of the Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital complicate our understandings of white southerners’ relationship to the federal government in the New South period.

Anxieties about relations with the rest of the nation would only escalate with the arrival of World War I and the Great Depression. Abbeville editor William P. Beard railed against the Yankee capitalists he blamed for dragging the United States into World War I, even as upcountry leaders sought to bring military training camps to the area. Jonathan K. Brooke tells the story of New York soldiers who traveled to Greenville County’s Dark Corner for artillery training during World War I. Locals met this new generation of Yankees with a mixture of suspicion and welcome. Two decades later the residents of the area around Table Rock proved considerably less suspicious of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) personnel who came to build a state park in their midst. Christopher M. Bishop shows the way that the local community shaped CCC operations and the way the CCC altered local life.

Taken as a whole, these essays support the historian William A. Link’s conclusion that the South is a highly diverse region, often at odds with itself.⁵ That diversity and that internal conflict are writ large in these essays, which add rich texture to our understanding of the story of southern life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these upcountry case studies reveal, the New South, like a bride, carried something old and something new into her remarriage with the United States of America.

Introduction

Andrew H. Myers and Timothy P. Grady

This second volume of Recovering the Piedmont Past follows in the footsteps of the first by featuring unexplored moments in the local history of the South Carolina upcountry. Once again these are the stories left untold, either overlooked entirely or exploring new facets of familiar episodes or individuals in the region. The book’s essays concentrate on events that occurred and people who lived between the end of Reconstruction and the attack on Pearl Harbor. The settings are located within the part of the Palmetto State that stretches from the fall line to the mountains.

Geographically the upcountry encompasses the parts of the Appalachian Piedmont lying within the Palmetto State. Culturally its legacy of Scots-Irish settlers and yeoman farmers stands in contrast to that of the English planters and enslaved Africans who populated the lowcountry. Historically it has been defined as the areas of South Carolina not dominated by Charleston. Its boundaries have shifted westward over the centuries. Many counties of the lower Piedmont and inner coastal plain that were once considered part of the backcountry or the upcountry fell into the orbit of Columbia and the midlands. Meanwhile those located closer to the mountains became more integrated with the economies of neighboring states after the completion of railroads, especially the Air Line that in 1873 connected Atlanta, Georgia, to Charlotte, North Carolina, along the Interstate 85 corridor of the present day. The city of Spartanburg enjoyed particular prominence at the turn of the twentieth century because of the multiple lines intersecting there. Not until after World War II would it be eclipsed by Greenville.

Indeed, many of the developments in the upcountry during the period 1877 to 1941 were associated with railroad expansion. Other prevalent themes included the marginalization of African Americans through legal segregation, the Populist movement and the grinding poverty of cotton cultivation, the lives of white textile laborers and their inability to unionize, the efforts of Progressive reformers, and the economic stimulus of World War I and the New Deal. The stories unfolded against a backdrop of business boosterism, religious fundamentalism, industrial paternalism, political demagoguery, racial violence, and the legacy of the Civil War. Wilbur J. Cash, a native of the upcountry from Gaffney, applied many of these themes broadly in his 1941 book Mind of the South.¹

Like Cash, more recent scholars have seen the region as a key to unlocking the mysteries of southern distinctiveness, particularly in the areas of economic and political history. They include Bruce Eelman, whose Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry examines merchants and manufacturers in Spartanburg; Stephen West, whose From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry chronicles the development of an industrial working class; and W. Scott Poole, whose Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry analyzes the connection between the mythology of the Lost Cause and the consolidation of white political power. These built upon earlier works such as Lacy Ford’s Origins of Southern Radicalism in the South Carolina Upcountry, Scott Nelson’s Iron Confederacies, and David Carlton’s Mill and Town in South Carolina.²

Practitioners of social history have mined the regional past less extensively but with notable success. In his pioneering book In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions, Orville Vernon Burton used quantitative data from the middle to late 1800s to call into question broader southern stereotypes about race and family structure. Melissa Walker drew upon oral histories in All We Knew Was to Farm to reveal how women in places such as the South Carolina upcountry responded to industrialization, the commercialization of agriculture, and the increasing role of government agencies in personal lives during the period between the two world wars. Among other sources, W. J. Megginson relied on denominational records for his African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900. In Living a Big War in a Small Place, Philip Racine painted a picture of the home front in Spartanburg during the Civil War using sources such as town council minutes, newspaper articles, personal letters, and an important diary of an upcountry farmer that he had previously edited. As with those to the first volume of Recovering the Piedmont Past, the contributors to this second collection tap into similarly rich veins of material using the techniques of social historians.³

The nonfiction literature about the upcountry past also features works produced by individuals and organizations seeking primarily to educate or entertain a broad, local audience. Though suffering from an ailment that cost him his vision and ultimately his life at forty-eight years of age, Elmer Don Herd compiled a collection of historical and biographical sketches about the region.⁴ Archie Vernon Huff and Ray Belcher both produced works about the city and county of Greenville, as has one of the contributors to this volume, Alexia Jones Helsley.⁵ Lowry Ware, Anne Collins, Fitz Hugh McMaster, Thomas H. Pope, Doyle W. Boggs, and Allan D. Charles have in relatively recent decades narrated the histories of Abbeville, Chester, Fairfield, Newberry, Spartanburg, and Union Counties, respectively.⁶ Jerry Lee West has told the story of the Ku Klux Klan in York County, while Tom Moore Craig has transcribed and edited the letters written by his Spartanburg ancestors during the Civil War.⁷ Arcadia Publishing and the History Press have issued postcard books about various upcountry communities as well as subjects of regional interest such as Talmadge Johnson’s Ghosts of the South Carolina Upcountry.⁸ Inspired by the Federal Writers’ Project of the New Deal, the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg has produced an impressive backlist that includes histories of textile mill villages and military encampments.⁹ The Kennedy Free Press of the Spartanburg County Public Library publishes books on local topics that use sources from its archival collections.¹⁰ Other valuable works have come about through the efforts of historical societies, genealogical organizations, and museums.

The contributors to this volume of Recovering the Piedmont Past do not seek to overturn any paradigms or supplant local efforts. In fact, the majority of them belong to communities in the upcountry. Like modernist painters from this same bygone era, they probe familiar boundaries and underlying realities from fresh, often surprising angles. For example, Timothy P. Grady explains how the growth of railroads contributed to the popularity of circuses. He discusses how this amusement drew people together and exposed them to new technologies while sometimes dividing them along religious, political, and racial lines.

The vulgar comments about niggers made by South Carolina senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman after Booker T. Washington dined at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt remain notorious.¹¹ Less well known are the three visits that Washington made to the upcountry or the rumors that spread during 1907 that he planned to build a school for blacks at Cherokee Springs. Andrew H. Myers documents how the relationship between Washington and upper-class whites of the upcountry evolved during the first decade of the twentieth century.

In his essay about Tillman’s tenure as governor, Kevin Krause casts the Edgefield native not as an agent of change but as an opponent of a subtreasury plan that other Populists in the upcountry viewed as a way to alleviate the plight of cotton farmers. Diane C. Vecchio illuminates the lives of sharecroppers and mill workers with her article about the Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital. In addition, she discusses how the doctors who ran the facility came under criticism from local business boosters who feared for the town’s reputation and who did not want to admit that the economic system contributed to the disease’s prevalence.

Nancy Snell Griffith engages with the social gospel in her study of the Reverend William Plumer Jacobs and his founding in 1875 of the Thornwell Orphanage. The Laurens County facility’s organization along family lines and emphasis on education placed it at the cutting edge of Progressive ideas about the upbringing of children. Alexia Jones Helsley views progressivism through a secular lens in her essay about Daniel Lesesne Smith, a physician whose treatment clinic and summer training seminars helped establish pediatrics as a medical specialty within the United States.

Catherine G. Canino introduces readers to an altogether different group of businessmen. These were Greek immigrants who settled in Spartanburg during the early 1900s and who came to dominate the area’s food-service industry. Canino says that the newcomers gained rapid acceptance and were able to retain their ethnic distinctiveness because white southerners had a romanticized affinity for ancient Greece. Through this argument she gives a unique twist to Wilbur J. Cash’s claim that southern whites shared a proto-Dorian bond.¹²

Mind of the South and its author are so well known that, despite their Cherokee County roots, an essay about them would be inappropriate for a book about unexplored moments. The same could be said for Ben Robertson or Thomas Dixon.¹³ Marvin L. Cann writes instead about another upcountry writer, Robert Quillen, who gained national acclaim but is less remembered. Quillen moved to Greenville County in 1911 and published a weekly newspaper, the Fountain Inn Tribune, until his death in 1948. Quillen emphasized the decline of small-town values as the region became industrialized and less rural.

Robert B. McCormick writes about a more controversial newspaper editor from the upcountry, William P. Beard. Beard, who published the Scimitar from Abbeville, was the only South Carolinian during World War I to be convicted and imprisoned under the Espionage Act. McCormick analyzes how Beard’s ideas about race, the economics of cotton, and Woodrow Wilson were tied to the antiwar writings that became the source of his legal difficulties.

World War I proved to be a boon for the upcountry, with armed-forces installations such as Camps Sevier and Wadsworth becoming sources of jobs, customers, and federal contracts. Jonathan K. Brooke takes an unusual approach to this topic by concentrating on the U.S. Army rifle and artillery range near Glassy Mountain in Greenville County. Here, National Guardsmen from New York conducted field maneuvers and came in contact with people who lived in the Dark Corner and had a reputation for making moonshine liquor.

Although the time span of Bridging the Centuries comes to a close before the start of World War II, Christopher M. Bishop demonstrates through his study of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Pickens County that the martial regimentation of this program helped prepare young men for subsequent service in the military. Bishop goes further to show that the CCC, which is ordinarily used by historians as an example of the New Deal’s radical potential, actually served to inculcate traditional values regarding gender.

Advances in technology have allowed contributors to leverage their sources in powerful, unprecedented ways. The sheer number of newspapers from upcountry cities and towns is breathtaking. Many of these journals are available online for no additional cost through the Library of Congress Chronicling America site or the South Carolina Digital Newspaper Project. Some can be found at the Google News Archive. Others can be purchased for modest fees through newspapers.com, genealogybank.com, and newspaperarchive.com. Not only have these sources become more accessible, but they are also searchable and easier to cross-reference. These qualities facilitate discovery of articles from nonextant issues of upcountry newspapers that were reprinted in Columbia and Charleston, and they facilitate the piecing together of narratives that hitherto had been lost.

The historical figures whose biographies are in this volume have gained bone and sinew from records such as manuscript census, death certificates, and draft registration cards available through genealogical subscription services such as ancestry.com. Quite a few public libraries and colleges in the upcountry have established their own electronic archives containing photographs and documents of local interest, for example, town council minutes. The South Carolina Department of Archives and History has a growing collection of digitized materials that include nomination forms for the National Register of Historical Places received by the State Historic Preservation Office. Even if the materials are too voluminous to digitize completely or upload, online finding aids allow researchers to pinpoint and frequently obtain what they need through the mail or interlibrary loans.

In terms of subject matter, this book connects the late 1800s to the early 1900s. In terms of method, it joins the social history of the late 1900s with the technology of the 2000s. The title Bridging the Centuries thus has dual meaning.

The Circus Is Coming to Town

The Golden Age of the Circus in the South Carolina Upcountry

Timothy P. Grady

As the sun rose over Anderson, South Carolina, on Saturday, November 5, 1898, the town already buzzed with activity.¹ According to a report published in the local newspaper, Even before the appearance of the first streaks of dawn the rumble of wheels broke the stillness of night and up to 11 o’clock wagons containing five, ten and fifteen people rolled in from every direction. Special trains arranged by local railroad companies steamed into town packed with excited visitors who took advantage of the half-price rates charged that day. By the time the circus parade began, the business district and public square around the Anderson County Courthouse were packed with an estimated twelve thousand people. J. F. Clinkscales and C. C. Langston, the editors and owners of the Anderson Intelligencer who wrote that account, almost certainly stood outside their offices on the main square across from the courthouse to witness the spectacle. The Forepaugh & Sells Bros. Circus had come to town.²

The circus’s visit to Anderson was a highlight of the year for many residents. By the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it and other circus companies such as the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Baily, and the Cole Bros. Circus, just to name some of the larger productions, made the upcountry of South Carolina a regular stop on their seasonal tours of the nation. The largest shows traveled along the vast network of railroad lines that linked practically every corner of the bustling country, bringing forms of entertainment that captivated audiences drawn from miles in every direction. Exotic animals, skilled acrobats, technological marvels, and scores of strange, bizarre, and amazing demonstrations bedazzled spectators who represented in microcosm the entirety of upcountry society. The crowds that flooded into the towns were drawn from the rich and poor, educated and uneducated, black and white, farmers and factory workers. For them, the circus represented a momentary break from uniformity, a chance to see new things. It was, as the circus historian Linda Simon observed, dazzling and fantastic, a living cabinet of wonders, a theatre of the improbable and the impossible, an escape from reality—not only the escape afforded by a few hours of diversion but escape from the circumscribed reality of one’s daily life.³

Circuses had not always found the eager receptions from community leaders they enjoyed by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the years after the Civil War, while the shows were not unknown to the residents of the South Carolina upcountry, they were frowned upon as an immoral influence and a waste of time and money. Over time, as their number and size grew, attitudes changed. Local communities began to welcome the temporary diversion of a circus visit. Community leaders began to herald the coming of the event months in advance; a decision by a circus to bypass one town for another was greeted with dismay; and families in the various counties began to save their pennies in anticipation of the fall, knowing that the extravaganza would soon be there. The circus came to be an accepted part of local life, and the towns adapted to the event. Businesses geared their advertisements around the excitement created by the circus; local factories shut down to allow their workers and families to attend; and school districts closed their doors to allow students to witness the inevitable parade.

Just as upcountry communities adapted to the circus as a part of their annual experiences, circuses were quick to adapt to the changing political, social, and technological nature of the upcountry. As the region changed, the circus, as it did around the nation, evolved to keep up. It became a tool in the bitter racial politics of the times, came to conform to religious concerns, and changed with the rapidly evolving technological context of the times. In short, the circus became a unique fixture in American culture, what Janet M. Davis described as a vast, cosmopolitan cultural form [that] was the product of the same economic and social forces that were transforming other areas of American life.⁴ But to the residents of the upcountry, it took on unique aspects of their own lives, was used to influence community affairs, and affected each locale in ways peculiar to that particular area.

The Forepaugh & Sells Bros. Circus, which visited Anderson, South Carolina, that bright November Saturday in 1898, was one of the larger companies touring the country by rail in the late nineteenth century. Circuses began experimenting with the use of railroad transportation from the 1830s on, but due to the difficulty and expense of rail travel at that time, they were largely unsuccessful. With the expansion of the railroads across the nation after the Civil War, however, circuses were quick to begin adapting their operations to take advantage of the expanded markets. Only one year after the veteran circus proprietors Dan Castello and William C. Coup partnered with legendary showman P. T. Barnum to create a traveling circus, in 1872 they moved their new show to the railroad by buying their own fleet of specially designed cars to solve the logistical problems of transporting all of the various component parts of a vastly complex circus. Others soon followed, and by 1910 the two biggest circus operations, the Ringling Bros. show and the Barnum & Bailey circus, used their own special trains consisting of eighty-four railway cars. Theirs were only two of the over thirty circuses traveling by rail.⁵

The South Carolina upcountry benefited from access to these new railroad circuses thanks to the expansion and consolidation of the railroads that occurred in the years immediately before and after the Civil War. The railroad reached the upcountry in the decade and a half before 1860. The Greenville and Columbia Railroad had successfully linked both Anderson and Greenville to the rest of the state through the Saluda River Valley, with the first trains steaming into town in Anderson in 1848 and Greenville by 1853.⁶ Farther north it took until 1859 for the Spartanburg and Union Railroad to complete the ten-year effort that successfully linked the town of Spartanburg into the larger railroad network through the Broad River Valley. In the years after the war, new projects such as the Charlotte and Atlanta Air-Line Railroad linked Spartanburg, Greenville, and Anderson to the national transportation system, while smaller communities such as Gaffney, Walhalla, and Pickens benefited from their locations along the main lines or on spur lines.⁷ By the 1880s the South Carolina upcountry was fully connected to the rest of the nation.

The circus visiting Anderson that Saturday in 1898 was typical of the larger shows of the time. A few months before that date, representatives of the circus visited the town to make arrangements for the site, to make payment to the local city or county government for the circus license, and to scout the route for the parade that was so much a part of every circus until many of the larger operations abandoned the tradition in the mid-1920s.⁸ A few weeks before the show, a team of bill men arrived in Anderson to plaster every available wall, billboard, and fence with posters and to arrange advertising with the local newspapers. Railroads announced special trains to bring people in from as far away as Walhalla and Mc-Cormick, South Carolina. Soon the whole town was simmering with excitement.⁹

The day of the event dawned in Anderson with the circus train and its seventy-four railcars having arrived hours earlier at the Greenville and Columbia Railroad depot on East Boundary Street. By November 5 the Forepaugh & Sells Bros. Circus had been touring for twenty-eight weeks, giving shows in different towns every day except Sundays. Sundays were reserved as days of rest, repair, and often recuperation for the just under two thousand performers, trainers, and workers who made the circus their home. According to Walter Taylor, a reporter from the Atlanta Journal embedded with the circus, by the time they performed in Anderson, the routine mechanisms of the operation were a fine-tuned machine. As he put it, It would take President [William] McKinley a week to unload that train. Yet the boss canvas man James Jordan accomplished it in less than two hours and all without a profane word, a harsh word or a rough act in the whole transaction. It was a case of hustle from start to finish.¹⁰

Circus day in Spartanburg, S.C., 1904. Courtesy

of the Spartanburg County (S.C.) Public Libraries.

Jordan proceeded from the depot to the circus lot, which was to be located on the property of Maj. Benjamin Franklin Whitner, a leading citizen of Anderson, directly behind his Rose Hill estate. Jordan measured a flat area that was 320 feet long and 110 feet wide, with three equidistant spots marked for the massive poles, the tallest in the middle, that would hold the weight of the tent. Once the tent was up, with sides open for spectators to navigate easily in and out, the workers and trainers moved in the various animals of the menagerie, some in cages and some, for example the elephants, driven by their trainers. All of the hundreds of animals that were not to be part of the parade were quickly in place to serve as a display or to wait until the appropriate moment to be moved into the main tent during the show.¹¹

Once the arrangements for the menagerie were complete, Jordan moved 15 feet from the side of that tent and began measuring for the even grander show tent. This one extended 437 feet in length and was supported by three even larger poles with a forest of smaller poles supporting the sides, this time closed. Inside laborers hurried about raising the bleachers for the circus-goers, setting in place the enormous rings for the acts, and stringing up the intricate network of lines and trapezes for the acrobats. Surrounding both tents was an army of workers, each with an individual, carefully prescribed task to complete to ensure that the show happened on time, every time. A cooking post served a hearty breakfast to everyone. A busy blacksmith shop turned out stakes, repaired equipment, and outfitted animals as necessary. William Star Chambers and Patsy Meagher Forepaugh oversaw the elephants. Jack Shumate took charge of the horses and oversaw the young attendants who cared for four each—quite the job, given that the horses accompanying the circus numbered four hundred. All told, the tasks went smoothly thanks to the expertise of the circus owners and organizers.¹²

Back at the railroad depot, the various actors, animals, and attractions that made up the circus parade were being prepared with equal skill. By 11:00 A.M. the entire formation was set up in the lot to the south of the trains. Almost due east from the depot, Whitner Street ran straight through the heart of Anderson and the public square around the county courthouse. Thousands of spectators lined the street on both sides to witness the spectacle. Allen Sells, a nephew of the circus proprietors, oversaw the entire operation, and exactly on time he climbed into the ornate buggy that would lead the procession and off they went. As described by Walter Taylor, Mr. Sells jumped into [the] buggy, and riding behind three mounted policemen he started the parade. Roman soldiers, riders, elephants, wild beasts, bands of music and a hundred other things followed him. At the end of the parade came the crowd favorites: The clowns were surrounded by mobs of boys, and last came the calliope. A young man played on this machine almost constantly. His favorite was ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’ … [and the] steam issuing from the smoke stack made this tune very appropriate. The circus had arrived.¹³

Scenes like this played out in the upcountry of South Carolina and across the country every fall, making the circus a vibrant part of American popular culture on a national scale. Yet the circus also became a reflection of life in the upcountry, adapting itself to the evolving social fabric of the local communities and the larger region. One particular area to which the circus adapted was the increasingly tense race relations in the decades after the Civil War. During Reconstruction a political union between freed blacks and white Republicans in 1868 led to Republican control of the state government until 1876. In the election of that year, Wade Hampton III and his Red Shirt Democrats took control of the state government in an election fraught with irregularities, a situation that led to the existence of two rival governments, one Democratic and the other Republican, that continued until April 1877.¹⁴

In this tense political environment, circuses began to find their way into the South Carolina upcountry and soon became embroiled in the struggle. As early as 1875, Democratic-leaning newspapers such as the Anderson Intelligencer were printing racist and derogatory anecdotes using the circus