Anderson City Council will consider whether to send to the Planning Commission a proposal to annex about 9.36 acres at 305 Edgebrook Drive for a subdivision of 15 houses, most on lots of roughly one-third of an acre, with none smaller than one-fourth of an acre.

It also makes Anderson the only county in the nation with such a potentially politicized method of zoning.

Born near Honea Path in 1896, Johnston was the son of farm-and-mill parents, and the world he came from never really left him. As a boy, he worked in textile mills and on the farm, then pushed his way through the Textile Industrial Institute, Wofford College, and the University of South Carolina by working odd jobs along the way. That hard road mattered politically: Johnston spent the rest of his life presenting himself, and being received, as one of the people he served rather than a polished outsider looking down from above.

Under the direction of Mill Town Players founder Will Ragland—who boasts a long history with this production—the performers manage to do the truly hard thing: they make their roles feel not merely inhabited, but nearly synonymous with themselves. The company’s energy is at its most potent when it treats these characters as if they were not theatrical inventions at all, but rather the natural products of a raffish little universe that has always been there, just waiting for the right actors to walk into it.

Robert Anderson was the kind of frontier figure who appears, in retrospect, to have been made for county names: soldier, surveyor, landholder, legislator, church elder, and the sort of man around whom local history gathers like weather. In Anderson County, where the city and the county both bear his name, he is remembered not so much as a polished statesman than as a Revolutionary back-country patriarch whose life ran alongside the making of the upcountry itself.

As a new school year begins, the Anderson Career and Technology Center is entering it with a stronger front porch, a bigger footprint and a long list of ambitions that would make a conventional high school blush. The center, which serves students from Anderson School Districts 1 and 2, has added parking, is preparing for a new welding and auto collision facility, and is trying to keep pace with a student population that has filled the school to capacity.

The reopening also serves as the finale to Mill Town Players’ 12th season, and Ragland chose a musical that would feel celebratory without being merely nostalgic. “Guys & Dolls,” with its gamblers, showgirls and durable songs, offered that balance.

Anderson County Council moved ahead Tuesday night on a slate of development and infrastructure measures that included approvals for two major industrial projects, a new county hazardous-materials employee, a continued push to slow data-center development, major updates at Green Pond Landing and Events Center, and the beginning of a large amphitheater renovation tied to a public-private concert partnership.

Anderson is the only county in the United States that utilizes voting precincts to determine land use zoning boundaries. Because voting precincts are drawn based on population density for political representation—and must be reapportioned after every census—tying land-use regulations to these political lines creates a logistical challenge.

Anderson School District Five’s board is set to take up a routine but wide-ranging agenda Tuesday night, including financial reports, policy revisions, a modified school calendar, and several staffing and facilities matters. The 6:30 p.m. meeting at the district’s administrative office will also include discussion of student meal accounts, screen time, and an employee survey planned for a future work session.

Anderson County Council will vote on third reading a shoring up of laws related to conservation subdivision standards, what qualifies as a short-term rental property, as well as tax incentive agreements Athrex and International Vitamin Corporation/Nutra Manufacturing, LLC., and a pair of bids to increase tourism.

Anderson County began in 1826, when the sprawling Pendleton District—then encompassing what are now Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties—became too large for practical governance. Travel for court business had become difficult to manage in Pendleton, and the legislature divided the district, naming the new counties for Revolutionary War figures Andrew Pickens and Robert Anderson, two men Drake described as inseparable in life and honored in death.

The new 240,000-square-foot Pendleton High School is opening in August, and with it comes the moving of Riverside Middle School into the former high school building, a reshuffling made possible by land purchased more than a decade ago and by a $115 million referendum approved in 2023.

Honea Path officially opened the newest feature of Dogwood Park on Saturday with a ribbon-cutting for the new Open-Air Pavilion. The new community gathering space is designed to host a variety of events throughout the year, including festivals, concerts, community celebrations, educational programs, markets, and other special events.

The signs for the new Richard A. Shirley Memorial Parkway were unveiled as family and local officials remembered the man who served as Anderson Mayor, city councilman and County Clerk of Court.

For 37 years, the Electrolux Anderson plant has been tied to food preservation. But after April’s announcement of a long-term North American partnership with Midea, the Chinese appliance giant, a reordering of production that will move the Anderson factory away from refrigerators and toward laundry equipment.

Anderson School District 1 heads back to school this year with a revamped elementary school lineup thanks to the opening of Oak Hill Elementary, which gives the district a ninth elementary school and, at least in Powdersville, a more conventional K-5 structure after years of a split arrangement that divided younger and older elementary students between Concrete and Powdersville Elementary

The East-West Parkway will be named after former Anderson Mayor Richard A. Shirley, who also served on city council and Anderson County Clerk of Court, in a ceremony at 10 a.m. at the roadway’s Francis M. Crowder Park.

Anderson County is preparing for an unusually compressed and unusually consequential election calendar following the death of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., which will trigger a special Republican primary to choose a candidate for the general-election ballot. The primary is set for Aug. 11, with a runoff, if needed, on Aug. 25.

Anderson School District 3 operates five schools: three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. It also shares the Anderson Institute of Technology with Anderson districts 4 and 5, a facility Hipp described as a major benefit both for space at Crescent High School and for career and college readiness. AIT was built, Hipp said, through a deliberate planning process that matched programs to workforce needs in the region.