Bicentennial Highlights Museum’s Key Role in Preserving County’s History

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

A county can mark two hundred years with a parade, a fireworks display, a new book or a speech beneath a shiny, renovated historic courthouse, but it will only remember those two centuries if somebody has been saving the evidence.

At the Anderson County Museum, is caretaker of the community’s accumulated life: photographs, maps, dresses, household objects, military keepsakes, business records, school stories, fairgrounds, cotton-mill artifacts and things so ordinary that they become remarkable only after the people who used them are gone.

The museum’s role in Anderson County’s bicentennial is therefore both ceremonial and practical. It is helping organize the celebration, but it has also spent more than four decades collecting the raw material from which the county’s public memory is made.

The institution now occupies a 26,000-square-foot facility, with 12,000 square feet of gallery space and a collection of more than 35,000 artifacts. It is an unusually expansive and ambitious museum for a city the size of Anderson.

But it all started with a display case in the hallway of the old courthouse downtown.

“That’s actually the very seed of the thing,” said Donna Roper, a historian and one of the museum’s early organizers.

The desire for a home for a county history museum began in the late 1970s, when members of the Anderson County Historical Society, Anderson Heritage and other local preservation advocates began discussing the possibility of a dedicated place for historical artifacts.

Among the people central to that effort were Beth Ann Klosky, a journalist then president of the Anderson County Historical Society and known as “The Anderson County Historian;” John Wall, associated with Anderson Heritage; Journalist Hurley Badders, then director of the Pendleton District Commission; and Fred Whitten, an assistant county treasurer whose interest in local history became one of the museum’s earliest sources of momentum.

Whitten worked in the old courthouse and was an energetic advocate for historical preservation. Before the museum had rooms, exhibits or a collection of its own, he obtained permission to place a glass-front display in the courthouse hallway.

“It was a display in the hallway that Fred did,” Roper said.

The precise form of that furniture has become a small historical mystery. Roper, who never saw it, said it was described as a large cabinet or hutch with a glass front. But what matters is that the case made history visible in a public building. The museum had not yet been created, but the idea had been placed where people could see it.

The museum did not, as is sometimes reported, begin in a single room. When its organizers formally approached County Council for space, they were given the former sheriff’s-office suite in the basement of the old courthouse. The transfer occurred Oct. 23, 1983 — a date the museum will soon mark as its 43rd anniversary.

Visitors at that time could enter through an exterior door near Main Street without gaining access to the rest of the courthouse. Inside, there was a small office area with a desk and a donated copier, a larger room for displays, a storage room and another exhibit space beyond it.

“It had an outside door, which is why they gave us that one so we could be open on weekends,” Roper said.

The arrangement was humble, but it had the essential ingredients of a museum: space, volunteers, artifacts and people willing to decide that the things they had inherited were worth keeping.

At first, the museum did not own a collection. Anderson Heritage and the Anderson County Historical Society supplied items from their holdings, while staff from the Pendleton District Commission helped develop and install the displays. Volunteers, many of them members of the historical society, sustained the operation.

Then the public began to respond.

“The museum started its own collection almost immediately because when people found out that it was there, they brought us stuff,” Roper said.

The earliest displays included objects donated or loaned by the historical groups, Whitten and local collector Wayne Broadwell. There were photographs, old kitchen tools, small household objects, an antique doughnut maker and an antebellum dress that remains in the museum’s collection and appeared in the original courthouse exhibitions.

“Mostly little doodads,” Roper said, using the affectionate phrase that often describes the objects from which a museum’s larger narrative is eventually assembled.

Those doodads, of course, are never merely doodads. A kitchen implement can illuminate domestic labor. A dress can reveal social expectations, textile practices and family memory. A photograph can preserve a vanished storefront or a face whose name would otherwise disappear. A county museum’s collections grow not only through grand artifacts but through the recognition that ordinary lives leave evidence behind.

By the late 1990s, the museum had outgrown the courthouse basement. As discussions began over a new library, county leaders considered relocating the museum to the former Anderson County Library building. The move gained support from county officials, including the county leadership at the time, and the museum eventually opened in its present location in 2003.

For Beverly Childs, the museum’s executive director, the move was transformative.

“Here we are in a 26,000-square-foot facility with 12,000 square feet of gallery space,” Childs said, an extraordinary expansion from a courthouse hallway cabinet. There is also not enough space.

“We’re out of space,” Childs said. “We’re out of storage space. We’re out of exhibit space.”

That is the peculiar fate of a successful history museum: the more a community trusts it with its past, the more urgently it needs room.

Childs joined the museum in January 2008 and during her tenure, the museum’s collection has grown beyond 35,000 artifacts, including cataloged with photographs. It has also developed a more deliberately artifact-driven approach to exhibitions.

The galleries are not fixed. Objects are moved into storage, brought back out and placed in new contexts. A visitor who returns after several months may find a familiar artifact missing, or perhaps discover an item that had spent years waiting in a collection room.

“Museums, directors and curators are never finished,” Roper said. “You always have more to catalog and more to work on, and you run out of storage space and office space and everything else. It’s always an ongoing thing. It’s not something that’s stationary or static.”

The museum’s education exhibit, which includes the history of desegregation in Anderson County, Anderson University, Rosenwald Schools and older county schools, is scheduled for a major overhaul beginning around February 2027. The façade will remain, but the interior will be remade with a new interpretive approach and additional interactive features.

The exhibit has been part of the museum since Childs arrived in 2008, alongside the “Turbines and Textiles” gallery. The coming renovation will preserve the premise that education is part of the county’s story while reconsidering how that story is told.

The museum has made similar efforts to build interaction into its galleries. A plasma globe installed in “Turbines and Textiles” has become a favorite among children and adults alike. The SPARK Station, a STEM-oriented children’s learning space, gives young visitors room to play with puppets, trains and other hands-on activities.

Childs said the museum’s children’s programs now draw roughly 25 to 40 children a week, not including those who attend the Electric City Kids program on the third Saturday of the month.

The goal is not to turn history into a screen or a spectacle, but to make the past tactile enough that visitors can recognize it as something that belonged to people like them.

Every museum employee has a favorite artifact or gallery, though asking one to choose can be like asking a parent to identify a favorite child.

“You’re asking me what my favorite dog is,” Childs said, laughing as she responded to the question.

Childs said one enduring favorite among visitors is a miniature replica of the Sally Rose House, a detailed model of a local home built in 1948. The actual house and its furnishings are gone, but the miniature preserves the scale, rooms, furniture and atmosphere of an Anderson residence from another era. Visitors can press buttons to illuminate parts of the house.

Childs said her own favorite changes over time. For years, it was the Trade Street exhibit, the first major gallery installed after she arrived and the first for which she raised money through the Friends of the Anderson County Museum Board. The exhibit includes an important 1840s stoneware known as “The Orr Edgefield Jar, one of those objects that draws visitors who have come specifically to see it.

More recently, Childs has favored “Andersonians in War,” an exhibit she believes could hold its own in museums anywhere in the country. The $600,000 project, paid for through fundraising rather than county operating funds, tells the stories of county residents who served in different wars. It includes interactive features and a hologram, but its emotional center may be Veterans Hall, which allows local military service to be recognized in a public setting.

Roper placed her uncle’s information in Veterans Hall and later took a photograph beside it. He died about a year ago at age 93.

Dustin Norris, the museum’s curator, arrived in 2015 while the “Roots of History” exhibit was being installed. The first exhibition a curator works on, he said, often retains a special hold. But he, too, singled out “Andersonians in War” as evidence of what the museum has become capable of doing.

“It’s a great exhibit to show how far the museum has come,” Norris said. “The ways that we’re able to implement new technology into the gallery and interactivity for people, and also just the quality stories.”

The large Anderson County Fair “King of Mirth” exhibit near the museum entrance also attracts visitors of every age. It was created by Leonard King, an engineer who built its rides, attractions and signs from memory and imagination. It does not reproduce one particular fair; it evokes the fair as an experience — the rides, booths, crowds and carnival logic that linger in family memory long after the actual fairgrounds are gone.

“It’s not one fair, but it’s the fair as an idea,” Norris said.

Children press their faces toward the glass. Adults do the same.

“They are places where we always expect to see nose prints and forehead prints on the glass,” Norris said of the fair exhibit.

The exhibit is handmade and intricate enough that visitors sometimes point out spelling mistakes in its hand-lettered signs. The museum has no intention of correcting them.

“That’s his work,” Childs said. “That’s his handwriting, which makes it so special.”

The Roper Research Room offers another version of the museum’s work. It is not arranged around a narrative display or a grand artifact, but instead is a place for patient inquiry.

The room contains files on local houses, churches, businesses, and other subjects; local and family-history books; maps; photographs; access to the museum’s collection database; and materials for people researching genealogy or the history of an older home.

“We have all kinds of stuff,” Roper said, for whom the room is named.

Among the holdings are Sanborn fire-insurance maps, which document the materials, footprint and arrangement of buildings in extraordinary detail. The maps were originally created for insurers assessing fire risk, but they have become invaluable tools for local historians, including those in Anderson, trying to identify vanished homes, former businesses and old industrial structures.

The maps mark whether a building was made of stone, brick or wood. They show the cotton mills in detail. They can help settle questions that survive nowhere else in the archive.

“We’ve been trying to figure out where Judge Reed’s house exactly was on South Main,” Roper said. “That’s fun to look at and say, ‘Oh, it was at that little block painted pink.’”

While the county's history can often be found in the obvious places: courthouses, cemeteries, battlefields and monuments. But it also survives in a faded insurance map, a family photograph, a handwritten label on a kitchen tool or a file folder about a house that no longer stands.

Anderson County’s bicentennial has given the museum a visible role in a larger year of commemoration. The county’s 200th anniversary and the continuing South Carolina 250 observance have converged, placing local and state history in the same celebratory frame.

The bicentennial efforts began last year, Childs said, when the Museum Advisory Committee raised money for a Robert Anderson marker at Old Stone Church. Other major projects include renovations to the historic courthouse, where the restored clock tower’s copper trim and roof have become a visual centerpiece downtown.

“If you haven’t been down Main Street and looked up at the clock tower, you must do that,” Childs said. “It is absolutely stunning.”

The year’s programming has included Carolina Day in June, with demonstrations of early crafts such as weaving and blacksmithing. A drone show at Celebrate Anderson, highlighted the county and its municipalities.

The bicentennial parade, highlighting all of the county’s towns and villages and other historic events, is scheduled for Oct. 4, and Childs said businesses and others are still invited to create floats.

“It is the one opportunity for our community to participate in a bicentennial parade,” she said. “Because I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be around for the next one.”

A 618-page county history book is scheduled for release later in October. Childs noted that the manuscript had already been cut by approximately 300 pages before going to print — evidence that a county’s past rarely submits gracefully to a page limit.

The county’s actual bicentennial date is Dec. 20, though the celebration has unfolded across the year. The museum’s work is an appropriate model for the anniversary itself. A bicentennial is not celebrated in a single day; but in various events and milestones scheduled to help the public notice how much of the past remains unfinished.

The museum is also looking beyond the county line. After hosting the South Carolina State Museum Board of Trustees in March, the Anderson County Museum was invited to develop a temporary exhibit for the State Museum in Columbia.

The State Museum has opened a Revolutionary-era exhibition and a community gallery connected to the South Carolina 250 observance. Anderson County’s display, expected to open in July 2027, will introduce statewide audiences to Robert Anderson, the county’s Revolutionary infrastructure, the General’s Road and the museum itself.

“It’s a really exciting opportunity,” Norris said. “We want to use it to introduce the rest of the state not only to our museum, what we can do here, but also to our background.”

The exhibit will invite Anderson County residents to travel to Columbia, but it is also intended to encourage visitors in Columbia to come north and see the museum at its home base.

That ambition reflects what the museum has become, not simply a repository for objects from the past, but a cultural institution arguing that a county’s history belongs in the larger story of the state.

The Anderson County Museum is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Admission is free.

That free admission is possible because the museum operates as a department of Anderson County. The county maintains the building and pays staff salaries, while the museum raises money for exhibitions, programs and special projects.

“Every County Council since 1978 has believed in preserving this history,” Childs said.

The education-exhibit renovation has more than $200,000 in privately raised funds behind it. “Andersonians in War” was funded through approximately $600,000 in fundraising. The plasma globe, children’s programming and many other features have also depended on donations and Friends of the Museum support.

The Friends Board’s next “Party with the Past” fundraiser is scheduled for Jan. 29 and will take visitors to 1969 — specifically, a Woodstock-themed evening with music by the band Randomonium and an invitation to wear bell-bottoms and flowered shirts.

“You do have to wear clothes,” Childs said, adding a clarification that even a museum devoted to the past sometimes has to make.

The museum’s leaders speak often of needing more space: more storage, more galleries, perhaps an expansion that would allow them to add a county-government exhibit and pursue ideas that have been waiting for a room of their own.

“I would never want to move from this location, ever,” Childs said. “This is a great location for this museum. But it would be great if we could build up or out or whatever.”

The impulse is understandable. Anderson County is 200 years old, and the evidence keeps arriving.