Bicentennial Profile: G. Cullen Sullivan Helped Build Anderson

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

When G. Cullen Sullivan returned to Anderson in April 1899, he brought souvenirs that belonged to two different worlds.

There was coral from Cuba, where he had served with the Second South Carolina Volunteer Regiment after the Spanish-American War. There was a clay water jar that had stood in his tent. And there were two swords from Morro Castle, acquired in Havana and used, according to the account later preserved in Anderson, either for fighting or for cutting grain.

The objects must have seemed unusual in Anderson, a South Carolina town emerging from the 19th century: traces of an island occupation, military transport ships, cavalry reviews and a war that had carried a 20-year-old aspiring newspaperman far from home. Sullivan had left Anderson intending to prepare for a newspaper career and returned with stories from Cuba and the beginning of a public life that would eventually include the city’s first daily newspaper, and attorney with the law firms of Hood & Sullivan and Sullivan & Cooley, and decades as city attorney and a term as mayor.

Sullivan's most enduring physical legacy in Anderson is tied to the city's infrastructure. During his administration as mayor in 1940, Anderson completed its first viaduct to connect Murray Avenue and Peoples' Street, a project that initially generated some navigational confusion among residents. Though Sullivan passed away while still in mayoral office, when the viaduct's construction was ultimately finalized and dedicated on September 16, 1945, the structure was officially christened the G. Cullen Sullivan Memorial Viaduct in his honor.

After his death on Feb. 3, 1944, an editorial in “The Independent” offered a broad assessment of his civic life. It noted there had been scarcely a progressive public undertaking in Anderson during his era that had not received Sullivan’s support.

That description captured the public legacy of a man whose life moved through the essential institutions of his town: the newspaper, the law office, City Hall, the Democratic Party, Grace Episcopal Church and the civic organizations that gave a growing Southern city its sense of itself.

Sullivan was the son of James Mattison Sullivan and Mary Wannamaker Sullivan, part of a family with a long tradition of contributing to the early development of the Anderson area. His first professional aspiration was journalism, but in 1898, as he was preparing for that work, the Spanish-American War interrupted the plan.

He attempted to join the First South Carolina Regiment but was rejected because of his eyesight. Instead, at age 20, he went to Columbia and took a reporter’s job with the “Columbia Register.” The arrangement allowed him to remain near the currents of state politics and military organization, and it soon led him into uniform by another route.

While Sullivan was in Columbia, Gov. William H. Ellerbe appointed him regimental quartermaster of the Second South Carolina Volunteer Regiment, an assignment placed him in the logistics of war — the supplies, arrangements and constant administrative work necessary to move a regiment from one place to another.

The Second South Carolina trained first in Jacksonville, Florida, and then in Savannah, Georgia, before deploying to Cuba in early 1899. The regiment arrived in Havana aboard the transport Roumanian, carrying 840 men. Sullivan later wrote, with apparent pride, that the journey had occurred without a single desertion.

For soldiers who had endured Panama Camp in Jacksonville, Cuba brought at least one unexpected improvement: better sanitation. The sulphury water at the Florida camp had made many men ill. In Cuba, the conditions were more tolerable.

The occupation had its odd moments of leisure. Soldiers held afternoon horse races along the main street of their camp in Havana, turning the military landscape briefly into a racetrack.

But Sullivan also saw the harsher remnants of war and poverty, writing of seeing a pile of skulls and bones bleaching in the sun. In the cemetery, when families could not afford to pay rent, corpses were tossed into a corner.

The scenes were vivid enough to survive in recollection decades later: the bright, tropical city; the military horses; the naval ships; the evidence of human hardship gathered at the edge of a cemetery.

Sullivan and two fellow Andersonians, Joe Trowbridge and Edgar M. “Toad” Scott, had a more ceremonial encounter during the deployment. The three dined aboard the North Atlantic fleet’s flagship, the New York, where they met Richard Pearson Hobson, the naval officer celebrated for sinking the collier Merrimac during the war.

One of Sullivan’s greatest thrills in military service came during a massive review before President William McKinley. Mounted on a prancing horse, he rode before the president in what must have seemed the fullest possible version of public spectacle: troops, cavalry, the commander in chief and a young Anderson man suddenly participating in the national story.

After his discharge, Sullivan returned to Anderson and took up the work he had intended to pursue before war redirected him.

He became the first editor of “The Daily Mail,” the paper that later became “The Anderson Daily Mail.” Sullivan had helped persuade his father and G.P. Browne to establish the newspaper, which became Anderson’s first daily.

The work was demanding in ways that would be familiar to generations of small-town journalists. The paper did not acquire an Associated Press franchise until 1911. In its earliest years, Sullivan and the staff could not rely on wire reports to fill the pages. They had to find local news, write it, edit it, proofread it and assemble it themselves.

Sullivan later summarized his responsibilities with a list that sounds both weary and proud: “editor, cub reporter, star reporter, proofreader, and city editor.”

The newspaper became part of Anderson’s civic infrastructure, but Sullivan did not remain in journalism for long. After roughly a year, he left to study law, attending the University of Michigan and received his law degree from the University of Indiana.

Back in Anderson, he entered practice with K.P. Smith. Later, he was associated with Curran Cooley and Pat Sullivan before establishing his own practice. The law would become the central professional work of his life.

For 30 years, Sullivan served as Anderson’s city attorney, a position that placed him near the daily mechanics of municipal government: ordinances, contracts, disputes, public works, property questions and the legal framework beneath the town’s visible growth.

Sullivan entered the mayor’s office in January 1937, after the death of Mayor G.T. McGregor, winning election to complete McGregor’s unexpired term and was then elected to a full term that ended in 1940.

The years were a complicated time to govern a small American city. The country was still recovering from the Great Depression, while international events were moving toward another war. In Anderson, Sullivan’s public responsibilities were joined to a network of local positions that reflected the civic culture of the period.

He served as president of the South Carolina Municipal League. He was president of the Anderson Bar Association. He chaired the Anderson Democratic Executive Committee. At Grace Episcopal Church, he served as senior warden.

The accumulation of titles suggests a kind of public life that was once common in small cities: the lawyer who becomes mayor, the newspaper editor who remains a civic authority, the church officer who participates in party organization, the local figure who appears in every institution where decisions are made.

Sullivan’s influence was not limited to offices. The editorial published after his death emphasized something harder to measure: his habit of supporting public undertakings. Anderson’s progress had occurred with Sullivan nearby, lending time, influence or approval.

That role — the reliable, experienced citizen of the old civic order — may be the most durable explanation for why his name remained important after the events of his career had passed.

G. Cullen Sullivan’s story also contains an unusual sequence of American roles: a young reporter rejected from one regiment because of poor eyesight, a quartermaster in Cuba, a first editor of a daily newspaper, a lawyer, a city attorney, a mayor and a leader in civic, political and religious life.

The objects he carried back from Cuba offer a concise image of the life that followed. The coral, the water jar and the swords, all souvenirs of a distant war. But his most lasting work was local.

He helped start a newspaper at a time when a daily paper had to write its own local news. He practiced law for decades and spent 30 years as the city’s legal counsel. He entered the mayor’s office at a moment of transition and remained in public service through the institutions that shaped Anderson’s civic life.

His career began with a desire to tell the news. It ended with a reputation for helping make the city’s history.