Bicentennial Profile: Whitner Family Key to Early County History
Greg Wilson/Anderson Obsever
In Anderson, the dead may be more eloquent than the living. Behind the old First Presbyterian Church, on the street that bears the family name, the Whitners still occupy their ground. Joseph Newton Whitner lies there with most of his kin, as if the city itself had chosen to keep its founders close at hand. His cousin W. C. Whitner, who brought electricity to Anderson and helped give the place its nickname, the “Electric City,” lies elsewhere, having moved to Richmond before his death and, in the record as in life, leaving behind the town he had remade.
The story of the Whitners is, in the old Southern style, both ancestral and infrastructural. It is a family biography told in churchyards, legislative chambers, and power stations. Their forebear, Josef Whitner, arrived from the Black Forest of Germany by way of Charleston, surviving a sea crossing that killed the rest of his family and, later, an Indian attack that left him with a skull wound he covered for the rest of his life with a skullcap. His son, Joseph Newton Whitner, grew into a public man of unusual local consequence, the sort of legislator who does not merely represent a district but helps invent it.
By 1828, at 29, Joseph Newton Whitner was serving in the South Carolina Senate, where he sponsored the legislation that divided the old Pendleton District and created Anderson County. He later bought a country house on a hill west of the courthouse, expanded it into Rose Hill, and planted the grounds with roses and, according to later histories, every variety of tree then known in South Carolina. The effect was not modesty but cultivation where even the landscape seemed to have been instructed to behave like a civically minded estate.
Whitner’s domestic life was shadowed by the usual 19th-century arithmetic of grief. Of 10 children, only one son, Benjamin F., lived a full life. Others died young, some in infancy, while the Civil War carried away still more of the family’s youth and certainty. Yet the family’s public standing only deepened. Whitner was a senator, a town councilman, Anderson Courthouse’s first circuit judge, and a member of the six-man delegation sent to the Secession Convention in Charleston in 1860. In a region where politics often wore the face of personal obligation, he seems to have embodied both at once.
The Whitners’ influence extended beyond public office into the religious and civic architecture of the town. Joseph Newton donated the land for the First Presbyterian Church, where he and his family are buried, and his widow, Elizabeth, later gave the logs for one of Anderson’s early Black churches. Such acts read now as the sort of local pieties that also function as a kind of municipal authorship, to donate land, timber, or money was to help write the town into being.
That impulse toward invention reached its most consequential form in W. C. Whitner’s electrical work when in 1890 he created the Anderson Waterworks Company and lit the city with 750 incandescent lamps powered by steam. Four years later, he was pressing his associates to imagine something more audacious: using water power from Portman Shoals to electrify Anderson itself. The men around him balked, but he moved ahead anyway, buying land with his own money and then persuading the company to test the transmission of electricity at High Shoals, six miles from town.
What followed was a local improvement as well as a technological provocation. The High Shoals station, built for $25,000, powered 2,000 more lights and 70 arc lamps in town and became the first long-distance electric transmission in the South. Its 5,000-volt alternating-current generator was the first of its kind in the world, and when Portman Shoals opened in 1897, the plant’s 11,000-volt generators were again leading the field. Whitner, whom later readers would picture as a provincial visionary, was in fact doing something harder by proving that the province could be ahead of the center.
Anderson’s industrial life followed the current he had helped create. Once the cotton mills saw what electricity could do, the company became the Anderson Water and Light Power Company, and the city’s industries began to convert. When Whitner left for Richmond in 1921, he left behind not just a utility system but a civic temperament — one that liked to think of progress as something local, practical, and a little bit miraculous. If Anderson became the Electric City, it was because the Whitners understood that in the South, as elsewhere, the future is often introduced by a family that has been there all along.
