Economic Development, Parks, Festivals Highlight Spring in Anderson County
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Rusty Burns’ latest conversation with The Anderson Observer begins, as these things often do, with the advent of jobs. In Anderson County, jobs arrive like weather fronts—unseen until suddenly they’re on top of you, bringing a high-pressure system of press releases, tax incentives, and hiring fairs.
Vertiv, a switch‑gear maker with Irish roots and a fondness for Anderson’s industrial parks, has announced that it plans to add as many as 800 new positions at its existing local sites. Because the company is already here, Burns said, the usual 18‑to‑24‑month lull between announcement and hiring vanishes; recruiting, including Anderson University engineering graduates, will be “pretty immediate,” a phrase that hangs in the air like a promise. Add in more than 200 jobs from one recent project and 50 from another, and the county is suddenly staring at roughly 1,050 new paychecks, just as Burns reminds anyone listening that history—textile mills, foreign manufacturers, famous brand names that packed up overnight—argues for never relaxing the search for “appropriate” new employers.
The courtship is not entirely romantic. Prospective companies come armed with R.F.P.s funneled through the state Department of Commerce and the Upstate Alliance, asking about power reliability (Monterrey, Mexico, once an industrial magnet, is mentioned as a cautionary tale), wages, benefits, and whether the county intends to say yes to anything that rolls off the interstate. Burns insists it does not: battery recyclers, certain battery makers, and at least one mammoth food‑processing project have been politely shown the county line after staff research suggested that the smell would arrive before the jobs did.
Meanwhile, the mere presence of Michelin, Arthrex, Bosch, and First Quality—Burns recites the names as if they were on a marquee—functions as a kind of endorsement seal for newcomers, their national flags already flying at the airport and on county marketing material, with a few new banners reportedly on order.
If the industrial base is the county’s weather map, the festival calendar is its social register. In Pendleton, the Spring Jubilee prepares for its 49th outing, scheduled for April 4-5, when artisans and shoppers from across the Southeast fill the streets with booths and folding chairs. On May 2, at Dolly Cooper Park, Rhythm on the River will begin with a 10 a.m. fun run and sprawl through the day with races, frisbee tournaments, a Kid Zone, and enough food to make it feel like a cousin to Celebrate Anderson, the county’s signature end‑of‑summer party.
New entries are elbowing their way onto the calendar. Carolina Day, on June 28th in downtown Anderson’s Wren Park, will invoke Fort Moultrie and the state’s Revolutionary‑era mythology, helped along by a $15,000 grant to cover the cost of history made festive. In October, the county’s bicentennial parade is set for a Sunday—October 4—promising an all‑veteran march behind a color guard, followed by patriotic floats from every town and school district willing to send one; Burns says, cheerfully, that it may be the longest parade in Anderson’s history, which seems fine, because he does not plan to do this again for another 200 years. Honea Path, with its new Dancing Goats Folk Fest and a mill‑site redevelopment the county is helping along, joins Piedmont, where a weekend car show is expected to draw more than 200 vehicles to raise money in anticipation of new Christmas decorations. Williamston’s Spring Water Festival and a flurry of smaller town events round out a circuit where corporate recruiters can, and apparently do, wander the crowds and decide whether their future workers might like it here.
Parks—finished, unfinished, and somewhere in between—have become the county’s other calling card. Down on the Saluda River, Piedmont River Park is almost ready to open, conceived as “passive” recreation: a picnic shelter, some grass, and the river sliding past for people who want to fish, read, or stare at the water. It will host its own Carolina Day event even before the ribbon is officially cut, and it ties into the emerging Saluda Blue Trail, an idea that Parks director Matt Schell is said to have floated on an exploratory paddle, leading to an annual river rally and a string of access points from Pelzer’s A.D.A. kayak launch on downstream.
Green Pond Landing, by contrast, is anything but passive. The county has redone the lighting and electrical system, so concerts no longer compete with the hum of rented generators and the dark. In early May—May 6-11—AnMed will sponsor and the Market Theatre will present a free series called “Welcome to Margaritaville” in the lakeside amphitheater; visitors may arrive by car or by boat, pick a night, and stay as long as the songs last. Three new boat‑launch lanes, paid for largely with accommodations‑tax revenue from hotel stays and assorted state and federal grants, expand a facility that already hosts national Bassmaster tournaments, collegiate events, and smaller weekend competitions, earning it a reputation that Burns, not notably given to hyperbole, describes as perhaps the best fishery in the Southeast.
Up the road, Dolly Cooper Park, now the county’s largest by acreage, is in the middle of its own upgrade, with restrooms under construction and pickleball courts on the way, helped along by grants shepherded through Columbia by S.C. Senators Richard Cash and Mike Gambrell. Out at the Civic Center complex, demolition at the aging amphitheater seating area has cleared the way for a rebuild; construction firms have been interviewed, and Burns says the goal is to have the venue ready for a “banner year” of entertainment in 2027, contracts already signed with acts that are counting on the county to finish on time.
The more invisible work—pipes, courts, budgets—proceeds alongside the visible. A recent joint study with the City of Anderson concluded that the county’s sewer capacity can handle normal growth through 2045, and clearing has begun around interchanges where, Burns said, “clients” are waiting to move in once the infrastructure is in place. The county is also considering larger required lot sizes in some areas, encouraging the use of septic tanks where that makes economic sense and, not incidentally, cooling the pace of development.
In downtown Anderson, the scaffolding that has encased the historic courthouse for more than a year is scheduled to come down on a Monday, with the rear parking lot and road behind the courthouse — closed so long that some residents may have forgotten it ever existed — clearing by the following Friday. The building’s restored copper roof and trim have become an impromptu tourist attraction, with people walking slow circles around the square to inspect the details and then reporting their findings to Burns, who likes to point out that the recent fired that destroyed the Rome, Georgia, left an absence is felt in ways that far exceeded the loss of a building.
Across the street from the historic courthouse, the newer courthouse — at 33 years old, practically an upstart — gets its own quieter improvements, as the probate court outgrows its space in a county where, as Burns said, “there’s no fence,” and the population keeps arriving.
The new Anderson County Detention Center remains on schedule, and under budget, with a tentative date to begin housing prisoners before Thanksgiving.
Some of the most animated talk in the interview is reserved for items that rarely show up in brochures. There is a new, free program that lets property owners register their deeds to be alerted to potential fraud, born out of a council retreat and a story Burns tells about a friend who, in a diminished mental state, lost his farm when someone quietly filed a new deed; undoing such damage, Burns said, can cost thousands of dollars, even when the victim has done nothing wrong. The animal shelter, P.A.W.S., has restarted its trap‑neuter‑return days for cats — three veterinarians worked through a recent Monday — and is renewing a teaching pipeline with Tri‑County Technical College’s vet‑tech program and Clemson University’s new veterinary school, which plans to place students in shelters across the region. Burns said he has been surprised only by how unsurprised people are to learn that corporate recruiters care about how a county treats its animals.
Litter, too, gets its moment. The Great Anderson County Cleanup is on the way—details to follow—and the Department of Transportation has announced a spring sweep of garbage along major roads, though with fewer miles funded than in past years, which Burns hopes to change. The county has cameras trained on some chronic illegal‑dumping sites and is in the process of adding cameras around both courthouses, in coordination with the City of Anderson, to keep an eye on the square. Burns admits to wanting a live webcam on Main Street since the dawn of the commercial Internet; this, he suggests, might finally be the year.
Through all of it—the festivals, the grants, the quiet decisions about which factories to woo and which to discourage—Burns returns to the same point: 2,000 high‑school students will graduate in Anderson County this year, as they do every year, and they will need a job somewhere close by to go in the morning. The rest of the county’s progress, he implies, will rise or fall with that simple fact.
