Historic Marker Commemorates General’s Road in Anderson
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
“When the village was projected in 1828, there ran through the very center an old wagon road bearing the euphonious and appropriate title the General's Road. It lay between the residence of General Pickens in what is now Oconee County and Abbeville. The General's Road lay straight through the projected town, but the forefathers failed to see the beauty of retaining the name. Consequently, the first thoroughfare of the town bears the same name that is borne by hundreds of other streets throughout the country. And since mister Sinclair Lewis' widely read novel of a few years ago, it has become a synonym of the absolute commonplace. Main Street means nothing. The General's Road would be distinctive and also historic.” – from the book “Traditions and History of Anderson County South Carolina,” by Louise Ayer Vandiver. 1928
On Thursday evening, at the corner of Main and Whitner Streets in downtown Anderson, a small crowd gathered to dedicate a historic marker, and in doing so, to restore a name that the county is preparing to celebrate two centuries of existence. The event was part of the Anderson Area Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting held outdoors behind the historic courthouse this year.
The marker commemorates the General's Road, and its story is Anderson's story — which is to say it is the story of how a dirt path through the South Carolina Piedmont became a county seat, and how a county seat became a city, and how, somewhere in that transformation, the original name got left behind like a trunk in an attic no one thought to open.
“The idea originated when we were discussing things during our 250 committee meetings, but it ended up being a project of our bicentennial year for the county,” said Dustin Norris, curator for the Anderson County Museum. “This ended up being something that was meant to commemorate 200 years of Anderson County history and the first route that might have brought people to our area.”
The road dates to the 1780s, when it served as the primary north-south thoroughfare connecting Abbeville to the Tamassee estate of Revolutionary War General Andrew Pickens, situated near what is now Clemson University. Pickens traveled the route so frequently that the region simply began calling it after him. It was a practical name, the kind that places acquire before anyone has decided to be intentional about naming things — a description of who used the road rather than where it went, which is, in retrospect, the more interesting piece of information.
By the early 1800s, the road had become the economic spine of the Pendleton District. Stagecoach stops and taverns rose along it to serve the volume of travelers it was drawing. Jehu Orr, one of the more entrepreneurial figures of the period, built an inn near the road that became an early anchor of commerce in the region. The road was, before the county existed, already doing the work a county does.
When the Pendleton District was divided in 1826 to create Anderson and Pickens counties, local commissioners were charged with selecting a site for the new county seat. They chose a 130-acre parcel situated directly on the General's Road — a decision that was less a coincidence than a recognition that the road had already organized the landscape around it.
The courthouse would go where the traffic already was. Around 1828, as the town took shape and regional maps were updated to reflect the new reality, the section of the General's Road running through the town center began appearing under a different label: Main Street. The transition was gradual, unsentimental, and nearly total. By the Civil War, the old name had largely passed out of common usage, replaced by the one that said nothing about who had walked it or why.
In 1928, a local historian Louise Ayers Vandiver published a history of Anderson County and paused, with the regret of someone who had just noticed what was lost, to observe that the town had traded a distinctive and resonant name for one that could belong to anywhere. "Main Street" is, Vandiver implied, the blandest possible description of a road with a genuinely remarkable history. Her objection went unheeded for nearly another century.
On Thursday, in the bicentennial year of the county's founding, local officials and the Anderson County Museum addressed that omission with the marker where the General's Road once ran and, in a manner of speaking, still does. The marker will not rename the street. Main Street will remain Main Street. But it will tell anyone who stops to read it that the ground beneath their feet was once known by a name that carried the whole of the county's origin story inside it — that before there was a courthouse, before there was a public square, before there was an Anderson, there was a road, and the road was called the General's.
