Honea Path Growth Marked by Mill, Downtown Progress
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Honea Path Mayor Jimmy Smith admits his first seven months in office had taught him more than he expected.
“It’s been a busy seven months,” said Smith. “I think it’s busier than even I thought it would have been. But most of that busyness has been good. It’s been good for the town.”
The town, long accustomed to a slower rhythm, has felt that new pace. There have been more events, more meetings, more announcements pinned to the windows of downtown storefronts, than many residents can remember in recent years. Smith talks about this not as a burden but as an exciting civic metabolism speeding up, the town stretching muscles it hadn’t used in a while.
At the center of this new activity is a project that has hung over Honea Path for a generation: the fate of the old Chicola Mill. For roughly 25 years, the property has lingered in a limbo familiar to mill towns across the South—no longer an engine of employment and identity, not yet anything else, a hulking question mark at the edge of town.
“We have two big things that we’re working on bringing to fruition finally,” Smith said. “Number one on that list would be the demolition and removal of the old Chicola Mill.”
For Smith, the mill is not an abstraction.
He grew up with the mill as a daily presence, first as the “heartbeat of the community,” then as something far more malignant.
“I watched it go from the heartbeat of the community to being the cancer of the community,” Smith said, describing a transformation of a place that once dictated paychecks and supper-table conversations slowly becoming a ruin, a reminder of jobs lost and promises deferred.
That long interlude appears to be ending. The town has put out the contract for demolition and removal of the mill, a procedural step that, in a place where change has often been promised and rarely delivered, feels almost radical. Smith said the contract has been left out “for everybody to look at and agree to be signed,” a small but telling gesture toward transparency in a town that knows the difference between talk and action. If all goes as planned work could begin around mid-April, a start date that carries the weight of those twenty-five years.
What comes after the rubble is cleared is still an open question. In Smith’s telling, the point of demolition is not simply subtraction but possibility. The day the site is cleaned up and the grass is planted, he said, “it’ll be available then to develop.”
He imagines either residential or mixed residential development—condominium-style housing, perhaps, alongside units for senior citizens. In a town where many young people leave and older residents age in place, the idea of new housing options feels less like a real-estate play than a social recalibration, a chance to keep families connected across generations.
There are other visions, too. Some residents talk about attracting light industry back to the site, a faint echo of the mill’s original purpose. “If we could, that would be great too,” Smith said, sounding less like a politician working from a script than a neighbor willing to entertain a good idea from whoever offers it. For now, he emphasizes that the town will not be restricted in what it can do with the land—an unusual kind of freedom for a parcel so freighted with history.
The mill project is only one part of a broader attempt to reorient Honea Path’s physical and civic landscape. The past seven months have been marked by “a lot of events and a lot of things going on,” much of it centered in and around downtown. Each festival, meeting, or ribbon-cutting might seem minor on its own; taken together, they amount to a campaign to coax residents back into shared spaces, to remind them that the town is something they actively make rather than simply inhabit.
What Smith says he has learned as mayor is not a single lesson but an accumulation of them: that the job is more consuming than it appears from the outside, that the workdays are longer and the calendar more crowded, but also that the busyness can be a sign of health.
“Most of that busyness has been good,” Smith said, as if reassuring himself as much as anyone else. The real test will come in the next year, when the Chicola Mill finally comes down and Honea Path is left to decide what kind of town it wants to be, untethered from the looming structure that once defined it.
