Honea Path History of Story of Reinvention

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

There’s only one Honea Path.

There are Greenwoods and Beltons elsewhere, said Justin Thomas Atkins, artist and owner of Honea Path’s Fiddle & Bow, but only Honea Path holds the claim to a unique name.

And like many old Southern place names, it has acquired a small cloud of competing origin stories — Cherokee language, bee-filled trees, a family name, an errant postmaster, perhaps even an “evil Yankee” with a fondness for spelling changes.

The town’s history may be easier to trace than its name. Before settlers arrived, the place was Cherokee hunting ground, part of the broad, wooded backcountry of what became the South Carolina Upcountry. By the late 1790s, European settlers had begun arriving, farming the land and establishing the early institutions — churches, schools, family plots — that gave a scattered settlement the beginnings of permanence.

That first version of Honea Path was agricultural, a landscape of small farms and isolated homesteads. Then the railroad arrived, initially using the area as a water stop between larger towns. In time, the tracks did more than move trains through the countryside. They gave the settlement a reason to gather around itself. Honea Path was chartered in 1855, and the railroad turned what had been a collection of farms into a place with a future.

The depot stood just off Main Street, near what is now the parking area behind local businesses, restaurants, and the police station. There were, at one point, two depots serving different rail lines. The town became a practical stop on the way somewhere else.

By the late 19th century, the town had another source of momentum: textiles. Chiquola Mill began operating in 1903, and with it, Honea Path entered the industrial era. The mill became the town’s economic center, employing generations of residents and sustaining the businesses that fed, clothed, and served them. For much of the 20th century, Atkins said, nearly everyone in town was connected to the mill in one way or another.

The transformation mattered because the years before it had been hard ones. The late 1800s brought poverty to the region, and at the turn of the century the mill offered wages, regularity, and the possibility of something beyond subsistence. Cotton was profitable for a time, and the early decades of the 20th century brought an economic lift that changed the rhythm of life. People who had once struggled merely to hold onto their farms could, for a while, afford not only necessities but a few things they wanted.

A labor union dispute led to the notorious Chiquola Mill Massacre or “Bloody Thursday,” on September 6, 1934, during the nationwide General Textile Strike. It was among the deadliest episodes of labor violence in South Carolina history. A marker to those who died in this event was dedicated in Dogwood Park in 1995.

The seven men killed were Claude Cannon, Lee Crawford, Ira Davis, E. M. “Bill” Knight, Maxie Peterson, C. R. Rucker, and Thomas Yarborough. Eleven men were charged with murder but were acquitted. The mill reopened under military guard the following week, and the community lived with the event’s aftermath for decades. (This story will be expounded upon soon in a feature in The Anderson Observer).

Then came the familiar Southern sequence of calamities for farmers: crop failures, storms, the boll weevil, declining cotton prices, and then a Great Depression. Atkins said family farms that were lost after years in which the weather and the market seemed to work together against the people who depended on the land. The beautiful brick homes that remained could obscure the precariousness that lay behind them.

World War II helped pull the country, and towns like Honea Path, out of the Depression. It also changed expectations. Men and women who left for military service or war-related work returned having seen other places and other ways of living. Production expanded, and the postwar years brought a different kind of confidence to a town whose identity still revolved around Chicola Mill.

The mill ran strong for roughly a century, from the early 1900s until 2003. Its closing left Honea Path with the same difficult question that confronted many former textile towns: what becomes of a place when the institution that once organized its economy, its schedules, and even its social life is gone?

The answer, at least so far, has not been to become something unrecognizable. Honea Path remains a small town, but it has begun to find energy in the qualities that mill life once overshadowed — its location, its history, its downtown buildings, and the people who have stayed.

Atkins sees signs of that change on Main Street, home to his Fiddle & Bow Music Hall. A few years ago, he said, a Saturday evening might pass with scarcely a car parked downtown. Now the street can be full. New shops and a coffeehouse have joined established restaurants, and the town is preparing to move City Hall back into a restored historic building downtown.

For Atkins, the past is not an abstraction. He restores old graves in family cemeteries around the area, straightening fallen markers and following the clues left by inscriptions. In one cemetery, he noticed that people of varying ages had died within a short period; research later revealed a disease outbreak. Such details, he said, make the hardships of the region’s early settlers more immediate. This was not Charleston, with its established streets and institutions. It was backcountry, where survival was work enough and endurance was an accomplishment.

His own family has roots in the area that reach back generations. The Saylors, Pruitts, and Atkins families were among those who settled nearby, some receiving land grants after the Revolutionary War. His grandfather once owned a 200-acre farm where a golf course later stood. The old brick home remains.

It is easy to treat such continuity as nostalgia, but Atkins’s version of Honea Path is more practical than sentimental. The town is roughly half an hour from Anderson, Greenwood, Abbeville, Simpsonville, and other Upstate communities.

Two centuries into Anderson County’s history, Honea Path is still here — not because its story has been uncomplicated, but because each generation has found a reason to build upon a legacy.