It All Started with Water; A Brief History of Williamston

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

It is a town that was birthed by water. Williamston did not start with a mill, a courthouse, or an intersection of commercial trade, but with a spring.

That water still rises in the town’s Mineral Springs Park, beneath a gazebo in the shade of large trees. People still come down for a drink as children pass through the park. At Christmas, visitors drive or walk among it to visit the holiday lights and decorations. The spring is so familiar that it is more than a relic at the center of an old municipal landscape. It’s the reason the town exists at all.

“Williamston has an unusual background,” said Marion Middleton, a local historian and former town council member. “Different from all the other towns in Anderson County. We’re here because of the spring.”

The town grew from land once owned by West Allen Williams, who held a plantation and large farm in the area. In the late 1840s, the Greenville and Columbia Railroad proposed a line through the community, and Williams recognized what rail access might make possible. He began selling lots, people began arriving, and the settlement took the name Mineral Springs.

In 1852, it was incorporated as Williamston, named for Williams.

The name was only one part of his legacy. Williams, who Middleton said was not especially wealthy and had debts, gave the land around the spring to the town with a condition of unusual permanence: the water in the park would remain free and accessible to the public. A person who discovers mineral water on private land elsewhere may bottle or sell it. But the spring in Williamston Park belongs, by the terms of that early gift, to everyone.

“And that water would always be free,” Middleton said.

In the 19th century, the promise of mineral water could transform a rural place into a destination. Springs were thought to possess curative powers. Visitors traveled to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Saratoga Springs, New York, to drink, bathe in, or otherwise submit themselves to water believed to improve the body and soothe the mind.

Williamston became part of that national fascination.

A local physician, Dr. Smith, said the water contained lithium, and Middleton recalled that he once blamed changes in the town’s water system for making people “go crazy” after the supply shifted from the spring and deep wells to municipal water. The claim belongs to an era in which mineral water was both commodity and confidence, a substance advertised as medicine before the boundary between health advice and marketing had fully settled.

Around 1900, a bottling works opened in Williamston, a business that drew water from a deep well rather than the public spring. It only lasted about three years, but among its products was a drink called Celery Cola, a beverage whose name may help explain why it did not outlive the century.

The town’s early ambitions were larger than its present scale suggests. At one point, Middleton said, Williamston was home to the largest hotel in South Carolina, a 220-room establishment with a ballroom, a well-stocked bar, and gas lighting — all before the Civil War. Five trains a day stopped in town. Lots sold for $500 before the war; an indication of how seriously investors and visitors took the place.

“It was a resort town,” Middleton said. “Williamston was unique in that we’re here because of tourism, basically.”

The hotel burned in 1858, just before the Civil War, taking with it some of the town’s grandest early promise. Boardinghouses remained, and the spring continued to draw visitors, but the war altered Williamston’s role. People displaced by the Union occupation of coastal South Carolina came inland, and the town filled with refugees.

“We were packed to the gills,” Middleton said. “We were actually a refugee town at that point.”

After Appomattox, Williamston, like much of the South, had to invent its next version of itself.

Middleton described the period as a vacuum: the old order had ended, but no one knew precisely what would replace it. One local story, passed down from the years just after the war, tells of white residents gathering for supper in the park while formerly enslaved Black residents stood nearby. The white residents cleared the table, reset it, and invited them to eat.

The story does not erase the rigid racial hierarchy that shaped Southern life after emancipation. It instead suggests the uncertainty of a community trying to navigate a new social order after a system that had been cruel but deeply entrenched had collapsed.

Williamston gradually became, in part, a textile town. Mill housing rose behind the park, and the industry offered employment to workers in town and to people commuting to nearby Pelzer. The work created jobs but also reinforced the divisions common in Southern industrial communities: mill workers, town residents and Black residents occupied distinct places in the local social structure.

The town’s identity kept changing. In 1873, Samuel Lander established Lander Female College in Williamston, a school which later moved to Greenwood and became what is now Lander University. No conclusive explanation for the move has emerged, Middleton said, though Greenwood presumably made an offer Williamston could not match.

So for a moment in history, Williamston was not only a resort town and a mill town. It was also a college town.

The early 20th century brought a more familiar kind of small-town life: churches, shops, wooden homes, trains and, frequently, fire.

Many houses were built of local timber, and Middleton said fires became a constant presence in the town’s history. Churches were equally enduring. West Allen Williams sold land to several congregations and gave land to the Methodist church, although he was Presbyterian — a decision whose motive has not survived.

The churches influenced both the landscape and the rhythms of daily life. Middleton, who was born in 1960, remembers the era of blue laws, when Sunday commerce was sharply limited. A person could buy ice at a gas station between 2 and 4 p.m. for a picnic, but not gasoline. It was a time when Sabbath was not simply observed; it was regulated.

Before highways changed the map, trains remained central. Williamston had both the Greenville and Columbia Railroad and the Piedmont and Northern electric interurban line, which ran behind the park. Locals called the latter the “poor and needy,” Middleton said, because of its rough ride and unreliable reputation.

For generations, residents worked in Williamston’s mills, in Pelzer’s mills, or in the stores and boardinghouses that supported the surrounding communities. Later, students from Williamston, Pelzer and West Pelzer began attending consolidated schools, including Palmetto High School. The boundaries between the towns became less important in daily life, even as each retained its own civic identity.

Williamston’s town park also contains a story of war, memory and municipal improvisation.

In the 1930s, residents acquired a cannon, a 1864 rifled bronze Civil War cannon named "Miss Annie Lee" after General Robert E. Lee's daughter, as a memorial. It was a bronze rifled piece from the Noble Foundry in Rome, Georgia, according to Middleton. During World War II, when scrap-metal drives swept through communities across the country, residents worried it might be taken away. They painted it green and told collectors it was only iron.

The strategy worked.

Years later, someone noticed a bright spot where the paint had worn away. The cannon’s bronze surface had revealed itself. At one point it had apparently been pulled from its mount during an attempted theft and was later stored at an old water plant. After its rediscovery, the weapon was restored, placed on a caisson and made safe. It contained several cannonballs, which had to be removed before the cannon could return to public display.

The cannon also points toward the larger textile story of the region. Middleton said the last Civil War battle east of the Mississippi was fought near Williamston, and that a Citadel cadet involved in it, Ellison Smyth, later joined with Francis J. Pelzer in creating the industrial enterprise at Pelzer.

Smyth remembered the shoals of the Saluda River and saw their industrial potential. He helped develop the mills, first using water power, then electrifying machinery and installing incandescent lighting. Engineers doubted whether electricity could travel from the Lower Hydro to the Upper Mill more than a mile away, but it did.

The result was a mill system that shaped the lives of many Williamston families for decades. For local teenagers, Middleton said, the old question after graduation was uncomplicated: college, or the mill.

World War II sent many Williamston men into military service, while women continued to sustain both homes and textile work. Middleton remembers the men of that generation as quiet bearers of experience. They did not tend to describe what they had seen. Their service became visible only in fragments — a flag at a funeral, an American Legion cap, a passing reference to Korea or Europe.

One former Williamston resident, William Holland, told Middleton about being captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge. Holland described being placed behind trucks with machine guns and witnessing the grim logic of captivity. When he was released, a photograph showed him weighing perhaps 75 pounds.

“They did not talk about it,” Middleton said of the men who came home.

After the war, Williamston confronted another shift. Highway 20 had once carried people through town. But then came U.S. 29 and Interstate 85, rerouting the region’s movement and reducing Williamston’s visibility. The town became more of a bedroom community. Textile work remained but jobs and commerce increasingly lay elsewhere.

The 1960s and 1970s could feel stagnant, and opportunities for young people were limited, Middleton said, unless they found work in a local or nearby mill. The town was close to Greenville and Anderson in geography but not always in practical accessibility.

Today, Williamston is growing again. New subdivisions are appearing, and local leaders are trying to handle the pressures that come with them: infrastructure costs, public services, traffic, taxes and the unease that arrives whenever a familiar place begins to change.

Middleton serves on the town’s planning commission and does not see growth as something a town can simply refuse.

“Nothing stays the same,” he said. “You can’t say we’re not going to change, because things change around you. You have to deal with change.”

The harder task is to prepare for it rather than merely react to it.

Williamston’s appeal, he believes, remains the old small-town promise: friendly neighbors, walkability, trails, manageable traffic, seasonal events and a sense that people still recognize one another, including Christmas in the Park, a tradition that began with churches and local businesses in the mid-20th century and has become one of the community’s signature occasions.

“The people are friendly,” Middleton said. “People tend to know each other, and we haven’t lost that.”

The old hotel is gone. The college moved away. The textile mills no longer define the region as they once did. But the spring remains, free by the terms of a long-ago gift, rising in the park beneath the town’s changing history.

Williamston may be, as Middleton calls it, “the best unknown town” in Anderson County. Its purpose has changed several times: resort, refuge, mill community, college site, bedroom town and growing municipality. Yet at the center of each version is the same water — available to anyone willing to walk down to the park, fill a cup and drink.