Museum to Lead Celebrations of County’s Bicentennial, S.C.’s 250th Birthday

Greg Wilson/Anderson Obserserver

On a sunny February morning, the fountain on the hill at 202 East Greenville Street was still dry from winter, a concrete bowl waiting for its cue. Inside the Anderson County Museum, however, the future was already crowding in: a year of anniversaries, an accumulation of dates and stories that, taken together, would ask a noted Upstate museum to stand in for both a 200‑year‑old county and a 250‑year‑old state.

“The Anderson County Museum is leading off the 200 for the whole county,” the museum’s executive director, Beverly Childs, said recently. “This is a celebration for our whole county, not just the museum.”

The arithmetic is tangled but precise. In 2026, Anderson County marks its bicentennial, tracing its official birth to 1826 and the carving up of the old Pendleton District into new political units. At the same time, South Carolina is part of a nationwide commemoration of the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary — “the 250,” in the shorthand that has crept into planners’ conversations—recognizing the quarter‑millennium since the colonies began the slow, violent process of becoming a country.

The museum, which serves both as a county history repository and as a kind of civic living room, has elected not to choose between them.

“Coming up on April 7, the museum is doing a combined 200 celebration and a 250 celebration,” Childs said. “We’re starting off on April the 7th planting a Liberty Tree for the 250. That celebrates our patriots.”

April 7 will function as a ceremonial overture. Outside, on the slope below the museum’s fountain, staff and volunteers plan to sink the roots of a Liberty Tree, a descendant in idea if not in sap of the Revolutionary‑era trees that once served as community bulletin boards and protest sites. Childs is still finalizing the exact spot — “somewhere down below the fountain to the left of the walkway there,” she said—but the symbolism is clear. That same day, the museum will turn the fountain back on after its winter hiatus and formally dedicate it to Robert Anderson, the Revolutionary War general and namesake of both county and city.

“We will start flowing the fountain again and celebrate Robert Anderson and our fountain for the 200th,” Childs said. “We will plant the Liberty Tree for the 250th and celebrate not just our patriots from early in our existence, but also veterans today. Men and women today still fight for our freedom.”

Inside the galleries, the curatorial staff has been quietly constructing a scaffolding for this year of remembrance. In February, the museum opened “In Our Revolutionary Era: Exploring Anderson County in the Age of Independence,” a temporary exhibit that sits alongside the permanent military gallery, Andersonians in War.

“This year, in particular, to highlight the 250th of the American Revolution, we have prepared a temporary exhibit,” the museum’s curator, Dustin Norris, said. “It will explore some of these concepts from Anderson County history, different ways that people from our area at the time intersected with the revolutionary discourse.” Anderson County did not host a major battle, but it did host infrastructure—roads, ferries, and trading paths—and people whose lives bent under the war’s weight.

One of the exhibit’s anchor stories is that of the Generals’ Road, an eighteenth‑century route named for General Andrew Pickens, who used the road for his business between Abbeville and Pendleton and on to his retirement home at Tamassee.

“This is a really important piece of revolutionary infrastructure that was here in our county and includes Main Street Anderson,” said Norris. “In fact, Main Street Anderson was referred to as the Generals’ Road for the better part of Anderson’s early history.”

On May 28, in partnership with the Anderson Area Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, the museum will unveil a state historic marker for the Generals Road in front of the historic courthouse, putting into the streetscape a name that had largely receded into footnotes. “The marker is going to be installed at the historic courthouse,” Norris said. “So it’s going to be front and center.”

The museum’s Revolutionary programming extends beyond labels and bronze plaques. Norris’s ongoing Heritage and History lecture series, typically a deep dive into specific corners of county lore, has been repurposed for the anniversary year.

“Each of those is either going to have a bicentennial or a 250 theme,” he said. “Next month in March, we’re going to highlight some of the female historians who prepared very commonly read histories of Anderson County as part of our bicentennial celebration. And then we’re going to bounce back to the 250 and cover Andrew Williamson’s campaign of 1776, which we know crossed through the area that is now Anderson County.” Other programs—children’s activities, homeschool days, the recurring Electric City Kids series—will adopt Revolutionary motifs, turning the galleries into a year‑long civics lab.

The dates accumulate like artifacts. June 28—Carolina Day—is reserved for a collaboration that stretches well beyond the museum’s walls. The holiday commemorates the 1776 Battle of Sullivan’s Island, one of the Revolution’s early Patriot victories, but in Anderson this year it will also function as a family festival and civic roll call.

“Carolina Day is June the 28th, and it’s going to be on the square,” said Childs. “June 28th is a Sunday. We’re starting at noon with food trucks, lots of things for children to do. Then about 2:15, 2:30, we’ll have a program for the bicentennial.”

At 2:50 p.m., in a nod to the numerology of 250, church bells and other bells—including the museum’s own—will ring out across downtown. “The most exciting thing about this day is at 2:50, to celebrate South Carolina’s 250, church bells and all types of bells, including our bell here, will be ringing,” Childs said. “That is a 250‑type event for everybody, for all the families to come and enjoy.”

The Carolina Day event is a consortium project, with the museum tag‑teaming with the Anderson Arts Center, the public library, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city. The museum and the Arts Center are also jointly hosting a bicentennial‑themed art contest, asking local artists to interpret two centuries of county life in paint, clay, or mixed media. At the farmers’ market, an agricultural display will trace “farming in our county for 200 years,” a reminder that the region’s economic backbone long predated its textile mills. Celebrate Anderson, the county’s Labor Day‑weekend concert and fireworks tradition, will take up the bicentennial theme as well, stitched into a season that also includes a bicentennial‑focused fishing tournament and a new county history book, due in August, that moves from Cherokee homelands through Lake Hartwell to the speculative future of 2126.

For all the careful programming, the image that seems to delight Childs most is an old bell rolling down Main Street. On October 4, the county will stage what she believes is a first: a bicentennial parade, separate from the long‑standing Christmas and Veterans Day processions.

“We are having a bicentennial parade,” she said. “Wait till you see some of the floats that we’re already planning. Ours and the county have started planning theirs. It’s going to be a magnificent parade celebrating 200 years, celebrating our businesses over the years that have made our county our workforce work.”

The parade will be led by the bell that once hung in the clock tower downtown, now part of the museum’s collection.

“Everybody wants to see the bell,” Childs said. “You can see the bell at the Anderson County Museum in July because we are going to have it in our bicentennial exhibit. It’s beautiful. The sound of that bell is just so wonderful. But the bell will make an appearance. It won’t be ringing—we have to protect it—but it will make an appearance in the parade.”

If all of this sounds like a great deal for a mid‑sized county museum, that is because it is. Before the pandemic, the Anderson County Museum welcomed a little more than 25,000 visitors annually; attendance now is inching back toward 20,000, and staff hope that the twin anniversaries will push those numbers higher. The building itself—26,000 square feet, with more than 12,000 square feet of gallery space—belongs to the county, which maintains the facility and pays the staff. Everything that happens inside the galleries, though, is funded through grants, private donations, and the efforts of the museum’s Friends board.

“People look at me as the historian,” Childs said. “That’s not what I was hired to do. I’m the business end of the museum.” She spends her days writing grants, courting donors, and, at present, raising the remaining hundred‑odd thousand dollars needed to overhaul the museum’s education exhibit in time for a planned late‑2027 reopening.

The galleries themselves are dense with the sort of material culture that draws both genealogists and schoolchildren. The long‑running Anderson County Fair model—built by a local engineer, Leonard King—remains one of the most nostalgic stops, a miniature carnival that prompts parents to point out the rides of their own childhoods. Newer additions have altered the museum’s sensory geography. In 2022, the staff unveiled Andersonians in War, a military exhibit whose centerpiece is a hologram of Freddie Stowers, the World War I soldier from Anderson County who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. “If you haven’t been to the museum since November of 2022, you haven’t seen the only hologram in Upstate South Carolina,” Childs said.

“Actually, I think it’s the only hologram probably right now in the state.” Nearby, a 30‑inch Blue Lightning plasma globe dramatizes electricity—the power that earned Anderson its “Electric City” nickname—and the SPARC Station offers a STEM‑themed educational room for children.

Behind the scenes, Norris and a network of volunteers help manage more than 35,000 artifacts in the collection, only a fraction of which can be on display at any given time.

“My job, I guess most simply explained, is just to care for the collection, preserve the artifacts,” he said. “The other part of my job would be to research, write, and install a lot of the exhibit material that we have in the gallery.”

The museum’s PastPerfect database holds more than 27,000 cataloged entries, each with photographs, which allows researchers to zoom in on fragile documents without handling them. In the Roper Research Room, named for the museum’s first curator, Donna Roper, visitors spend Tuesday afternoons paging through city directories, church histories, and cemetery records, or tracing family lines across land grants and obituaries.

The bicentennial has sharpened the staff’s sense of what they still do not have. The “Ledbetter sword”—a saber associated with D. A. Ledbetter, whose story appears in the Civil War section of Andersonians in War—is an object of great interest that remains in private hands somewhere.

Norris mentions clocks from the old Andersonville factory, arms manufactured in the county, any number of objects that would “send us to the moon if they ever walk through the door.”

Storage space is tight, but the museum is still taking donations, triaging items carefully and, when necessary, directing potential donors to other institutions rather than see historical material thrown away.

For visitors, the museum’s public hours remain steady amid the flurry of special events: Tuesdays from 10 a.m.-7 p.m., when both the galleries and the research room are open, and Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Admission is free, a luxury Childs attributes directly to the county’s support.

“We’re a free‑admission museum and we say thank you, Anderson County,” she said. “There’s not many free‑admission museums in the United States of America. We’re a gift to our community.”

It is a community that, in 2026, is being asked to see itself both as an heir to the Revolution and as a relatively young political invention, separated by only ten generations or so from its founding moment. The museum’s staff seems to take particular pleasure in the smaller stories that stitch those scales together. Norris likes to tell the tale of Ann Kennedy Hamilton, whose family home was raided by Tories in 1780; she physically expelled some of the soldiers, was injured, and then delivered intelligence to General Daniel Morgan before the Battle of Cowpens. She later settled in the area that would become Anderson County, her revolutionary daring becoming one thread in a larger, more domestic life.

Somewhere between the Liberty Tree and the Bicentennial Parade, between the hologram of Freddie Stowers and the quiet Tuesday genealogist in the Roper Research Room, the museum is attempting a similar balancing act. It is marking dates—April 7, May 28, June 28, October 4—with due ceremonial weight, ringing bells at 2:50 p.m. because the number happens to suggest a particular anniversary. But it is also doing something less theatrical and more stubborn: insisting that a county’s history is not a static scrapbook but a living, contested, occasionally surprising archive, one that requires both curatorial care and public participation.

“If you haven’t walked in our door, you haven’t seen” what the museum has become, Childs said. She meant the hologram of WWI Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Freddie Stowers, the plasma globe, the STEM room, the new exhibits, but she might just as easily have been talking about the year itself—a compressed, celebratory experiment in how a place remembers, and who shows up when it does.