New Housing, Riverside School Plans, Infrastructure Improvements Driving Pendleton Growth

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

New housing at Pendleton Lofts, future plans for the old Riverside School, paving needs, sewer updates and events leading into the fall and holidays are all propelling growth in the Town of Pendleton.

The town is working with Anderson School Dist. 4 and Tri-County Technical College on a plan for the future of the historic Riverside Middle School building which will be vacated with the middle school moves into the current high school building next year. Built in 1954 as part of a sweeping state plan to provide newer, higher-quality schools to Black students during the segregated era, Riverside occupies both a literal and figurative corner in Pendleton’s civic imagination.

“It’s a great facility,” said Pendleton Mayor Frank Crenshaw. “We want to see it become something really positive for the community, not just that side of town, but all of Pendleton.”

Possibilities include preserving the gymnasium, using DHEC-certified kitchen, and other potential ideas for a building with a certain optimism of a life after school bells. Riverside is already a part of town which has seen substantial upgrades and additions in recent years, including streetlights.

Crenshaw said the west end of town’s “long overdue” transformation: new sidewalks, parking and traffic-calming features, and modern homes on spindly lots threading through old neighborhoods.

“We’ve really just extended downtown,” Crenshaw says, gesturing toward the once-industrial edge that now presses up against the Village Green—Pendleton’s collective front porch.

A few blocks away, the Pendleton Mill lofts—recently reborn from brick and beam—are renting to newcomers who prize tall windows and high ceilings.

“It isn’t just a cookie-cutter apartment,” Crenshaw notes. “It puts a lot of new faces in front of our downtown merchants.” Even the sidewalks, unfinished as they are, symbolize connection, hinting at a future in which walking trails might draw even more life downtown.

Yet, for every new roof and repainted curb, there’s a lingering uncertainty about funding—how to marshal local resources, grants, and the support from Tri-County Tech. Crenshaw said the planning is as much about patience as budgets.

There is, too, the old oil mill property, granted new purpose by a small-area planning grant, and Evans Drugstore—where for a century townspeople filled prescriptions, shared gossip, and, soon, may order a cocktail from a speakeasy planned for its basement.

“The town’s strategic plan isn’t just a document—it’s our blueprint,” Crenshaw insists, as he lists recent achievements: better parking signage (with QR codes—progress in a place that honors its history but eyes the horizon), modernized public works, new public safety officers, and continual upgrades to core services.

Pressing in from without is the question of infrastructure, always fragile: roads rutted by stormwater and time, bridges whose stability is measured year by year, and a wastewater plant, now swelling from two to five million gallons a day to keep pace with the traffic and growth spinning out from Clemson and across Anderson County.

“If you let infrastructure go, it gets worse and worse,” said Crenshaw. “People don’t realize it costs one or two million a mile to reconstruct a road.” He supports the pending sales tax because, as he argues, “40 percent will be paid by people driving through, not living here.”

All of Pendleton, it seems, is locked in a gentle but persistent act of self-renewal—matching old bones to new vision.

The town’s events calendar, once ruled by the Spring Jubilee, now lingers into fall and winter: the Scarecrow contest and Fall Festival in October, then the Christmas Christkindlmarkt and the lighting of the great holiday tree—a seasonal affirmation that there is always something to look forward to, that the Village Green will fill with music, laughter, the chatter of merchants and newcomers alike.

Elections are also coming in Pendleton, with residents voting for mayor and town council members in Ward 1, and Ward 3.