Pelzer Creating Town Square on a Parking Lot

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

In Pelzer, the town square is a parking lot.

Such is a working theory of small-town public life, advanced by Pelzer Mayor Chase Smithwick, who sees the open pavement beside the town gym as something more than a place to leave a car. It is a location for mobile medical care, veteran appointments, a new pet clinic, vendor tables, Christmas lights, children’s games and the improvised rituals through which a town becomes visible to itself.

“To me, it’s your town square,” Smithwick said. “Every town needs a town square.”

For Pelzer, a town without the conventional downtown square of a larger municipality, the gym parking lot has become a practical community center. Smithwick wants to activate it, surround it with events and use it as the starting point for a broader reimagining of the town.

“Everybody’s always joking, calling it downtown Pelzer,” he said. “We don’t really have a downtown because it’s Pelzer. We’re a small little town, but we can have something similar to that.”

The project is partly physical and partly psychological. A town square is not a particular arrangement of brick and benches but an understanding that people should have a place to go together.

The gym parking lot has already become a site for a mobile medical clinic, which visits about once a month. Smithwick said the program has remained busy enough to keep returning, an encouraging sign in a community where transportation can be a barrier to care.

The clinic is not meant to replace existing medical providers, Pelzer has urgent-care services nearby, but the mobile unit gives residents access to primary-care support without requiring a car, a ride or a long trip.

“Some of our residents can’t get out,” Smithwick said. “They don’t have cars, or they’re elderly and they don’t have anybody to take them anywhere.”

For someone living near the gym, he said, a visit that might otherwise require coordinating transportation becomes a short walk across a parking lot.

“Having something set up in the gym parking lot where it takes them two minutes to get down here is very helpful,” he said.

The town is also working with Optum Veterans Services, a veterans health-care service. Optum is not a walk-in clinic, but veterans can schedule appointments for providers to meet them in Pelzer.

“If you’re a veteran and you need medical service, you can schedule when they’ll actually come to town and set up time to meet with you in the parking lot,” Smithwick said.

A mobile pet clinic is scheduled to begin service this month and Smithwick expects it to be well used, given how often residents contact him about cats, dogs and other animal-care concerns.

The growth of mobile services reflects a simple local truth that when care cannot always be brought closer through permanent buildings, it can sometimes arrive on wheels.

Pelzer’s fall calendar will test the town square idea at a larger scale.

The first major event is the joining West Pelzer’s annual two-mile yard sale, scheduled for Oct. 3. The event began years ago in neighboring West Pelzer as a one-mile sale during former Mayor Blake Sanders’ tenure. Smithwick said he suggested expanding it across both communities.

“I told (current Pelzer Mayor) Rick (Sanders), I said, ‘Rick, let’s do a two-mile-long yard sale,’” Smithwick said. “I got them people in Pelzer — they want to sell stuff.”

The gym parking lot and the area around Scott’s Barbershop is available for vendors, and while there is no charge to participate, spaces will be available first come, first served. Town officials have asked sellers not to set up before 5 a.m.

Smithwick expects the event to be crowded.

“You’ll have 20,000 people,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

Highway 8 will remain open, but traffic can become slow enough that the route feels like part of the event itself.

The town’s second annual Jack-o’-Lantern Jamboree will follow Oct. 17 at Bill Hopkins Ball Field. The event, scheduled from 3-9 p.m., is intended as a fall festival rather than strictly a trunk-or-treat or Halloween event.

“It’s not a strict Halloween festival,” Smithwick said. “We’re going to have a lot of small-town fall festivities involved in it.”

The festival will include a pie-eating contest, a tasty pie competition with few rules beyond bringing a pie, two bands, vendor booths and traditional field-day-style games: sack races, three-legged races and egg races. Sponsors and local vendors will help support the activities.

The town will leave a Halloween parade to West Pelzer, which plans a “Thriller Parade” from the West Pelzer Fire Department to Chapman Park. Smithwick said Pelzer will support the neighboring town’s event rather than duplicate it.

The holiday season will begin with Pelzer’s Christmas celebration, planned for Dec. 5, the same day as the community parade. The town expects to host vendors, a tree-lighting ceremony and possibly games in the gym parking lot.

Smithwick said the town will not have a municipal tree as large as Anderson’s, but it is beginning a tradition it hopes to expand over time.

The parade, expected to begin at 4 p.m., will be followed by a chance for residents to visit vendors and continue the celebration.

The town’s summer Fishing on the Riverbanks event offered another glimpse of the kind of programming Smithwick wants to develop. Children fished from a cleaned-up riverbank, caught bream rather than trophies and ate free hot dogs. The event cost the town little beyond weeks of cleanup and planning, but Smithwick said children responded strongly.

“Nobody caught any monsters,” he said. “Everybody caught a bunch of bream. They had a blast.”

When he asked children what they wanted more of in Pelzer, he said, their answer was direct.

“They said, ‘We want to be outside. We want to do stuff outside. Give us stuff to do outside.’”

Beyond events and public spaces, Pelzer is trying to resolve questions surrounding its former mill properties.

Smithwick said he recently requested a meeting involving Anderson County representatives and members of Patriot Hydro Co., or PHC, to discuss the Lower Mill and Upper Mill sites. He believes the timing is right for an updated conversation because the town’s Planning Commission, Board of Zoning Appeals and Town Council have changed significantly, while new county representation is expected in January.

“Everything’s different in Pelzer now,” Smithwick said.

His vision divides the two mill sites by function.

At the Lower Mill, he imagines a recreational and commercial area with restaurants, a trail connected to the town’s future trail system, a fishing pier and improvements near the dam and old generator buildings.

“We would have some restaurants on a trail that would hook into our trail system in the future,” Smithwick said.

The Upper Mill, he believes, should return to the industrial role that helped create Pelzer. The town was founded around industry, he said, and he would seek a smaller, specialized manufacturer — perhaps in aerospace, biomedical production or another low-logistics field — rather than a large operation that would bring heavy truck traffic.

“We’re not going to get a Bosch or anything super big,” Smithwick said. “But there’s a lot of niche small industrial manufacturers that could go up there and fit well.”

The economic calculation is straightforward. Without property taxes Pelzer depends heavily on sparse business-license revenue, the development that generates business activity can help support town services.

“Anything that can go on these two mill properties that bring me in some kind of business tax, that’s what I’m for,” he said.

The town has applied for a Community Development Block Grant for improvements at Monkey Park. The proposal includes a new playground and an Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant walking trail around the park.

The existing playground equipment is older than the mayor.

“It’s probably 30-year-old playground equipment,” Smithwick said. “That’s pushing it.”

The walking trail would give older residents and others a safe place to exercise, and Smithwick said the improvements could support future public events as well.

At Bill Hopkins Ball Field, the town is working on new infield dirt, fence repairs, restroom renovations and parking improvements. The existing dirt contains shells and rocks that make sliding unpleasant and potentially unsafe, Smithwick said. The town plans to bring in better silt and clay.

The town’s community building presents a more complicated problem. Repairs have stalled because of issues involving its burned rafters. Engineers, architects and builders are studying possible solutions, but Smithwick said the project is becoming expensive.

The town is now weighing less expensive alternatives for that building and the old hospital and expects to have a clearer answer by the end of the year.

“It’s one of those things we walked into,” Smithwick said. “We’re having to deal with it and figure out how to make it work.”

Smithwick said the most consequential changes in Pelzer may not yet be visible from the street.

Since taking office in January, he said, the town has focused on building administrative systems that were previously absent or incomplete: purchase-order procedures, maintenance schedules for town equipment, budget worksheets, hospitality trackers, improved internal controls and current financial audits.

“We haven’t seen a lot of flashy changes in Pelzer right now,” Smithwick said. “But organizationally, we are light years ahead of where we were.”

The work has been bureaucratic, but Smithwick views it as foundational. Better records make it easier for Town Council members to understand the finances, approve projects and plan for the future.

“When your council knows how much money is in the bank, it makes life easier for everybody,” he said.

The town plans to provide quarterly budget updates using budget-analysis tools. Smithwick said the first-quarter review is expected in October and that, so far, the town is staying within budget.

The administrative work is occurring in a government where the mayor’s compensation is about $180 per month.

“I probably work 40 hours a week in that office,” Smithwick said.

He also works remotely in his full-time job. The part-time mayor’s position, he said, is not a route to money or public praise — especially not in the era of social media.

“You don’t run for Pelzer mayor because you want a bunch of money,” he said. “You don’t want it because you want recognition.”

To reduce confusion and conflict, the town has increased its public meetings and created a monthly podcast, “The Pelzer Front Porch,” to discuss municipal projects, answer questions and give residents a clearer picture of what town staff and boards are doing.

“If you want to keep the controversy out and keep people from coming up with rumors and shut the rumor mill down, you just got to tell people exactly what’s going on,” Smithwick said.

He said increased transparency has reduced, though not eliminated, “Facebook drama.”

Pelzer’s future is also linked to West Pelzer and Williamston. Smithwick said the mayors of the three neighboring communities — Pelzer, West Pelzer and Williamston — work closely together because their residents share schools, businesses, events and daily routines.

“All three of us rely on each other,” Smithwick said. “We’re three cities, but realistically, we’re all right here together.”

He said he values his working relationships with West Pelzer Mayor Rick Sanders and Williamston Mayor Rocky Burgess, describing them as friends and sources of advice when he needs help navigating a municipal question.

“There’s a lot of times that I need help where I need to lean on somebody,” Smithwick said. “I have people to call, and that’s beautiful.”

For a town with limited staff and limited money, regional cooperation is not simply a gesture of good will, it is a practical means of surviving, planning and holding events without competing against nearby communities for the same residents on the same day.

Smithwick’s stated ambition is not to make Pelzer famous in the short term, it is to make the town durable enough that his son will want to remain there as an adult.

“I want my kid to grow up in Pelzer,” he said. “I want him to live in the same house he lives in now. I want him to go to school here. I want him to go to college, and I want him to come right back.”

That ambition explains the mixture of projects now underway: a mobile clinic in a parking lot, an animal-care service, public festivals, a riverbank cleanup, better accounting, repaired fields, a possible park trail, conversations about mills and the patient work of studying an old building’s ruined rafters.

The work does not always produce immediate spectacle. But Smithwick said the town is trying to direct its limited resources toward projects that will last longer than a single political term.

“I don’t care what people think about me in four years, eight years,” he said. “I care what people think about me in 20 or 25.”

For now, the town square is still a parking lot. But it is becoming a place where a resident can see a doctor, arrange veterans care, take a pet for treatment, buy something from a neighbor, bring a child to a festival or wait beneath a Christmas tree. In a small town, that is how a center begins.