Pendleton Birthplace of Anderson County Progress

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

As part of Anderson County’s bicentennial celebration, The Anderson Observer is offering brief histories of our towns and communities. Today we look at the oldest township, Pendleton.

Carol Burdette is setting her sights on writing a book chronicling the last 100 years of Pendleton’s history. Not a surprise for those who know her, since she’s been a part of much of that time period.

A Pendleton native who has served the interest of the town most of her life, including three terms as mayor, remains passionate about her hometown.

She is quick to remind that Pendleton is older than Anderson County, which is celebrating its bicentennial this year, as well as older than many public institutions that now define the region. It is a history that must be told in layers. First, it was Cherokee country. Then a village established in 1790 largely by the wealthy Charlestonians who came north in search of relief from heat, mosquitoes, and malaria, joining the Scotch-Irish farmers who had already made a life in the upcountry. With the development came the churches, plantations, mills, schools, soldiers, shopkeepers, preservationists, and volunteers who continued the work of turning a crossroads into a town.

Burdette, the former mayor, chamber executive, and lifelong student of the town, sees history not a subject that lies safely behind glass. It is alive in the Farmers Hall on the village green, in the graveyards at Old Stone Church and St. Paul’s, in the old mill windows along Blue Ridge Street, in the memories of handwritten charge accounts at Evans Drug Store, and in the stories residents tell each other when an old building is restored instead of demolished.

The community was named for Judge Henry Pendleton, only a few years after the Pendleton District was formed. In 1990, the town held a yearlong bicentennial celebration, which Burdette chaired — an effort to commemorate not merely a founding date but every version of Pendleton that had followed.

Some of the grand historic homes remain. Woodburn, built for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Ashtabula, first associated with the Gibbs family and later owned by the Broyles, Bowens, and Pelzer families, are now restored and open to the public. Other names, including Altamont and Boscobel, survive more imperfectly, their homes lost to fire, demolition, or time.

The early religious landscape remains equally visible. Old Stone Church, the original Hopewell-Keowee Presbyterian Church congregation just outside Pendleton still stands, and its cemetery includes Robert Anderson, the Revolutionary War officer for whom Anderson County was named. The Presbyterian church on Broad Street has stood for decades, while Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, and African American congregations developed their own deep roots in the community.

Burdette’s affection for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church is particularly strong. Built in 1822, it was attended by the Calhouns and Clemsons and contains the graves of some of South Carolina’s most prominent families. One story holds that Mrs. Calhoun disliked the hissing sound made by the choir director so intensely that she donated $300 for a pump organ to drown him out. Another concerns the church bell: the original bell was melted down for ammunition during the Civil War, and Burdette rang its replacement this summer on Carolina Day.

Pendleton’s early importance eventually declined for reasons that were both political and practical. After the county seat shifted to Anderson, and the railroad bypassed Pendleton, the town did not disappear, but it ceased to be the place where public power and commercial growth naturally converged.

That reduction in prominence may have preserved it.

In 1970, the entire Town of Pendleton was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a distinction that Burdette attributes largely to Hurley Badders, a former Anderson Independent journalist, historian, and early director of what became the Pendleton District Commission. Badders researched the town, prepared the application, and made a convincing case that Pendleton’s history was not scattered among individual landmarks but embedded in the town itself.

The village square remains at the geographic center of Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties — one reason, Burdette suggested, that Tri-County Technical College selected Pendleton for its original campus. At its center, on the village green, sits Farmers Hall, completed in 1826 by the Pendleton Farmers Society. Nearby is the Guard House, built in 1860 and used at different times as a jail, library, Garden Club headquarters, magistrate’s office, and now a small visitor center operated by the Pendleton Historic Foundation.

Other buildings on the square, dating from around the 1850s, remain among the town’s oldest commercial structures. The square has also held a drug store, Welborn Department Store, Brown’s Five-and-Dime, a hardware store, a Duke Power office, appliance shops, banks, and the kind of locally owned businesses that made a town self-sufficient before the arrival of shopping centers and online ordering.

Burdette remembers working at Evans Drug Store in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when charge accounts still governed much of the town’s commerce. A customer might pick up an item, call out its price, and leave without providing a name. The clerk was expected to know who had bought it.

“It was very much a Mayberry setting,” she said, adding that learning those names came in handy later when she ran for mayor.

It was also a system of watchfulness. At Welborn’s, children were closely observed, though not always with suspicion as Mr. Welborn worked to upsell all customers. In the older version of Pendleton, everyone knew everyone, and the town’s collective memory functioned as both social network and informal security system.

Agriculture has deep roots and remains important after the Civil War, but Pendleton also became part of the textile economy. The Pendleton Manufacturing Company operated in nearby La France, while the Pendleton Cotton Mill created its own mill neighborhood along East and West Blue Ridge streets. Many of Burdette’s family members worked there.

She remains grateful that the building, smokestack, pond, and large industrial windows were preserved when the property was redeveloped as Pendleton Mill Lofts. The old mill now has another life, but its shape is still visible — an acknowledgment that the town’s history should not have to vanish simply because its original economic purpose has changed.

Textile work eventually gave way to newer forms of industry. Milliken built plants in the Pendleton area in the 1940s, and nearby Michelin’s arrival in Anderson County in 1974 marked an early shift toward high-tech manufacturing. The local economy changed, but Pendleton maintained something that many mill towns lost: a historic center intact enough to become an asset.

The town’s schools have also been a source of civic pride. The WPA-built elementary school from the 1930s was eventually repurposed as Town Hall rather than torn down. A newer school building later became Riverside Middle School, and Pendleton’s most recent high-school facilities, Burdette said, have the appearance and scale of a college campus.

She remembers local figures such as J. B. Outz, the school superintendent who later became chairman of the election commission. “Nothing was ever funny to Mr. Outz,” she said. “He was all business.”

Still, the story of Pendleton is not only one of stern officials, old buildings, and careful preservation. It is also the story of people deciding that a town is worth improving.

In the 1970s, Pendleton became one of the early examples of downtown revitalization in South Carolina. The village green, then little more than an unattractive open space, was remade with grass and patios around Farmers Hall. The Farmers Hall Tea Room brought visitors downtown, and the town began shifting from older retail businesses toward tourism, restaurants, historic preservation, and cultural events.

The Pendleton Spring Jubilee, founded in 1977 by Burdette’s sister, became a central part of that change. The festival was conceived as an arts-and-crafts event that would launch the Anderson County festival season each April. It grew into one of the better-known events of its kind in the region and has been featured repeatedly in Southern Living.

The arrival of visitors, followed by new residents, changed Pendleton’s character. The town was no longer merely a place people passed through or a community sustained by its own small businesses. It became a place people discovered, liked, and decided to join.

Burdette served as mayor during a period of continued change. Her administration helped move Town Hall from the old icehouse into the former school building, completing the renovation and furnishing for about $325,000. The town also created a sister-city relationship with Stornoway, Scotland, bringing students and residents into an international exchange that eventually gave Burdette an opportunity to meet Queen Elizabeth II.

A donated lot beside Liberty Hall became Sister City Park, with a condition written into the deed that the property remain green space permanently. Pendleton acquired a new post office, expanded public parking, improved its water system, and built a new water tank because the existing water pressure was insufficient to fight a major fire on the town square.

Water pressure, parking, sewage, public buildings, and loans do not generally inspire postcards, but they are how a small town remains livable while protecting the things visitors come to admire.

Burdette tells the story of Buddy Durham, her predecessor as mayor, who, when approached about naming something in tow in his honor, asked that the first town-owned downtown parking lot be named after him. The Buddy Durham parking lot was paved, marked with a sign, and preserved as a small reminder that even the unglamorous parts of public service can acquire local personality.

Burdette also created a long-term beautification fund after asking a local philanthropist for help planting flowers. She expected perhaps a $25,000 check. Instead, the donor established a $136,000 endowment, with the principal protected and the annual proceeds dedicated to flowers, landscaping, and improvements that make the town more beautiful.

“It’s still being used today,” she said.

Burdette’s list of future wishes is long: a downtown clock, a museum where residents and visitors can see and touch Pendleton’s history, historic markers for African American landmarks, a book about the town’s past century, and the restoration of a 1938 fire engine. The engine, she noted, has special significance because Pendleton’s Methodist church once burned when the town lacked the capacity to fight the fire. Frank Crenshaw’s father, Horace, and other local men traveled to Chicago to bring back the truck.

She also hopes Pendleton will continue to become more beautiful without becoming unrecognizable. Her regret, she said, is that the town did not borrow money years ago to complete a master plan for Veterans Park, when the price was a little more than $1 million. Now, the same work would cost many times more.

But the central idea, for Burdette, is not architecture, infrastructure, or even preservation. It is people.

She remembers civic projects in which wealthy residents, retired mill workers, Black and white residents, longtime families, newcomers, Clemson professors, and people with little formal education worked alongside one another. At the time she was mayor, Pendleton’s Black population was about 37 percent; today, she said, it is closer to 20 percent. She wants the town’s African American churches, neighborhoods, and landmarks to receive the historic recognition they deserve.

A town is historic because people decide it is worth remembering. Pendleton has endured partly because its residents have repeatedly made that decision — restoring the green, saving the mill, protecting open space, preserving old schools, keeping Farmers Hall at the center of the square, and teaching each generation why the old buildings matter.