Pendleton Mayor Planting Seeds for Long-Range Progress

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

“Patience.”

That’s the one-word summary from Pendleton Mayor Sarah Stokowski of the most important lesson she’s learned in her first few months in office.

When Stokowski talks about being mayor, she begins not with a list of accomplishments but with an adjustment of temperament. She is discovering that the work of a small-town executive is less about quick wins than about living comfortably with the fact that she cannot please everyone and still going home at night able to sleep, convinced she has done the best she can for the people she serves.

Her time horizon has stretched accordingly. She speaks now in terms of a “50-year thought process,” a way of thinking that asks her to imagine Pendleton not just at the end of her term but in 2076, when today’s festival kids are old enough to complain about traffic and reminisce about “the way the square used to be.”

The most tangible expression of that long view is something as unromantic-sounding as a Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO, which Stokowski mentions with the excitement other mayors reserve for ribbon cuttings. The document, drafted by a 32-member citizen committee over the course of 18 months, has finally moved out of committee and into the hands of the Planning Commission, which will mark it up before it passes through rounds of public meetings and, eventually, a council vote.

In its current incarnation, she notes with a mix of pride and wry amusement, the UDO is longer than Greenville County’s. It is encyclopedic: a tree ordinance that specifies how many trees developers must keep and what happens when one is cut down, fencing standards, architectural review—an attempt to capture, in legal prose, who Pendleton believes it is and how it wants to look as it grows. The point, as she tells it, is protection: of identity, of historical significance, of the fragile sense that the town is still itself even as the edges blur into highway and corridor.

Surrounding the Village Green, progress on the downtown square includes some scaffolding and dust as the old Evans drugstore building at Main and Exchange—now owned by four couples who pooled their resources—is being restored “back to its former glory,” down to the width of the windows and the color of the bricks. Stokowski, who once sat on the architectural review committee that saw the early designs, lingers over the awning: a company is recreating it to match a 1930s version, measurements and colors included.

The project, which she refers to by its working name, Main Exchange, will house Men on Exchange, a sort of brother boutique to New Teak, along with a financial advisor and a photographer upstairs, with additional space left for whatever speakeasy-style business might next be persuaded to take a chance on Pendleton. Around the corner, parking lots behind Exchange Street and in the old car dealer lot are being rebuilt, walls redesigned by engineers after utilities work made them crumble, in anticipation of what she promises will be “brand new parking” even as she reminds residents that there are already more than 310 spaces within a 10-minute walk of downtown.

The square, in her imagination, is not just functional but cinematic. Early in her term she persuaded council, unanimously, to reallocate funds to create a celebration and decoration committee—five citizens and Mayor Pro Tem Lynn Merchant—tasked with re-enchanting the heart of town. She ticks off their ideas: uplighting, new banners, lights braided through the trees, illumination running the length of Exchange Street. If council funds the plan through the budget process, downtown, she says, could finally look like the Christmas-card or Hallmark town that locals insist it already is in spirit.

That magic, she insists, will not be seasonal. The committee’s mandate is to make downtown “magical year-round,” building on the existing calendar of holidays, scarecrows, Christmas, and, every April, Spring Jubilee, and the town’s annual celebration of its founding. This year will mark the 49th Jubilee; artists from across the country will descend on the green, though 65 percent of them, by design, will be from South Carolina. Stokowski is already thinking ahead to the 50th.

Downtown is no longer bounded by the square. The Cheney Lofts have filled, the Queen Street and Riverside area has been remade with sidewalks and a upgraded community center that, in her view, has quietly shifted the town’s center of gravity. She imagines movie nights in the middle of that green space in that area this summer, another way to stretch the definition of where downtown begins and ends.

Then there is the old oil mill, whose hulking presence at the edge of town has long stood for a certain kind of deferred dream. The developer, John Gumpert, who developed Cheney Lofts, is working with the town on what they call a “Small Area Plan,” a phrase that understates the scope of what might be possible once that property is fully folded into the life of Pendleton. For Stokowski, the oil mill, the Tax Increment Financing district (the “TIF” that still causes her to lose sleep), and the 76 corridor are all pieces of the same puzzle.

The TIF district, still in its early planning stages, is where she locates many of the town’s most consequential near-future decisions. Architects and engineers are sketching sidewalks, public works, and public facilities; she is vetting developers and insisting on a plan that can bear the weight of half a century. If it all comes together, the district could deliver a new police department and fire station and, perhaps more importantly, a more walkable town, stitched together from highway to square to mill.

The old Doghouse—a beloved but aging recreation center—sits in the middle of those dreams like a question. To restore it to its “former glory” would cost roughly $6 million, she said, an amount that has forced some sobering conversations about what the building should be in 2026 and beyond. She is adamant that it will not be demolished; it means too much to too many people. Instead, she talks of a multipurpose facility: a farmers market, a gathering space, a place that could host the kinds of everyday rituals that make a town feel whole. For now, it remains on the long, Sunday-night list she texts to her town administrator—this week’s list, she notes, did not include it, but it is never far from her mind.

For all the talk of lights and festivals, Stokowski insists that her first priority is public safety. Pendleton does not have 24-hour police coverage, a fact she believes many residents would find surprising, and changing that is high on her agenda. The question, of course, is where those officers will be housed once the town can afford to keep them on around the clock.

The fire department presents a different sort of challenge. Pendleton relies on a volunteer force, organized as a nonprofit and funded by the county, which owns the recreation fields that sit beside the Doghouse. The town has issued a bid request for a substation across Highway 76, a project that has been the subject of community meetings and council debate and which Stokowski hopes will come to fruition, especially if the main station one day relocates to the TIF district.

She is quick to puncture myths about the job she holds. The mayorship of Pendleton is part-time; she earns a $10,000 annual stipend, a figure she cites with both gratitude and a kind of gallows humor. A fellow mayor, she recalls, once calculated that his own mayoral work was compensated at roughly 13 cents an hour. Stokowski laughs about residents who ask whether she is moving into the “mayor’s house,” or who assume the role comes with a six-figure salary, but she also uses the anecdotes to gesture toward something more serious: the vast, largely invisible apparatus of checks and balances that governs every municipal dollar.

Everything, she has learned, is double- and triple-checked, she says, and she takes real comfort—as a taxpayer as much as as mayor—in knowing where each cent goes. Pendleton, in the last decade, has roughly doubled in size after annexing the stretch of highway that most locals refer to simply as “out on 76,” and that growth has made the discipline of budgeting both more complex and more urgent.

If the square is where Pendleton presents itself to visitors, the 76 corridor is where it pays its bills. Stokowski is explicit about this. The businesses and residents along that strip provide much of the town’s tax revenue, underwriting the preservation of the “old Pendleton” that appears on postcards and Instagram feeds. She lives out there herself, amid the new fast-food franchises and chain stores that have proliferated in recent years.

Recently, a Whataburger opened along the corridor, overseen by an owner-operator named Brandy, whose warmth impressed Stokowski enough that she recounts the encounter in detail, as if to suggest that good corporate citizens can still feel personal. A Wendy’s is on the way. Behind these relatively ordinary announcements is a more deliberate strategy: she has been talking with developers about not just recruiting businesses to Pendleton, but recruiting the right ones—those that fill unmet needs for residents rather than simply duplicating what already exists.

The corridor, she believes, deserves to be more than a drive-through. One of her “passion projects” is a beautification plan for 76, something she has begun exploring with colleagues at Clemson, where she is a professor, possibly through a student-led Creative Inquiry project. In her mind’s eye, the highway becomes a kind of extended front porch, aesthetically tied to downtown, the physical embodiment of the relationship she draws between the tax base at the edge and the historic core at the center.

The arrangement is not unique. She points to Travelers Rest, where a corridor of chain businesses lines the road to Asheville while a carefully preserved downtown thrives a short turn away. Pendleton, too, has a historic overlay district with stricter rules and regulations than apply along 76, and she expects the UDO to refine those boundaries further, knitting together the corridor, the square, Greenville Street, Queen Street, and the oil mill into something more coherent and more walkable. Six years from now, she predicts, the town will look “very, very different”—still historic, but more connected, more legible on foot.

Much of what occupies Stokowski and the council in the short term is less visible than a new restaurant or a rebuilt wall. In the thick of the budgeting season, the priorities she describes are abstract but intensely felt: the green, the square, and what she calls “cultural and identity initiatives.” The town has been hosting public meetings where residents—newcomers of two years, lifers of sixty—are invited to articulate what living in Pendleton means to them.

There is, she insists, something unusually cohesive about this place. To be a Pendletonian is to claim an identity that cuts across age and tenure, and with that identity comes an outsized sense of ownership in the community’s direction. She has learned, in conversations with other municipal leaders, that not every town enjoys a council as cordial as hers, one whose members she speaks with individually at least once a week, who share, broadly, a vision of what Pendleton is and what it might become.

Recreation is another preoccupation. The town has bids out for the future of Veterans Park and is in active talks with nonprofit recreation organizations about bringing their programs to town, as well as with nonprofits focused on trail-building. These, too, are 50-year projects masquerading as five-year plans. She cautions residents—echoing her own lesson—to be patient.

The calendar, at least, offers more immediate satisfactions. In addition to Jubilee and the concerts on the green that will return as part of a “Summer on the Square” series in June, Pendleton will host the Kesse Barn Festival on April 11, the first event organized by the Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture, a group Stokowski says “means a lot to our town.” At the end of April, the free Taste of Pendleton will bring local restaurants, conversation, and her own State of Pendleton address to town, in collaboration with the Chamber and Tri-County.

All of this—the UDO and the TIF district, the Doghouse and the Doghouse’s shadow, the village green and the highway, the part-time mayor with the full-time text thread to her administrator—adds up, in Stokowski’s mind, to a town in motion but not in a hurry. The work of progress, as she describes it, is less a sprint than a long walk from the square out to 76 and back again, checking, as she goes, that the place still feels like home.