T. Ed Garrison to Join Anderson County Museum Hall of Fame
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Thomas Edmond “T. Ed” Garrison Jr. spent most of his ninety‑one years inside a fairly tight orbit—Anderson County, Clemson, Columbia—but within that circle he managed to leave traces on everything from dairy policy to 4‑H banquets. When the Anderson County Museum inducts him into its Hall of Fame on March 24, it will be as much a family portrait as a solo honor, recognizing a man whose public life was inseparable from a farm, a church, and a household that treated service as an inherited crop.
Born in 1922, Garrison came of age in the red‑clay fields just outside Anderson, graduated from Boys High, and then from Clemson in 1942 with a degree in vocational agriculture, when Clemson was still an all‑male military college. Like many of his classmates, he went straight from campus into uniform, serving with the U.S. Army Air Forces as a World War II bomber pilot, a role later noted in a House resolution that sketched his life as a sequence of linked duties: war, farm, legislature. The same resolution would later describe his death, in June 2013, as the close of “a life fully lived in committed service to God, family, community, and State.”
After the war, he came home and did something that now seems almost radical in its simplicity: he added a dairy to the family farm. From that decision flowed much of the rest—his immersion in soil and water conservation boards, Farm Bureau committees, and the dense network of organizations that managed land and livestock in mid‑century South Carolina. In 1955, he married Hazel Juanita Bartlett, a reporter and editor from Cochran, Georgia, whom he had met after she moved to Seneca to work at the Journal‑Tribune. They were married for fifty‑eight years, until his death, and raised six children in the white farmhouse at Denver Downs, their lives marked out as much by milking schedules as by legislative calendars.
Garrison’s political career began in 1958 with his election to the state House and stretched through three decades of institutional change. He served in the House from 1959 to 1966 and then in the Senate from 1967 to 1988, making him one of Anderson County’s longest‑serving legislators. His colleagues remembered him as a “true public servant” and a “keeper of the land”—phrases that, in his case, were not metaphorical but literal, reflecting years of work on laws touching agriculture, conservation, and rural infrastructure. The state eventually awarded him the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, a formal bow to a half‑century of overlapping obligations.
The project that most visibly carries his name is the T. Ed Garrison Livestock Arena at Clemson; the state’s only full‑service public venue designed specifically for the livestock industry. In the early 1980s, as industry groups pushed for a statewide arena, Garrison used his legislative clout to argue that Clemson—the land‑grant university he never really left—was the proper home, shepherding site selection and funding through the customary thicket of committees and competing interests. The General Assembly voted in 1986 to build the complex at Clemson, a bond referendum in 1991 financed the arena and barns, and the Legislature named the facility in his honor, turning his advocacy into a permanent piece of infrastructure. Today it hosts youth shows, sales, expos, and association meetings, its concrete and steel animated by the livestock culture he spent his career elevating.
Garrison’s record in Columbia was less a string of headline‑grabbing bills than a long, methodical campaign on behalf of farms, land, and the back roads that tie them together. Over three decades in the General Assembly, his work traced the contours of an older South Carolina—one in which dairies, soil districts, and extension offices were central institutions rather than nostalgic props.
In agriculture and livestock, he was a persistent advocate for public investment in the physical infrastructure of rural life, work that eventually coalesced in the state’s decision to build a multi‑purpose livestock arena at Clemson and, later, to give it his name. The T. Ed Garrison Arena, now South Carolina’s only full‑service public facility dedicated to the livestock industry, stands as the most visible monument to that impulse, hosting shows, sales, and youth events under a roof he helped secure.
His legislation often grew out of his own experience as a dairyman. He worked closely with soil and water conservation districts and backed measures aimed at land stewardship—erosion control, pasture management, and farm conservation practices that rarely draw cameras but quietly determine what survives the next hard season. In committee rooms and budget debates, he was a reliable ally of Clemson University and the state’s broader land‑grant network, steering money toward agricultural research, extension programs, and farm‑support services that carried university knowledge back down the farm‑to‑market roads he knew by heart.
Beyond the roll‑call votes, Garrison’s influence flowed through the dense mesh of boards and associations—Farm Bureau chapters, historical societies, conservation commissions—where policy met practice. The General Assembly’s decision not only to christen Clemson’s arena with his full name but also to award him the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest civilian honor, amounted to an official acknowledgement that his patient, unshowy work had, over time, helped redraw South Carolina’s agricultural and conservation landscape.
If his public titles trace one arc of service, Juanita’s résumé traces another. Born in 1933 in Houston County, Georgia, the only child of James Colson and Hazel Arrowood Bartlett, she joined Cochran First Baptist Church as a teenager and went on to a career in journalism before moving to the Upstate. In Anderson, she taught in local schools and at Anderson College, worked with the Vocational Rehabilitation program, and became something like a regional voice of the back yard and back forty through her gardening and food columns— “Growing a Garden” for the Greenville News, “My Country Garden” and “Sunday Dinner” for the Anderson Independent Mail and other papers. A House resolution later noted that she “ably assisted” her husband as his “life partner,” while also serving as a 4‑H leader, Scout leader, flower show judge, and charter member or officer in a long list of civic and literary organizations.
Together, the Garrisons produced a small dynasty of public‑spirited offspring. All six children graduated from Clemson, fulfilling a parental ambition that was as much cultural as academic. Their eldest, Gaye Garrison Sprague, served on Greenville City Council and volunteered as a 4‑H leader; Tom Garrison became chairman of the Anderson County Board of Conservation Commissioners and joined Clemson’s agriculture curriculum advisory board; Bart Garrison, remembered in the House resolution for his Little League coaching, died in a farming accident that neighbors still recall with a kind of stunned tenderness. Their daughters Lee Smith, Elizabeth Rasor, and Catherine Davis turned up in the rosters of the Tri‑County Tech Foundation, the Greenville Symphony Orchestra’s Downtown Symphony Club, and Junior Leagues in Greenville and Charleston, extending the family’s pattern of committee work and volunteer boards into the next generation.
At Welcome Baptist Church, founded by his grandfather, T. Ed served as a deacon for many years and taught the men’s Sunday school class; Juanita taught Sunday school “off and on for more than” four decades, as one obituary put it, and led waves of children through 4‑H, Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and mission organizations. The House resolution honoring the family reads, at moments, like a compressed social history of mid‑century Anderson County—church basements, extension offices, county fairs, and school board meetings stitched together by a single surname.
When Garrison died unexpectedly on June 16, 2013—Father’s Day—he did so at Denver Downs Farm, the address that had anchored his adult life and legislative mail for decades. Six years later, in September 2019, Juanita died at the same place, her obituary noting the garden columns, the teaching, the leadership roles that had quietly undergirded her husband’s higher‑profile work. By then, the state had already enshrined the family with a formal House resolution and a named arena; the Anderson County Museum’s Hall of Fame simply adds another plaque to a life already written into the region’s physical and institutional landscape.
Visitors who walk through the museum this spring for Hall of Fame ceremonies will likely hear the dates and offices, the war service and the Order of the Palmetto, the dairy, the arena, the six Clemson diplomas.
But in Anderson County, the more enduring memory may be smaller in scale: a former senator standing by a show ring at Clemson, watching a nervous teenager lead a calf under the lights, or an older couple on Denver Downs, one talking soil and legislation, the other writing about roses and okra—two lives braided so tightly into the place that honoring one inevitably means honoring them both.
