West Pelzer’s Origin Story a Tale of Dogs, Drinking and Gambling
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 West Pelzer.
West Pelzer, South Carolina, was born of a disagreement on the other side of the tracks — or, depending on how much faith you place in the old stories, of three disagreements: gambling, liquor, and dogs.
The town’s origin begins in the late 19th century with Francis Pelzer and Capt. Ellison A. Smyth, Charleston industrialists who came to the Upstate to build the textile enterprise that became Pelzer Manufacturing. Like many Southern mill operations of the era, the company was more than an employer, supplying homes, stores, rules, and the entire architecture of daily life. Workers lived in mill houses, shopped at the mill store, and were often paid in mill coin, meaning the company’s authority extended far beyond the factory gate.
The owner of Pelzer Manufacturing, according to S.C. Rep. Blake Sanders, disapproved of gambling, alcohol, and dogs. Gambling threatened the mill currency. Alcohol threatened attendance. Dogs, apparently, threatened the company store with the indignity of stocking dog food.
Sanders, a former mayor of West Pelzer who now represents District 9 in the South Carolina House, defines himself as a husband, father, landscape architect, planner, former Clemson professor, former mayor, state representative, and “chief storyteller.” The last title, he said, is the most important.
“If I don’t tell you a story about West Pelzer,” Sanders said, “then you’ll make up your own.”
The official version of the town’s history is preserved in incorporation papers dated Dec. 24, 1913, displayed at the West Pelzer Municipal Center. The unofficial version centers on John Franks, a surveyor who mapped not only Pelzer’s mills but other textile properties stretching from Greenville through Belton and Honea Path. Franks, according to town lore, grew tired of the restrictions imposed by the mill village, crossed the railroad tracks, and founded a new municipality called Frankville.
Sanders likes to embellish the scene. Snow fell, he imagines, on the Saluda River and the railroad tracks while the secretary of state rode from Columbia on horseback to sign the incorporation papers. No one is entirely certain how much of the tale is history and how much is part of a long-standing tradition of men telling stories over drinks at the Old Boots and Thelma’s.
The scant official record offers a less romantic, and perhaps more revealing, version of the town’s birth. Frankville’s creation was settled not by a surveyor’s theatrical walk across the railroad tracks but by a local vote: 25 in favor, 11 against.
The campaign for incorporation had begun weeks earlier, when residents met, chose a committee, and asked the secretary of state for a charter. The request was granted quickly. On Election Day, with an enthusiasm the contemporary account took care to note, voters selected an intendant and four wardens, T. C. Stewart, C. H. Drake, J. C. Murph, E.S. Smith and J.C. Mundy. No disorder accompanied the balloting, a phrase that suggests observers may have thought disorder at least conceivable.
The dispute was over whether self-rule was worth the bill. Some residents opposed incorporation because it meant higher property taxes, and the meetings leading up to the election were reportedly well attended and occasionally heated. Still, the prevailing side envisioned a town with more than 500 people, a high school, and three or four modern mercantile businesses. It would be enough of a community to claim both its independence and its obligations.
For five years, the town was Frankville. Then, September 13, 1918, its aldermen changed the name to West Pelzer. No surviving explanation has satisfied the town’s historians, though the new name has the practical advantage of locating the community in relation to its larger industrial neighbor.
West Pelzer’s earliest ordinances suggest that even a town founded in rebellion wanted rules. Its first ordinance created a bird sanctuary. Another provision, still technically on the books, requires written permission from the aldermen before a tree may be cut down. Sanders acknowledges such a rule may be difficult to enforce, but he admires its spirit.
There are other stories: of a female mayor who resigned after aldermen refused to let a circus come to town, leaving the community with one of South Carolina’s youngest mayors. It became a town that stood stubbornly on its own feet, a place where the town charter mattered because it meant that people could make their own rules, even if those rules were occasionally odd.
West Pelzer was never fully independent of Pelzer Manufacturing. Most of its residents still worked at the mill, even if they lived across the tracks from the company’s formal jurisdiction. The mill remained the economic engine, and the town’s commercial life grew in its shadow.
Sanders says one consequence of Frankville’s relative freedom may have been that Pelzer Manufacturing eventually began paying wages in United States currency rather than mill coin. It grew into a town that had more liquor stores per capita than anywhere else in Anderson County. One former liquor store, now a market known as The Well, was called Spirits and sat beside a church — a juxtaposition Sanders considers especially useful at Halloween.
The mill era shaped both towns, but it did not make them identical. West Pelzer did not have a textile baseball or basketball team and residents were often excluded from the civic mythology attached to Pelzer’s mill culture. When people speak of the textile heritage and its athletic legends, Sanders said they generally identify them as Pelzer stories, not West Pelzer stories.
That separation eventually softened as textile employment declined and newer manufacturing expanded and the communities found themselves facing the same future. Sanders remembers his father graduating from Palmetto High School in 1979 and choosing between a job at a Milliken plant making cloth and a new job at Michelin’s U.S. 1 facility at Donaldson Center. Michelin offered slightly less money at first, but to him the future of South Carolina manufacturing seemed clear.
The shift from textiles toward automotive and advanced manufacturing changed West Pelzer slowly. Empty storefronts appeared along Highway 8. Older buildings lost their tenants. The road itself, once a market route connecting local farmers to Pendleton and Fountain Inn, was widened by the state, trimming the front edges of some downtown buildings to make room for traffic.
For a time, West Pelzer became the sort of town motorists noticed only while driving through it.
Sanders was among those who thought the town could become something else. As mayor, he began calling West Pelzer the “Upstate’s Front Porch,” an idea that came to him while sitting on his own porch and watching Clemson traffic back up through town.
Travelers coming north from Columbia or Charleston toward Clemson could see West Pelzer before they reached the university. The question, Sanders decided, was how to make them stop.
The town commissioned a market study to determine what kinds of businesses the combined area of West Pelzer, Pelzer, and Williamston could support. It focused on Main Street, sidewalks, antique stores, coffee shops, and places where a traveler might spend 30 or 45 minutes rather than an entire day. The aim was not to recreate a downtown Greenville on a smaller scale, but to create a modest, walkable town center with its own logic.
Then came the annual mile-long yard sale.
Sanders scheduled the first event on Clemson’s homecoming weekend, not fully anticipating what would happen. The sale was shared 15,000 times on Facebook, he said, and drew an estimated 25,000 people to West Pelzer. Traffic toward Clemson backed up for roughly 15 miles, from the town along Highway 418 toward Interstate 385.
“West Pelzer caused it,” Sanders said.
The event produced something more durable than congestion. A visitor asked where she might buy a house in the area. Sanders directed her to a property for sale and she made an offer the next week and moved in. For him, it became a proof of concept.
“We can grow without growing,” he said.
West Pelzer then inventoried its remaining properties: vacant lots, buildings ready for demolition, homes that could be restored, and parcels suitable for infill development. The town marketed those opportunities while setting firm boundaries against sprawling outward into surrounding farmland.
Its Rural Renewal Master Plan, recognized by the Municipal Association, established growth boundaries intended to protect agricultural land and avoid extending water and sewer infrastructure into the countryside. The town filled existing spaces instead of planning large new subdivisions.
That approach has worked almost too well. Sanders says West Pelzer is now essentially full. A few lots near the elementary school remain under development, but there are no major subdivisions in the pipeline. The next challenge is affordability. Like the rest of the county, the town needs more market-rate multifamily housing, attached homes, and perhaps, one day, apartments above downtown businesses.
Sanders said adding second stories to some of the downtown businesses could provide one solution.
“There’s no reason that we couldn’t have downtown living one day,” he said, imagining apartments above City Hall, Westies, or Baby Sumo.
The revival of West Pelzer was not entirely a municipal project. It also became a Sanders family gamble.
After the market study was complete, Sanders pitched the idea of antique stores, restaurants, and taprooms to business owners from Anderson to Greenville and beyond. Most declined. One evening, while having a beer on his father’s back porch, Sanders heard a suggestion that became a challenge.
“If you really think it’ll work,” his father, Rick Sanders, said, “why don’t we put our money where our mouth is?”
While the town was relocating its government offices from a 25-by-25-foot building into the renovated former NAPA building on Main Street, Sanders’s father bought the building next door and opened an antique shop. The rear space remained storage until the family decided to open the Lincoln Tap Room in October 2019.
The name came from Abraham Lincoln, who made Thanksgiving a federal holiday rather than requiring presidents to seek congressional approval each year. The taproom, Sanders said, was intended as a place of Thanksgiving — somewhere people could gather, share food, and drink “their cold beverage of choice.”
The irony is not lost on him. A town that, by legend, began because its founder wanted freedom from the mill’s restrictions on alcohol, gambling, and dogs now has a taproom, a dog show called Dog Days of Summer, and free bingo in the beer garden. Actual gambling remains off limits, at least in its lucrative forms.
“I still have not found a way to have gambling in West Pelzer,” Sanders said. “I’m pretty sure that our governor and perhaps some of our legislative body would frown upon me for trying to do that.”
Today, West Pelzer works more closely with its neighbors than it did during the mill era. The town partners with Pelzer and Williamston on events, tourism, and community development. The Homesteading Festival is now a joint project with Pelzer. July Fourth events are coordinated so that each community has room for its own celebration.
The old rivalry has become something more practical for residents of Pelzer, West Pelzer, and Williamston who use the same schools, churches, grocery stores, roads, and regional employers. As Sanders put it: “We’re all in this together.”
There is another familial twist in the town’s current political story. Sanders was once South Carolina’s second-youngest mayor, behind the mayor of Joanna. After serving two terms and moving on to the State House, he was succeeded by his father, Rick Sanders, who is now mayor of West Pelzer.
The two are neighbors and best friends, though Sanders insists they do not talk as much politics as people might expect. His father manages the concerns of roughly 1,200 residents. Sanders handles the larger, more bewildering world of 46 counties and 271 municipalities.
West Pelzer has been doing things backward, Sanders said, since Dec. 24, 1913. That may be true. It was founded across the railroad tracks from a mill town, became Frankville before it became West Pelzer, found its future through an antique shop, a taproom, a yard sale, and a refusal to surrender farmland to easy growth.
But its history offers a useful lesson in the power of a small place to decide what it will become. Across the tracks, the old mill system once told people where to live, where to shop, what to drink, what to do with their wages, and forbid the ownership of dogs. West Pelzer’s answer, through the years, has been characteristically stubborn: it will make its own rules.
