Personal Injury Attorney in Glendale, SC

An iconic Spartanburg landmark will stand in perpetuity thanks to the preservations efforts of a local nonprofit.

Spartanburg Area Conservancy has purchased the historic Glendale Mill site for $1.5 million. The purchase was announced at the organization’s A Shucking Good Time fundraising event, which is held annually on the Glendale Shoals bridge near the mill property.

The purchase adds an additional 16.5 acres to Glendale Shoals Preserve's 13 acres, and according to SPACE Executive Director Sam Parrott, will benefit not only local residents but also the environment.

The purchase will help to better protect Lawson's Fork Creek, which divides the property and will be beneficial to the wildlife that inhabit the area by preventing fragmentation, or the disruption and segmentation of natural spaces by development.

"This is going to be green space forever. This property is never going to be subdivided. This property is never going to be commercially developed or residentially developed; it's going to be the way it is," Parrott said. "So, I really think it's a gift to future generations.

The organization began working toward the purchase of Glendale Mill about a year and a half ago. Belle Montgomery, the former chair of SPACE's board of directors, kick started the effort when a sales flyer for the property made its way to her desk.

"This property has been for sale, on and off, for the last decade with a large price tag and people talked a lot about SPACE buying, but it was an enormous endeavor for a nonprofit," Montgomery said. "[But] a new sales flyer hit my hands, and I thought, 'Why not try?'"

Montgomery met with the South Carolina Conservation Bank and was told it was a worthy goal. However, in order to receive funding from the South Carolina Conservation Bank, SPACE needed to be able to put down half of the purchase price, which the bank would match.

"It's really important to the South Carolina Conservation Bank board that there be local buy-in. That was one of the main things, if they were going to get behind the project, that I had to prove, that the local community really cared about it," Montgomery said.

And donors, both organizations, including Spartanburg County, and individuals stepped up to make the purchase happen. SPACE raised more than $700,000, and saw first-hand the community's commitment to saving its landscape and places of significance as more developers and businesses come to the area.

"We know with the amount of support that our community is given to this project that people want to see green spaces. And a big motivating thing for our board is to ensure that we not only conserve land, but we're conserving land that we are opening to the public," Montgomery said.

Glendale's 30 historic acres part of Spartanburg's history

The purchase will also help preserve an important piece of Spartanburg's history.

The Glendale neighborhood and particularly the lands surrounding Lawson's Fork Creek are rich with history. The lands closest to the river, which are now owned by the Tyger River Foundation, SPACE and Wofford College, were first developed as an iron works during the Revolutionary War.

The original water-powered cotton mill and the mill village, both called Bivingsville, were established along the creek in the early 1830s, and later renamed Glendale. The mill was rebuilt in 1902 as an electric mill and operated until the 1960s. Sadly, most of the structure was destroyed by a fire in 2004. The mill site was most recently listed for sale by its previous co-owner Glyn Morris in 2019.

"It means a great deal to the Glendale Community that that a big housing development is not going to radically alter this village," said Steve Patton, groundskeeper of Wofford’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center, housed in the former Glendale Mill office. "All the proposals that have come forward in the past would have immediately tripled the size of the population here, and the roads, the sewer, and the landscape just couldn't handle it. So keeping this as a place to come to for solace, instead of a place to make money, is going to be very much appreciated by the people who've taken care of it for a very, very long time and the people who live here for solace."

Parrott: Time to get 'serious about conservation'

The board hopes to open the mill site to the public in an official capacity, soon, but no timeline has been set.

Parrott said SPACE's goals for future acquisitions include purchases that will allow them to add onto existing SPACE properties, as they did at Glendale Shoals and earlier this year when they purchased additional lands near Milliken to grow the Upper Chinquapin Greenway from 36 to more than 100 acres.

They are additionally looking for purchases that will allow them to protect places of local historical significance and iconic view sheds, to protect waterways, and to ensure public access to Spartanburg green spaces.

"There's that old phrase, 'you only miss something when it's gone', and I think we're trying to stay ahead of that. We don't want every significant natural area, significant green space, significant publicly accessible site or potential publicly accessible site to be gone, and I think every sector of our community has bought into that idea," Parrott said. "From our board's perspective and my perspective, the time is now to get serious about conservation."