Editor’s note: This is the third in a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
If we want to understand Greenville honestly, we have to begin before Greenville existed.
Before there was a county line, a courthouse, a Main Street, or a mill village, this was Cherokee land. That is not symbolic language. It is historical fact. Long before Greenville had an English name, the rivers, ridges, valleys and hunting grounds of the Upcountry were part of a Cherokee world that was old, organized, and deeply rooted in place…