The story of Woodruff

01 A crossroads and a tavern

Woodruff grew up where two old roads met: the Buncombe Road, which ran from Charleston toward the mountains, and the Georgia Road. The families who settled here after the Revolution included Joseph Woodruff and his brothers. In 1787 they appear as members and deacons in the earliest minutes of the Church of Christ at Jamey’s Creek, the congregation that became Woodruff Baptist Church. By 1789 Joseph Woodruff had bought two hundred acres on the creek, land that takes in the site of today’s town.

By 1825 the crossroads was known for two things: a post office, named for its postmaster Thomas Woodruff (Joseph’s son), and Woodruff’s Tavern. Surrounded by cotton country, the settlement became the place where farm families came to trade. By the 1850s it hosted large fairs for livestock and home-made goods.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org ↗ · scpictureproject.org ↗

02 Price’s Post Office, and the people enslaved there

A few miles northeast of town stands a house older than Woodruff itself. Thomas Price came to the Spartanburg District around 1793. About 1795 he and his wife Anne built a two-and-a-half-story brick house with a steep gambrel roof and Flemish-bond walls, a style more common in the Chesapeake than in the Upcountry. From it the Prices ran a general store, a tavern and an inn on the stagecoach road toward Cross Anchor. From about 1811 to 1820 the store was also the post office, so the place appeared on maps as “Price’s P.O.” Travelers slept in dormitory rooms under the roof.

That business, and the 2,000 acres of cattle, corn and cotton around it, ran on the labor of enslaved African Americans. The record names a few of them. A 1794 bill of sale lists a woman named Phillis and a child named Harry, bought the same year Price bought his first land here. An enslaved man named George kept the store when Price was away. When Thomas Price died in 1820 he enslaved twenty-four people. Little else is known about their lives, and the historical association that keeps the house says so plainly.

The house passed to the Dean family after the Civil War and later came to the Spartanburg County Historical Association. (Our sources differ on when: one says about 1936, another says 1968, followed by four years of restoration.) It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969. Today it is a museum with a typical Upcountry slave cabin on the grounds (moved there, not original) so that visitors hear the whole story. The house is currently closed for renovations.

Visit today: Historic Price House →

Sources: spartanburghistory.org ↗ · en.wikipedia.org ↗ · theclio.com ↗ · loc.gov ↗

03 A charter, then the railroad

Thomas Woodruff wanted the community to become an official town. He didn’t live to see it, but his two sons carried the idea through, and Woodruff was chartered in 1874 with roughly 150 people.

The railroad changed everything. After the line reached Woodruff in 1885, the population jumped to an estimated 1,600 within a year. Woodruff was the end of the line, and its station had a turntable to send trains back toward Augusta, Georgia. Through the 1880s and ’90s Main Street filled in, with the popular Leatherwood Hotel at its center. A fair that began in the 1870s had become a major yearly draw by the 1890s, pulling visitors from as far as North Carolina.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org ↗ · scpictureproject.org ↗

04 Cotton oil, cotton mills and peaches

Industry arrived in 1898 with the Woodruff Cotton Oil Company, which you can see at the lower right of the 1904 map above. Within three years a newly chartered Woodruff Cotton Mill was running. The W. S. Gray Cotton Mill followed by 1907, and its mill houses widened the town’s neighborhoods.

Those early years were not easy. On the morning of March 28, 1907, the oil mill’s large brick building burned, a $15,000 loss reported by the Rock Hill Record. The company was headed by Dr. L. H. Irby. The cotton mill itself went on to change names more than once: first the Woodruff Cotton Mill, then the Brandon Mill, and later the Abney Mill. That last name lives on in the Abney Mills neighborhood of mill-era houses near downtown.

Until World War II, the one big alternative to textiles was fruit. More than 200,000 peach trees grew within ten miles of town.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org ↗ · rootsandrecall.com ↗

05 Brick, stained glass and a Collegiate Gothic school

Two buildings from this era are now on the National Register of Historic Places. The First Presbyterian Church of Woodruff (Associate Reformed Presbyterian from 1953) was completed in 1911 and dedicated in 1912. It was designed by Spartanburg County architect Luther D. Proffitt, mixing Romanesque and Gothic Revival touches under a standing-seam metal roof. It was listed in 2005. Today it’s a private building, so please enjoy it from the street.

Woodruff High School was built in 1925 for $50,000. Greenville architects Frank H. and Joseph G. Cunningham designed it in the Collegiate Gothic style, with a 600-seat auditorium. It replaced the first high school of 1908 on East Georgia Street and served as the high school until a new campus opened in September 1953.

Visit today: Old Woodruff High School →First Presbyterian building (1911) →

Sources: nationalregister.sc.gov ↗ · nationalregister.sc.gov ↗

06 The Varner years

For many South Carolinians, Woodruff means Wolverines football. W. L. “Willie” Varner coached at Woodruff High for 42 seasons, from 1954 to 1996, winning 383 games, 10 state championships and 28 conference titles. That includes four straight state titles from 1975 to 1978 and a combined 28–0 run over the 1983 and 1984 championship seasons.

Varner was named National High School Coach of the Year in 1983, received the Order of the Palmetto in 1996, and is in the National High School Hall of Fame. One of his quarterbacks, Tony Rice, went on to lead Notre Dame to a national championship.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · scencyclopedia.org ↗

07 New industry, a new city hall, a renewed downtown

Woodruff’s population dipped about four percent in the 1950s as industry clustered near bigger cities. It recovered when Jeffery Manufacturing, an industrial-equipment maker, opened a plant in 1962. By 1970 the town had grown to about 4,600 people.

In 1978 the city bought the old 1925 high school and turned it into City Hall and police headquarters. It still serves that purpose. In the mid-1980s Woodruff moved to a council–manager government while working through lean years. In 2001 a $1.1 million grant-funded downtown project replaced the sidewalks, added decorative lighting and buried the overhead wires.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org ↗ · nationalregister.sc.gov ↗

08 Wings over Woodruff: Triple Tree and Joe Nall

Greenville native Pat Hartness started flying model airplanes at age seven. At Furman University he met his best friend, Joseph T. Nall, who shared that passion. Nall became a pastor, then a lawyer and a flight instructor. In 1986 President Reagan appointed him to the National Transportation Safety Board. From 1982 until 1989, Nall was the master of ceremonies at the giant-scale model fly-ins Hartness hosted at his family’s airfield in Greenville. The first of these events, the Big Bird Fly-In, was held in 1983.

Nall died in 1989 in an aircraft accident in Caracas, Venezuela, while on official business. The next year Hartness renamed the gathering the Joe Nall Fly-In in his friend’s honor. In 1997 Hartness bought land near Woodruff and began shaping it into Triple Tree Aerodrome. He set it up as a nonprofit and gave it the land. Today Joe Nall Week and the Triple Tree Fly-In bring thousands of pilots and model flyers to Woodruff each year, from across the country and around the world.

Visit today: Triple Tree Aerodrome →

Sources: tta.aero ↗ · tta.aero ↗

09 Fire, rock ’n’ roll and a new campus

On January 11, 1987, an arson fire destroyed the Woodruff High School building that had opened in 1953. Students suddenly had no school. Help came from an unlikely place: the rock band REO Speedwagon played a benefit at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium to help that year’s seniors. The band followed it with an August 14 concert at Clemson University, expected to draw about 9,000 people, to raise money for a new building. Singer Kevin Cronin said the band wanted to “send out a positive signal that education is important.”

The rebuilt Woodruff High opened for the school year that began on August 13, 1989. A generation later the town had outgrown it. On August 11, 2022, voters approved a $100 million bond referendum for a new high school, and ground was broken on Cross Anchor Road on June 28, 2023. The new campus was designed for 1,500 students at first, with room to grow to 2,000, and it is the Wolverines’ home today.

Sources: upi.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org ↗ · wspa.com ↗ · whs.spartanburg4.org ↗