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Morgan Square 1
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walking map
In Morgan Square stand two important Spartanburg monuments: The Daniel Morgan Monument, for which the square is named, and the Clock Tower. Dedicated in 1881, the large bronze statue depicts General Daniel Morgan, the Patriot commander at the Battle of Cowpens. When the monument was dedicated, the country was still divided by the recent trials of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Take a moment to read the inscriptions at the monument’s base and you’ll hear connections to both the Revolutionary War and the PostReconstruction period. The inscriptions emphasize the need to overcome sectionalism by unifying the various factions of the country, an issue relevant to both time periods. The Clock Tower’s clock and bell were originally housed in the Spartanburg Opera House, which was located at the site of the Masonic Temple. The Opera House was Spartanburg’s original city hall and housed city offices, the post office, and a public auditorium that could be used for large meetings, speeches, and performances.
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N I L O R A C H T U
historic downtown
Ezell Street3
Morgan Square, 1884
The block of brick buildings on Ezell Street are all that remain of a small warehouse and wholesale district that was built along the Piedmont and Northern Railroad line. These warehouses stored goods sold in businesses on Morgan Square. The large patio in front of the buildings is not original, but many of the columns include cobblestones that were part of the original street pavement. Ezell Street was named for Samuel Ezell who owned a hardware and farm goods store in the Spartan Inn, a hotel which stood facing Morgan Square until it burned down in 1910. Towards the east end of Ezell we come up behind the former Spartanburg Water Works building, which is now the private residence of former mayor Bill Barnet. He and his wife purchased the building and renovated it into one of the most The Spartan Inn fire, 1910 unique homes in Spartanburg in order to promote downtown living.
2Masonic temple {190 W. Main St.}
The Masonic Temple Building
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This map is intended to be a self-guided walking tour of historic downtown Spartanburg. Follow the order of the locations on the map and it should take no more than 1 hour. We hope you enjoy your visit and please stop by the Spartanburg Regional History Museum at stop #14 for more information.”
Produced by the Spartanburg County Historical Association in conjunction with the Spartanburg Convention & Visitors Bureau and the City of Spartanburg.
Historic Downtown Walking Map
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The Masonic Temple building was designed by local architect Frank Collins in 1927. Collins designed several landmark homes and buildings in the area including the old Spartanburg Water Works building just up the street at 168 West Main. Masonic lodges still meet in the large hall on the second and third floors. When the Opera House was located on this site, the Spartan Inn, a large Gothic Revival style hotel which could accommodate some 500 guests and housed a variety of businesses, sat next-door. Adjacent to the Masonic Temple is the Cantrell Wagons Building which currently houses apartments and Carriage House Wines, a retail wine and beer shop that offers regular wine tasting events. The building was constructed in 1900 to house a carriage factory and repair shop. As automobiles gained in popularity it began selling early cars. However, the building’s sign advertising wagons can still be viewed in the rear of the property.
4Spring Street
Spring Street in this section is little more than a back alley behind the businesses that face Magnolia Street, but it's possible to see the great age of some of the buildings here. At the bottom of the hill is the first sign of a tiny stream that once bubbled up underneath one of the buildings on this street. The QS/1 Building stands on the site of the former Piedmont and Northern Railroad Depot. This was an inter-urban electric railroad that connected Spartanburg with Greenville and Greenwood. After the railroad was gone, it was a parking lot for several decades before QS/1 built here in The Piedmont & Northern Railroad line the mid-2000s. This is one of a handful of environmentally-sensitive construction projects in Spartanburg. Below ground, a cistern collects rainwater for landscaping and interior uses and the building is positioned to collect sunlight for maximum energy efficiency.
Spartanburg County was established in 1785 as the Revolutionary War was ending. Officials decided to place the county courthouse in the approximate center of the county where downtown Spartanburg now rests. Prior to this there was no village or crossroads here and only gradually did taverns, shops, and homes take their place along the streets of the courthouse village. The city grew steadily and, in 1859, was connected to the railroad, revolutionizing the local economy. Following the Civil War, leaders capitalized on the area’s tiny but profitable textile industry and by the 1880s Spartanburg had become a national leader in textiles. With the establishment of military training camps during WWI and WWII, the growth of local colleges, and the influx of textile money and The advertisement above inv ites its audience to visit, settle, and easy transportation, Spartanburg gained a cosmopolitan air. invest in Spartanburg. “Please rea d and hand to a friend!” By the 1980s, however, the collapse of the textile industry, declining agriculture, and lingering racial tensions left Spartanburg with a struggling economy and an ailing downtown. Today, a new generation brings life back into the old city.
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SPARTANBURG
S P A R T A N B U R G
Magnolia Street5
Magnolia Street is one of the oldest commercial and residential streets in the city. In Spartanburg's early days, this was one of the premier residential districts of the city. Benjamin Wofford, the founder of Wofford College, and many others had grand homes lining this street. Notice how the left side of the street contains only new, large buildings, while the right side features buildings of many different eras. This is because the entire block was leveled in the late 1970s in preparation for a large civic center that was never built. Also erased was a small street that ran between Magnolia and Church Streets known as Short Wofford Street. This was a small African-American commercial district that included some small restaurants and music venues where well known jazz musicians of the 1920s-1960s played. At the junction of Magnolia and Howard Streets lies Magnolia Cemetery. In 1838, Spartanburg received two and one half acres of this land for a graveyard. Many of Spartanburg’s early civic, educational, and political leaders are buried here.
6Spartanburg Co. Courthouse
{180 Magnolia St.}
The Spartanburg County Courthouse
The grassy lot on the corner of Magnolia and St. John Street was once the site of the Spartanburg County Courthouse which now sits on the adjacent lot. Built in 1890 in the Romanesque Revival Style, today it is considered to have been one of the most interesting buildings of its era but in the 1950s many thought it extremely unattractive. The newspaper editor even called the building a "monstrosity.” It stood on the site until 1958, when it was torn down following the construction of the current courthouse. This illustrates the changes in taste that occur over the years. Many would now consider the 1958 courthouse to be an ugly building and would celebrate its demolition in favor of a newer building. Fortunately, though, others see its appeal as a fine example of midcentury modern architecture with its clean lines and elegant use of materials.
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Historical Places Historic Walking Trail Parking Greenspace Colleges Bike Trails/Safe Roads
Map Key
1. Morgan Square 2. Masonic Temple 3. Ezell St. 4. Spring St. 5. Magnolia St. 6. Spartanburg Co. Courthouse 7. Montgomery Building
8. One Morgan Square 9. Palmetto Corner 10. Main St. Stores 11. Main St. Mall 12. Denny’s Plaza 13. Converse at Main 14. Chapman Cultural Center
Chamber of Commerce/ The Visitor’s Center
The Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine Art Museum History Museum Science Center
USC Upstate George Dean Johnson Jr. College of Business and Economics
One Morgan8 Square Building {100 Dunbar St.}
Built in 2003, the One Morgan Square Building occupies the site of the old Andrews Building, which was lost along with other buildings in this block in 1977. While working to demolish the building, many of the building’s support columns were removed to aid in the demolition. Unfortunately, a miscalculation occurred and the building simply collapsed a day or so before the demolition was scheduled to occur. At the time of the collapse, six workers were in or below the building, five of whom died. A plaque on the One Morgan Square building memorializes those workers. Also on this site was the original location of the Kennedy Free Library, built in 1885. This was the first public library in Spartanburg and the predecessor to the current Spartanburg County Public Library. The library’s headquarters are now located on South Church Street.
Palmetto Corner 9 E. M
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Spartanburg Community College Downtown Campus
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7Montgomery Building {187 N. Church St.}
Built in 1925 as the second multi-story office building in Spartanburg, the Montgomery Building was the premier office building of its day and exhibits a fine Chicago architectural style with hints of Art Deco in the interior. According to a newspaper article from 1925, the new building would provide desperately needed office space to the town. The writer claimed that lack of office space had been all that had kept businesses from flooding Spartanburg to date. The bottom floor was used as a retail space, and the upper floor housed the Cartography Division of the Soil Conservation Service. A select group of the Cartography Division was chosen to create top-secret maps for use during WWII, including the maps used to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. A variety of musicals, operettas, and plays were presented at the theater on the bottom floor, which boasted 6 chandeliers. Elvis Presley also made a notable performance in this grand theatre.
The Palmetto Hotel
The Aug W. Smith Company
On the corner of Church and Main, known in old days as the Palmetto Corner, stands the Palmetto Building. It was built around 1898 and replaced an1840s hotel known by the same name. This was one of the major social centers of Spartanburg in its early days. When the building was being restored in 1999, a worker discovered a whiskey bottle containing a note, which gave the name of the writer and read, “I drank this whiskey and laid these floors on September 21, 1898. When will it be found?” It was almost exactly one hundred years later. Looking at the corner of the square containing Wild Wings, notice how the building’s Church Street side is only a bare brick wall without any windows or doorways. This is the result of a street widening that occurred in the early 1960s. The brick wall there now had originally been an interior wall that separated two portions of the building.
Main St. Stores 10
Next door to the Palmetto Building is the original location of the Aug W. Smith Company, which was a local department store that thrived until the 1980s. In later years, this site was the downtown location for Belk’s. Beside the Belk’s was the local Woolworths. In 1960, the lunch counter there was the site of a sit-in by a group of civil rights protesters. By 1963, lunch counters in the city were legally integrated, one year prior to the federal law. Across the street are two other large buildings which once housed large department and five-and-dime stores. The building with decorative ceramic features was Kress, a popular chain of five-anddime stores. The empty lot beside the Kress building once contained one of the city’s most popular restaurants, The Elite. It was one of the first Greekowned restaurants in the city and was known by its slogan, “Where the Elite meet to eat!”
The Main Street Mall
Main St. Mall 11 On Liberty Street between Main and Broad Streets, you can see one of the few remainders of the Main Street Mall, one of the attempts to revitalize Main Street during the 1970s and 1980s. Created in 1974, it closed vehicular traffic to Main Street
between Liberty and Church Streets. In this pedestrian-only zone, trees and benches were installed reminiscent of the shopping malls that were beginning to drain businesses away from downtown. Like nearly every other location in the country where this concept was attempted, the Main Street Mall was a failure. In 1989, the street was reopened to automobile traffic. The Clock Tower, which is now in the lower portion of Morgan Square, was dedicated at this site in 1979. Decades earlier, this section of East Main housed several movie theaters, including the Palmetto (on the corner of Liberty and Main), The State, and the Strand (both in the middle of the block).
Denny’s Plaza {203 E. Main St.}
In the 1960s, Spartanburg native Jerry Richardson began a successful Hardee's Restaurant franchise in Spartanburg and, in 1990, he financed the construction of Spartanburg's tallest building. The building formerly housed Spartan Foods but now houses the corporate headquarters for Denny's Restaurants. Prior to the construction of the Denny's Building, this block housed the Finch/ Franklin Hotel. In 1917, the Finch Hotel was the site of a racially motivated scuffle. During WWI, the Harlem Hellfighters, an all-black infantry regiment, were briefly stationed in the area. One member of the group was struck by the hotel manager after he kept his hat on in the hotel lobby. He was quickly defended by fellow soldiers and the situation ended without further escalation. Shortly afterwards, the Finch family sold the hotel, but the new owners were forced to choose another name beginning with an F due to the design of the large stained glass windows throughout the building. They called it the Franklin Hotel. It stood until it was torn down in 1990 to make way for the current building.
Converse at Main 13
On the corner of Converse and Main stood the second of two early hotels in the city, the Walker House. This large wooden building, built around 1840, burned in 1882 and was replaced by homes. The entire stretch of Main Street in this section was lined by large homes even as late as the 1920s. The most impressive was the fivestory Col. Joseph Walker home, which stood beside the hotel. Walker was a Confederate officer during the Civil War who also served several terms as mayor during the 1870s-1890s. Converse Street, which was also lined with the homes of notable families, was named for D.E. Converse, the textile industrialist who salvaged the textile mill at Glendale from bankruptcy and built up one of the great textile empires of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Chapman 14 Cultural Center {200 E. St. John St.}
The Chapman Cultural Center and Barnet Park sites stand on St. John Street, which was nothing but an alley until the 1960s when it was widened and extended, linking several smaller streets. It was named for the St. John Military Academy, which was an early school on the current site of Converse College. Where the entrance to Barnet Park currently exists once stood a house that was later used as a school for young girls in the city and later still one of the city’s first graded public schools. On the site of the USC Upstate Business School on St. John stood the equivalent school for boys, which was later turned into a private school known as the Hastoc School. The Chapman Cultural Center, which was built here in 2007, houses several arts and cultural organizations including the Regional History Museum, the Spartanburg Art Museum, the Science Center, the Spartanburg Little Theater, Ballet Spartanburg, and others.
