The Resort Era

Five miles east of the village of Greenville, Dr. Chick—physician and entrepreneur—opened one of the Upstate’s first destination resorts. By 1841, the Greenville Mountaineer, an early Greenville newspaper, described it as “already the resort of many invalids” with effects “very salutary in every case.” The spring that had drawn deer and Cherokee hunters now drew the sick and the curious from across the state.

The hotel was “large and commodious”—board was $1 a day, with children, servants, and horses at half price. Chick sold twenty lots to cottage builders, including operators of the nearby Buena Vista cotton factory on the Enoree. Owners occupied rent-free but could not take in boarders. A settlement was forming around the water.

On July 31, 1857, Pettis W. Chick and Reuben S. Chick—executors of their father’s estate, writing from Union District—sold 250 acres to Franklin Talbird, an architect and builder from Beaufort District, and his brother-in-law John T. Henery of Charleston. The deed describes the property as bounded by Alfred Taylor, Thomas Taylor, and Wilson Crowder—near Thomas Taylor’s mill pond. The mortgage was secured by twelve named enslaved people: Stephen, a carpenter about 40; Diana, a washer and ironer and child’s nurse about 38; Charlotte, about 11; John, a carpenter about 32; Charles, a house servant about 40; Grace, about 23; Matilda, about 6; Robert, a carpenter about 50; Grace, a cook about 50; Rose, a house servant about 20; James, about 4; and John, a bricklayer about 25. The gathering place rested on their labor.

Fire broke out around 2:30 in the afternoon of November 4, 1862. By 4:10, the hotel was destroyed. The loss was estimated at $18,000, according to Alfred Taylor’s diary. The last guests had left the summer before—after news of the Battle of Bull Run, only 37 remained, and then none. The resort’s first life was over. Forty-one years later, J.A. Bull would build a 119-room replacement on the same ground.