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Brushes with History Documents

Spartanburg hosts Lindbergh

Ordinarily I stick to writing about Wofford history, with a little Methodist history thrown in for good measure.  Mostly I leave Spartanburg-area history to my friend and neighbor Brad Steinecke and his Hub City Historian blog.  However, in going through some materials today, I found a copy of the program celebrating the visit of Charles A. Lindbergh to Spartanburg in October 1927.  The festivities of the day included a welcome ceremony at the airport, a parade through downtown and Converse Heights, and a dinner at Converse that night.  

The program itself runs 32 pages.  Our copy was the gift of Wofford alumnus and Hampton Heights resident Rembert Stuckey '26.  It's got a lot of information about Spartanburg's new downtown airport and the city itself.  What struck me the most was the map of Spartanburg in 1926.  Several of the streets carry different highway numbers today, but by 1927, the bones of the area's highway system were in place.  The railroads that had so much to do with making Spartanburg the "hub city" were in place – and many of those rail lines are in exactly the same place today, almost 85 years later.  Here's the map.   Lindbergh001

You can see the circle that defined the city limits and streets such as Main Street, Church Street, Reidville Road, and Union Street.  Note that one of the rail lines- on the east side – is listed as a streetcar line.  I believe that connected to Glendale.  One of the two rail lines heading west toward Greenville was, I believe, the electric "interurban" rail line that was a passenger link to Greenville and Anderson.  

Here are the two pages of information about the city, with its population of some 42,000.  We don't have quite that many in the city today.  

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And finally, the cover.  

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By Phillip Stone

I've been the archivist of Wofford College and the South Carolina United Methodist since 1999. I'll be sharing college, Methodist, and local history, documents, photographs, and other interesting stories on this blog, which I've been keeping since December 2007.