EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wofford bubble was a very real thing when I was a student at Wofford between 1985 and 1989. The Bonner Scholar Program, which began at Wofford in 1991, and a growing emphasis on community- based learning changed that (thank goodness), but then Wofford was a different place in a Spartanburg of another time.
My room in Shipp Hall during my junior and senior years faced Evins Street and the few houses that sat steps beyond that boundary. They were the backdrop for tennis matches when the college’s tennis courts filled the area now paved for Olin Building and Shipp Hall parking. Some people consider everything between Evins Street and Spartanburg Regional Medical Center the Back of the College neighborhood. Others say the neighborhood was concentrated between Cumming Street School and the practice fields beyond Gibbs Stadium. With the exception of a few students or faculty who rented homes off McDowell Street or Osage, I didn’t know the people who lived to the north of the college. Later I interviewed a few residents, and as I listened to their stories, I felt both joy at their memories and discomfort at my lack of knowledge or engagement as a student.
In recent years, there have been competing narratives surrounding the evolution of the neighborhood. Current Wofford students are doing a good job of learning more through oral history and ethnographic research. Some are involved in a collaborative project to tell the residential history of the neighborhood. This article, written by local journalist Bob Dalton, blends both nostalgia and public record. There are areas of gray, but what good story doesn’t leave room for critical thinking, compassion and self reflection?
JMB
Rose Thomas loved playing tetherball.
It was her favorite thing to do at the T.K. Gregg Community Center in the Northside, where people who lived in the Back of the College neighborhood gathered for fun and fellowship. There were other games, of course, and dances. But tetherball, that was her thing.
So was roller skating through the neighborhood. And the May Day programs at Cumming Street School — the school she attended during the 1950s from first grade through ninth, and the school her mother attended before her.
Growing up, Thomas wanted to be a dancer, and she was part of a group that performed at functions in the neighborhood. Her mother, however, told her she needed to do something that would help her get a real job.
So she became a teacher, like Louvenia Barksdale, who lived next door to Thomas on Evins Street. And like Claudia Pinkney, her music teacher who lived three houses away. And like Stacey Whitmire, her second- grade teacher who would invite Thomas to her home to take tests because she knew Thomas was an anxious child who didn’t do well taking the tests in the classroom.
“I really enjoyed growing up Back of the College,” says Thomas, who taught English and math at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind and at Cleveland Elementary before retiring in 2000. “The neighborhood was like one big family. For the most part, everybody knew everybody, and everybody looked out for one another.”
The neighborhood
The Rev. A.H. Cumming — who came to town before the Civil War and served as an administrator at Spartanburg Female College — purchased property in the area after the war and donated it to emancipated slaves. Tobias “Tobe” Hartwell was one of the neighborhood’s earliest residents. He came to Spartanburg in 1859, enslaved by Albert M. Shipp, Wofford’s second president. Hartwell purchased a lot from the Cleveland family in 1872 and built a house there. He became a cornerstone of the community, and one of Spartanburg’s first public housing developments was named for him.
According to Brad Steinecke, assistant director of local history for Spartanburg County Public Libraries, the Back of the College neighborhood was one of the first, if not the very first, areas in the city to be Black-owned. Steinecke is involved in a project with Dr. Jim Neighbors, associate professor in the Department of English and co-coordinator of Wofford’s African/ African-American Studies Program, among others, to preserve the neighborhood’s history.
“Land ownership had been the primary marker of economic success for generations,” Steinecke says. “So the ownership of land was a major achievement.” Being able to purchase the land represented “another kind of freedom and independence” for the residents.
At its pinnacle in the 1940s, the neighborhoods adjacent to the college contained about 400 houses, Neighbors says. Based on census records, more than 1,600 people lived in the area. It was home to a number of churches, including Cumming Street Baptist, Trinity AME and Walker Memorial. People in the area also attended Silver Hill United Methodist, the first African-American Methodist Church in Spartanburg, located off North Converse Street, near what is now Barnet Park. Children attended Dean Street School and Cumming Street School. A Community Cash grocery store sat on the spot now occupied by the Wofford College Bookstore, and the neighborhood held a McBride’s Grocery as well.
Charles Mann grew up on the Southside of Spartanburg, but he attended church and worked in the Back of the College community. He went on to Livingstone College in North Carolina, then worked as a television journalist at several stations along the East Coast. He returned to Spartanburg in 2015.
“I was dismayed when I came back and realized the Back of the College was no longer there,” Mann says. “It wasn’t a great upper middle-class neighborhood; it was a substantial working-class neighborhood. When I came back, all the things that to me represented the community were gone. It was heartbreaking.”
Mann graduated from Carver High School in 1969. Although Wofford admitted its first Black student, Albert Gray, in 1964, Mann says most Black students saw attending college at Wofford as an unattainable goal.
“We called it the Harvard of the South,” Mann says, “but there was no way you as a Black kid could go there.”
In 2010, Mann’s son, Greyson, received a full scholarship to Wofford. He graduated with honors in 2014.
Mann’s sister, Catherine Mann Garner, who now makes her home in Charlotte, N.C., worked at the Kiddie College in the neighborhood from 1968 to 1970. Kiddie College was a daycare center and preschool owned and operated by the Rev. Walter Hart and his wife, Sophie.
“The Kiddie College was an essential business,” Garner says. “Those in the neighborhood who realized the importance of early education had their kids there.”
Garner said that during her senior year of high school (1970-71), there were signs that the invisible wall between the college and the community was beginning to crack. Wofford began actively recruiting Black students when Dr. Paul Hardin III became president in 1968, and Garner would sometimes visit friends who were attending the college. She didn’t always feel welcome.
“Whenever I was on campus, I’d get some stern looks,” she says. “There were students who were stopped and asked to show their IDs. There was a class of students who were not very warm to Black people.”
According to Neighbors, before integration Back of the College residents said “they wouldn’t go on campus because they didn’t feel welcome. They would walk around campus rather than risk going on it.” He says integration paved the way for more interaction between the college and the neighborhood. A program called Happy Saturdays, established by Wofford students around 1970, attempted to create a better relationship with residents.
“They invited kids to come on campus; they would have games for students, give tours, take them to the library and the dining hall. They wanted to make the college a welcoming place,” Neighbors says.
Former Spartanburg Mayor James Talley, an assistant football coach at Wofford in the 1980s and 1990s, has fond memories of a bustling, close-knit neighborhood during the 1950s, 1960s and even into the 1970s.
“A lot of professionals lived there,” says Talley. “It was a proud neighborhood. The people in the neighborhood supported the churches and the mom-andpop businesses. But as the years went on and people passed away or moved away, it began to deteriorate.”
Expansion and change
Wofford began buying properties adjacent to the college after World War II. Roger Milliken, the late textile magnate and longest-serving member of the college’s Board of Trustees, encouraged the college and Spartanburg General Hospital to buy properties as they became available. At the time, Cleveland Street, which no longer exists, ran behind Main Building. The Cleveland family owned all of the property between Evins and Cleveland streets and sold the college the land. The college used the property to add DuPré and Shipp halls as well as a set of tennis courts to the campus. Milliken funded these purchases until they became a line item in the college’s budget in the 1980s, according to Dr. Phillip Stone ’94, archivist and campus historian.
“Once people who owned property near Wofford learned that the college would buy if they were ready to sell, they would call the president and ask for an offer,” says Stone. “Joe Lesesne usually referred them to Ed Greene, the chief business officer.”
Over time, like most landlocked colleges and universities, Wofford began expanding its footprint.
“Many minorities who went through World War II and those who got an education left,” says Dr. Joe Lesesne, Wofford’s ninth president, who served from 1972 to 2000. “And they had no intention of coming back. There were greater opportunities for them in other regions of the country.”
When Wofford purchased a parcel of land with a house on it, the college would clear the land. Some people sold to investors who kept the houses but used them as rentals. The changes in ownership caused a shift in the neighborhood dynamic. Lesesne says the neighborhood was in decline by the time he arrived on campus as a faculty member in 1964.
“I have sympathy for the people who think the college, over its history, had opportunities to help, and in hindsight there are things I wish would have been done,” Lesesne says. “But where we were at the time, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, I don’t think the neighborhood died there.”
By the 1980s the neighborhood was sparsely populated, and many houses had been demolished, says Lesesne. There were few children, and the elementary school had been closed. There was a lot of drug activity in the area, and many of the people who still lived there were frightened.
“They would have liked for us to police the area, but we couldn’t, really,” he says, referring to the college’s lack of jurisdiction off campus. “We did tell our folks to patrol the area and to call the police if they saw anything.”
Lesesne says Wofford became more intentional about buying properties in the 1990s, especially after the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, founded and owned by Jerry Richardson ’59, agreed to hold training camp in Spartanburg on Wofford’s campus. By then only about 50 houses remained.
Woody Willard ’74, president of Willard Incorporated, became involved in the acquisition of property adjacent to the college when the community began negotiations with the Panthers. Willard wanted to support the project because of the economic benefits to the entire area, but he knew he could not participate as an investor. So he offered to provide his appraisal, negotiation and sales services pro bono. Since then, he has secured more than 275 parcels on behalf of the college at prices ranging from $2,000 to $250,000, always at or above fair market value.
“At first the college only bought abandoned properties,” says Willard. “Sometimes families in the neighborhood approached Wofford. They were going to leave the area and wanted to gauge the college’s interest in buying their property.”
According to Willard, some homeowners stayed for a decade or more after they had an offer on their homes. They wanted to live out their lives in their homes. “We respected that, altered our plans and were good neighbors to each other.”
Rerouting traffic through the neighborhood was another change. At a 1994 City Council meeting to consider closing Evins, Twitty, Jones and Pee Dee streets, several neighborhood residents raised concerns about access for emergency vehicles and inconvenience for those who still lived there. In response, Wofford agreed to pave two parking lots for Mount Zion and Greater Trinity churches.
“We started closing streets after the property had been sold to Wofford,” Talley says. “The Panthers were coming to town. Once Wofford owned the property, they petitioned the city to close the streets. And we gradually did, one by one or two by two. But the streets we were closing were already empty. We were closing them in name only.”
City Council minutes document both the resistance and support for street closings. Talley recognized the decline in the neighborhood but said the protests showed the passion many people had for the neighborhood they remembered. “This was where they grew up, where they spent their entire lives. It was their identity,” he said.
One of the final homeowners in the Back of the College neighborhood was Hattie Belle Penland, a longtime teacher at Cumming Street School and a mentor to countless children. Her home sat close to where the Gibbs Stadium scoreboard is now located.
“She had lived there all her life,” Lesesne says. “She was the only person there who I actually dealt with in buying a house. She was a tough negotiator.”
Moving forward
In 1998, the Wofford Neighborhood Focus Group initiated an effort to erect a marker near the entrance to Gibbs Stadium to recognize the neighborhood. Neighborhood members of the focus group helped pick the location, which was prominent during Spartanburg High School football games. Now that Spartanburg High School has a new stadium, the marker has been moved to front Cumming Street, where it will be visible to passing traffic.
“The marker means a great deal to the people who grew up in the shadows of the college,” said Winston Wingo in an article by Linda Conley in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Wingo was the artist who was commissioned to create the bronze panel featuring the people and landmarks of the Back of the College neighborhood.
Thomas hopes the college will find a way to preserve the neighborhood’s history and significance to Spartanburg.
Cumming Street School still stands across from the Jerry Richardson Indoor Stadium.
“Once some of the challenges of COVID- 19 settle, I hope to continue conversations with individuals and community partners regarding Cumming Street School,” says President Nayef Samhat. “It would be appropriate and an excellent way to honor the community for that building, which played such an important role in our community’s education, to be a part of Wofford’s mission as well.”
By Robert W. Dalton