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 Bethel: a church, a school and an 800-pound bell

The congregation Joseph Woodruff helped lead in 1787 is still here, and it has had five names. The church’s own history lists the Church of Christ on Jamey’s Creek, Woodruff Meeting House and Shackleford’s Meeting House. From 1798 until 1911 it was simply Bethel, “house of God.” Since 1911 it has been First Baptist. Its oldest surviving minutes are dated September 16, 1787. Richard Shackleford was its first pastor and served 27 years. Two later pastors went on to lead major Baptist schools: James C. Furman became president of Furman University, and John A. Broadus became president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Bethel also taught the town’s children. For most of the 1800s the church ran the only school in the area, known simply as The Academy, until the state could provide a public school. Church records say that in 1802 a revival began with the prayers of a girl who was a student there, and 188 people were baptized. About thirty years later a revival drew some 2,000 people.

The first meeting places were log houses on the ground that is now Bethel Cemetery. A large wooden church followed in 1849. In 1911 the congregation took the name First Baptist and moved into a brick sanctuary on Main Street, one block east of the old church grounds. In 1926 its Vacation Bible School enrolled 528 children, which the church records as the largest in South Carolina. The church moved to Cross Anchor Road in 1962, worshipping in its fellowship hall until the present sanctuary was finished in 1973. A state historical marker there, erected in 2022, notes that an 800-pound bell the church has rung since 1888 hangs in today’s steeple.

Visit today: First Baptist Church of Woodruff →

Sources: fbcwoodruff.org ↗ · hmdb.org ↗ · scencyclopedia.org ↗

04 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 ↗ · commons.wikimedia.org ↗

05 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 ↗

06 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 ↗

07 Brandon, Abney and the last shift: the mill’s later years

The cotton mill that opened around 1901 kept running for a century. At its peak, according to the county library’s archive, it had about 270,000 square feet of floor space, 45,684 spindles, 644 looms and some 400 workers. In 1928 it joined two Greenville mills, Brandon and Poinsett, to form the Brandon Corporation. That is why the mill is also remembered as the Brandon Mill.

In December 1946, Abney Mills bought the Brandon Corporation, and the plant became the Abney Mills Woodruff Mill. In the mid-1990s John Perkins of John Perkins Industries bought the building, renamed it Mount Vernon Mill and leased it out. On March 27, 2001, fire broke out inside, and the whole structure burned down.

A panoramic photograph of the Abney mill’s second-shift workers, taken sometime after 1946, is kept in the Kennedy Room of Local History at the Spartanburg County Public Library’s headquarters on South Church Street in Spartanburg. (The archive’s description opens by calling the mill “Woodside,” but the rest of its record is clearly about the Woodruff mill.) If your family worked that shift, the photo is worth a visit.

Sources: scplarchives-public.lyrasistechnology.org ↗ · en.wikipedia.org ↗ · rootsandrecall.com ↗

08 A bomber in the clouds over Switzer

On the morning of December 6, 1943, three Army Air Forces planes left the air base at Florence on a routine training flight to Greenville: two A-20G Havoc attack bombers and a B-25. Over Spartanburg County they flew into thick cloud at about 3,000 feet, and two of them lost sight of the formation. One of those was flown by 2nd Lt. Hampton P. Worrell of Columbia. He came out of the clouds only about 500 feet up, in a steep turn and descending too fast to recover. Shortly before 10 a.m. the plane went down in the trees of a farm near Switzer, a few miles from Woodruff. The Army’s report blamed the weather and the crew’s inexperience with instrument flying.

All three men aboard were killed: Worrell, the pilot, who was 26; Sgt. Harry G. Barnes of New York, a gunner, who was 19; and Sgt. John D. Hickman of California, a gunner, who was 21. (The marker spells his name Hickman, while the newspaper account of the Army report gives it as Wickham.) A Woodruff High student who lived nearby later remembered that soldiers guarded the roped-off wreckage after word reached the school.

They were among the many airmen who died in training at home rather than in combat, and for decades the crash was mostly forgotten. Volunteer aviation historians later worked with the Spartanburg County Historical Association to recover fragments from the site, which is on the Price House property. In 2008 the Thomas Price House Committee placed a memorial marker with the three men’s names. It stands at the corner of Oak View Farms Road and Old Switzer Road, beside a public road, so it can be read from the roadside.

Visit today: Historic Price House →

Sources: hmdb.org ↗

09 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 ↗

10 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.

The highway through town carries a name from these years. In 1969 the State Highway Commission named it S.J. Workman Highway in honor of S.J. Workman, a Woodruff business and civic leader. He served on the commission in 1952–56 and 1964–68 and chaired it in 1967–68.

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 ↗ · hmdb.org ↗

11 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 ↗

12 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 ↗

13 From cotton to batteries: BMW Plant Woodruff

A century after the cotton mill made Woodruff a factory town, a new kind of plant arrived. On June 27, 2023, BMW Group broke ground on what it named “Plant Woodruff,” a high-voltage battery assembly factory on 315 acres near the city. BMW put the investment at $700 million, part of a $1.7 billion U.S. commitment it announced in 2022, and said the plant would cover more than a million square feet and bring more than 300 jobs.

Building construction started that fall. On October 5, 2023, BMW leaders signed the first steel beam alongside representatives of the City of Woodruff, Spartanburg County and the builder, Evans Construction, and crews set it in place right afterward. According to BMW, equipment installation followed from September 2024, and test batteries have been coming off the line since the summer of 2025.

In July 2026 BMW gave a first look inside. The company says more than 300 people and 250 robots work there, and that series production of batteries for the fully electric BMW iX5 is scheduled to begin in December 2026. The finished batteries go to BMW’s Plant Spartanburg, about 15 miles away.

Visit today: Groundbreaking (2023) →First steel beam (2023) →First look inside (2026) →

Sources: press.bmwgroup.com ↗ · press.bmwgroup.com ↗ · press.bmwgroup.com ↗