By Brandon Inabinet, Professor of Communication Studies

Furman had been strategically situated by Vardy McBee on the hill above the city, across the river from his home. This modern acropolis would distinguish the Upstate as a place of high values and learning. White men of privilege would receive a great education there, finding wives across town at the women’s academy, while leased enslaved laborers would use their winter reprieve to help staff the institution. Just beyond Main Street and campus, the land gave way to cotton plantations.

Then came the Civil War and Reconstruction for this area around the university, which would become known as the Haynie-Sirrine neighborhood (for the names of the major streets in the area).

In 1887, a businessman named T. C. Gower bought 1.5 acres on Choice Street (later University Ridge) for $149. The lots were purchased from Margaret M. Carson and had been part of the Thruston cotton plantation. Over the next eight years, the property was subdivided and sold to four African American persons for a total of $280: Thomas Brier, a blacksmith who owned a shop on West Washington Street; Elias B. Holloway, a postal carrier; Jeremiah W. Seawright, a horseshoer; and James A. Brier, a teacher. Until his death in 1895, Gower kept doing this business of purchasing other portions of Carson’s land, subdividing, and reselling.

Aerial photography shows that the neighborhood was packed. White and Black families comingled block-by-block next to a busy downtown. Given the student population, there wasn’t a clear class difference either. Married white students were crammed into trailers on the old baseball field; veterans bunked in army-provided mobile housing so they could fulfill GI bill-funded education. Faculty and staff, even top administrators, lived in-between. Poor and middle-class Black families walked over the Main Street Bridge to get to a business district on Spring Street, two blocks off Main, segregated from the white businesses on Main Street.

Along the same street as these African-American families were the homes of Furman’s President, professors, and top administrators. The relationships varied, from the interviews Katy Watkins and I conducted last summer. Son of the President, John Plyler Jr., remembers playing various pickup games with Black children in the neighborhood, and watching Jesse Jackson, of nearby Haynie Street, practice with the Furman football team.

Another resident of the street, Nancy Bourne, remembers a slightly different story as a faculty daughter. Although she could play with Black children when she was very young, at a certain age, her mother asked her to no longer hang out with her African-American childhood friend. Nancy would later find out that friend had become pregnant at an extremely young age.

Never in the record do we see any reference, positive or negative, to the Haynie-Sirrine community or the employees who worked in the surrounding communities. Only the personal interviews, US Census (pasted below), and real estate map make the case so clear that the university left a mixed-race neighborhood that serviced campus.

Faculty and staff moved to areas like San Souci (a previous country club, now cheaper land prices as wealth moved to Greenville’s south along Main Street and Augusta Street) and the neighborhoods specifically designed for them by Furman’s donors and trustees (Stratford north of campus surrounding builder’s Charles Ezra Daniel’s White Oaks Estate and Duncan Chapel Road developments).

Meanwhile, staff and residents without intergenerational wealth would continue to make payments as contract buyers downtown, unable to leave declining neighborhood before their properties were paid for in full; if they did, they would lose everything they had invested. Lower paid cooks and janitors likely retired, tried commuting for a bit, or otherwise looked for new employment in the declining community.

Dean Bonner’s 1958 note remarking on the closure of the downtown campus and move to the new campus ended, “XXI. Janitorial service. Plans are to use some student help.”

Haynie-Sirrine, as the 2002 community master plan explains, went into a precipitous decline after the university’s departure, with significant rates of crime, vacant homes, and abandoned lots. The aerial viewer shows that each decade homes in the area were demolished until less than a quarter remained in the 2000s. Even just from 1990 to 2020 (the years for which we have data), the area’s African-American population crashes from 700 to 106. Meanwhile, gentrification takes over in 2010, and the white population grows from 188 in that year to 501 in 2020. Now, with construction of a billion-dollar development at the old Furman University site, the city anticipates Haynie-Sirrine to be one of the most densely populated areas in the city—with the high-rise apartments ascending from acres worth many, many millions.

Perhaps even just a few of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Furman University’s “houseworkers” or “janitors” might be able to be rewarded by these changing markets, against all of the trends in the data.

Image Caption: Richmond Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America offers this image detail on Haynie-Sirrine. The lower half of the image shows yellow “Best Negro Residential” and red “Fair Residential” (the average U.S. white housing market) mixed within the same streets and blocks.

Census District 23-69 of Greenville, SC in 1950 U.S. Census. Special thanks to Kathleen “Katy” Watkins (Communication Studies, ’26) for the transcription of this census data.

Appendix B. Census District 23-68 of Greenville, SC in 1950 U.S. Census

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