by Stephen O’Neill, Ph.D.
HISTORY
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In the 1950s, Furman moved from its two downtown campuses to its present site of nearly one-thousand acres located five miles north. But the development of the new campus was complicated by the legal status of Furman’s deeds to “old” campuses for the men’s and the women’s colleges located downtown.
To facilitate the move to the new campus, the university brought two lawsuits to establish fee simple ownership and negate any potentially restrictive covenants in the deeds for the downtown campuses. Both legal challenges by Furman reached the South Carolina Supreme Court, one in 1954 and the other in 1961. Furman won both cases, enhancing the value of the vacated land and, thus, helping to finance the development of the current campus.
The twentieth-century legal disputes were rooted in the nineteenth-century transfer of two parcels of land by Vardry McBee, often-touted as “the father of Greenville.”[1] In 1815, McBee had bought 11,028 acres that encompassed nearly all of present-day downtown Greenville.[2] In 1820, McBee donated thirty acres of land on Buncombe Road to establish the Greenville Academy for the education of boys and girls in the community. The deed listed six men who were designated as the Academy’s trustees.[3]
After several iterations this grant of land, the first parcel would become the Women’s College of Furman University, with the university receiving title to the land in 1937.[4] McBee’s transfer of the second parcel was a sale, in 1851 and 1852, of 50.1 acres on the Reedy River in Greenville to the South Carolina Baptist Convention for the going rate of $150 per acre and for the expressed purpose of relocating Furman University from Winnsboro, South Carolina, to that site.
Both deeds, one a grant and one a sale for market price, contained stipulations that the land be would be used for the stated educational purposes. These stipulations operated like a covenant: in exchange for taking ownership, the new occupant promised to abide by the particular wishes of the seller.
In the twentieth century, the need for Furman to clarify its title to the properties stemmed from plans to expand the university.
In 1920, when new president William Joseph McGlothlin reported to the Board of Trustees that Furman may need to enlarge its footprint downtown or purchase land out of town, longtime trustee Harry John Haynsworth, who was also a prominent attorney and business partner of Alester G. Furman, Jr., advised that “future conveyance [of the men’s campus] would, in my opinion, carry a good title. At the same time, it would be very difficult to secure a purchaser at full price without first having the [South Carolina] Supreme Court to pass upon the question and settle all doubt.”[5] President McGlothlin’s plans for expansion gained new urgency in the years after World War II.
In 1950, in a special meeting at the Poinsett Hotel in downtown Greenville, the board voted to purchase 973.08 acres north of town between Paris Mountain and Duncan Chapel Road and authorized Furman trustee Clement Furman Haynsworth, Jr., son of Harry J. Haynsworth, “to bring whatever legal action may be necessary to clarify the legal status of the title” to the two downtown campus plots.[6]
Clement F. Haynsworth’s efforts resulted in two South Carolina Supreme Court decisions on the status of the two downtown sites. Seeking to clarify Furman’s right to sell the land with no restrictions on the new owners, Haynsworth sued the surviving heirs of Vardry McBee. Haynsworth sought a preemptive and definitive ruling on whether the two parcels would revert to the possession of McBee’s heirs if the educational provisions in the original deeds were not upheld.
In 1954, the high court’s ruling in Furman University v. Wilson Glover, et al., upheld an earlier ruling in the Greenville County Court of Common Pleas concerning the 50.1 acres comprising the men’s campus, Yet, the Supreme Court in Furman v. Glover also slightly modified the same lower court decision on the twenty-two-and-a-half acre women’s college (some of the original thirty acres having been sold).
For the men’s campus, the Supreme Court found that Furman held the land under fee simple title, in other words, without any restrictions on how any future owner might use the land. And, thus, the heirs of McBee had no claim or in the words of the court, “no right of reverter or of re-entry.” For the women’s campus, however, the high court issued a more limited ruling.
The court held that McBee’s heirs had no claim or interest in the women’s campus property, but would “go no further and leave undecided the construction of the deed . . . except to the” rejection of the claims of the McBee heirs.[7]
So the heirs of Vardry McBee had no private claims on either property, but did Vardry McBee’s grant of land in 1820 to the six trustees of the Greenville Academy, or stipulations in the chain of deeds since then, bestow a public interest or responsibility in maintaining an educational institution on the women’s site? That was the question decided in Furman University v. McLeod in 1961, the second South Carolina Supreme Court case at the center of Furman’s move to the new campus.
The defendant in the case was South Carolina Attorney General Daniel R. McLeod, who was charged with defending the public interest in this case. Haynsworth once again argued the case for Furman. The court decided that neither McBee’s original grant, nor any subsequent transfer of title, required the owners of the land to maintain a school on that specific site.
Rather, the court maintained, the covenant in the various deeds in the chain of title had been to “maintain an academy at a suitable location accessible to the citizens of Greenville.” The court ruled that Furman’s new campus “outside, but in close proximity to the residential sections of the community, complies with the true purpose of the grantors in the chain of title and does not violate any term or provision in any such deed.”
Furman held fee simple title to the women’s campus and could sell, lease, or develop the property as it saw fit.[8]
In the 1960s, Furman University sought to monetize its unrestricted titles to the old campuses. In 1963, the Greenville City Council purchased the women’s campus for $500.000[9] and has developed it into Heritage Green, the site of many public institutions including the main county library, the Upcountry History Museum, the Children’s Museum, and the Greenville Theater.
The evolution of the old men’s campus is more complex.
In 1962, the university’s Board of Trustees created Bell Tower, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the university that was intended to retain ownership and generate revenue from site. The trustees of Bell Tower, Inc., would be drawn exclusively from the officers and board members of Furman.[10] The university also signed a property management agreement with the Alester G. Furman Company to serve as the exclusive agent for the sale and leasing of property of the old men’s campus.[11]
In July 1970, the Bell Tower Mall opened on the former campus, but by 1982 it was in decline,[12] and in 1984 Greenville County bought the site and developed County Square to house county offices. Presently, County Square is being re-developed into $1.1 billion mixed use development.
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ENDNOTES
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[1] Pronounced “MAC-bee.” Vardry McBee was Greenville’s largest landowner and greatest philanthropist from 1815 until his death in 1864. In addition to land for the Greenville Academy, McBee donated land for the first four Protestant churches in Greenville, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. He also founded one of the area’s first textile mills, McBee Mill at Conestee on the Reedy River. Furman University named one of its residence halls on the new campus after McBee. See Roy McBee Smith, Vardry McBee, 1775-1864: Man of Reason in an Age of Extremes (Laurel Heritage Press).
[2] Smith, Vardry McBee, ; Archie Vernon Huff, Jr., Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont (University of South Carolina Press), 82.
[3] Huff, Greenville, 94.
[4] Furman University v. Wilson Glover, 226 S.C. 1, 83 S.E.2d 559.
[5] Minutes of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, 27 January 1920.
[6] Minutes of Special Meeting of Board of Trustees, 22 August 1950.
[7] Furman University v. Wilson Glover, 226 S.C. 1, 83 S.E.2d 559.
[8] Furman University v. McLeod, 238 S.C. 120 S.E.2d 865
[9] Greenville News, 10 December 1963.
[10] Minutes Board of Trustees, Furman University, 16 May 1961, 24 October 1961, 23 October 1962.
[11] Minutes Board of Trustees, Furman University, 18 October 1960; Greenville News, n.d. (1962), and Greenville News 11, 12 November 1963.
[12] Judith T. Bainbridge, The Furman Company: Community & Commerce, Influence & Leadership Since 1888 (The Furman Company), 81.
Racially Restrictive Covenants and Graceland Cemetery
