We’ll Always Have Paris

I was browsing through the University of South Carolina’s collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. These maps are highly detailed maps of towns and cities from the early 20th Century and are excellent for historical research. According to Wikipedia…

Sanborn maps are detailed maps of U.S. cities and towns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Originally published by The Sanborn Map Company (Sanborn), the maps were created to allow fire insurance companies to assess their total liability in urbanized areas of the United States. Since they contain detailed information about properties and individual buildings in approximately 12,000 U.S. cities and towns, Sanborn maps are valuable for documenting changes in the built environment of American cities over many decades.^[1]

The Greenville County Library has a copy of the Sanborn Map for the city. Recently I was there doing some research and I looked through the physical map atlas. This was a large, oversized bound folio, and was NOT was I was expecting.

I’m used to seeing these maps online, where it’s a just a flat, complete image. The real thing, it turns out, consists of cut-outs glued to a hand-drawn map. I think the glued pieces are updates to an early map.

The Sanborn maps that interest me the most are the unpublished maps. These were never in bound volumes, and are usually for smaller towns, like the old ghost towns I like to explore. These are sketched in detail on graph paper.

As I was browsing through the USC collection I came across an unpublished map of Paris, SC. I was unaware of this town in our state and wondered if I should add it to my list of ghost towns. It looked like a substantial town with a central business district.

When I looked at the details of the map, I saw that it was only a couple of miles from where I live! The map is of the Paris community of Greenville. This puzzled me. While there are maps of incorporated towns like Greer, Fountain Inn, and Simpsonville, I hadn’t seen any for communities around Greenville itself, such as Taylors or Berea. It was almost as if they were treating Paris as a separate town. Given the number of businesses listed on the Sanborn map, it was certainly as large as many South Carolina towns.

I was intrigued. Was this treated like a separate town? It’s only a few miles from downtown Greenville, but back in the early 20th Century, that was still considered country.

It’s impossible to tell the story of Paris without telling the story of Camp Sevier. Camp Sevier was a WWI training camp that lasted from 1917 until 1919 and served the 30th “Old Hickory” Division. The camp covered most of the area along the current Rutherford Road, heading northward to Paris Mountain.

Much has already been written about Camp Sevier, but I was more interested in the town that supported the camp. The town (which is what I’m going to call it, though it was never incorporated), was in existence before the camp was built, but not by much. The Piedmont and Northern Railway was built in 1912 and the Paris Mountain Station, later known as just Paris Station, served the surrounding communities.

Prior to the the camp there were several churches, and the “Mountain Academy” served the area. The academy was later renamed Paris School. There were several stores at Paris Station, but the only one I’ve been able to identify from old news articles was Trammell Brothers Store. The Trammell store burned in 1915.

The Sanborn Map for Paris was created in 1917, and by that time business was booming. The map shows several stores, restaurants, pool halls, drug stores, a theater and variety show, and all the things to entertain a young soldier away from home. I counted no less than five pool halls, four theaters, and fifteen restaurants.

Postcards from the height of Camp Sevier show a decent sized town.

Despite all these distractions, life wasn’t easy in Camp Sevier. According to Fairwell [sic], Old Hickory by Teresa Slack, not only did the recruits have to train for war, but they also had to clear the land and build the camp itself. This included “5,875 16X16 tents… 234 mess halls, 393 barracks, 454 latrines, bathhouses, a hospital, stockade, a large remount station and several other buildings that made Camp Sevier the largest in the nation,” according to Teresa’s book.

To make matters worse, the winter of 1917 was one of the coldest on record. The soldiers didn’t have adequate winter gear and the tents weren’t insulated from the weather. There was an outbreak of measles and meningitis in the camp. These conditions, combined with the usual number of accidents during training led to 442 deaths over the short history of the camp.

These two postcards summed up the experience many soldiers had at Camp Sevier.

By 1919 the war was over and operations at Camp Sevier started to shut down. Many of the businesses that supported the camp closed as well. A 1920 Bradford report listed only one general store in Paris, the Ballenger & Cuttino store. The Ballenger store can be seen in on of the photos of Paris I posted above.

Herman Ballenger had been a deputy, serving under Sheriff P. D. Gilreath before opening his Paris Station store in 1912. He died in 1919 of stomach cancer, just as the camp was coming to an end.

Apart from the Trammell and Ballenger stores, I haven’t been able to find much information about the other stores. The Sanborn Map doesn’t identify the businesses. I tried zooming into the two historic photos I have of Paris to see if I could read the names on the buildings, but the images weren’t clear enough to see any but the Trammell building. I did find one more news article from 1918 about construction of a store in Paris. The article gives the builder’s name and describes the businesses, but no more than that.

I found one more article from 1942 labeled “Camp Sevier’s ‘Main Street'” that shows many of these buildings still extant at that time.

Me being me, I really wanted to see if there were any remnants of the town of Paris. I’ve driven through this area more times than I can count, but now armed with information and old maps, I was ready to take a closer look at the Camp Sevier area.

Today the area along Rutherford Road is mostly industrial. North of Rutherford is residential, with the Pebble Creek communities making up a large portion of the old Camp Sevier property. On Warehouse Road, just off of Artillery Road, is the last intact building from the camp.

The Greenville Historical Society identifies this as an ammunition dump.

Driving through the neighborhood north of Rutherford I turned down a dead-end road I’d not traveled. Robertson Road parallels Rutherford and there is a large, undeveloped plot on the south side, with nice houses lining the north side of the street. Along that south side I spotted some old foundations that I knew just had to be part of Camp Sevier.

An older gentleman who lives in the house across the street came out into his front yard, and I asked him about the foundations. Mr. Harold Jenkins said he had lived here since 1969, and that the foundations were the ruins of the old base hospital. He said that he had found numerous medicine bottles in the ditch behind his yard. Mr. Jenkins was a delight, and he even called me back with more information about the camp in general. He said that the property owner lived in New England, and that I was welcome to come explore the area.

As it turns out, Mr. Jenkins was not correct about the foundations. In conversations with Teresa Slack I learned that this was actually the camp bakery. The hospital was much larger and was in the area now occupied by Sevier Middle School. My map confirms that information. I suspect that Mr. Jenkins found a dump of some sort that happened to have medicine bottles. I still want to return and explore before summer vegetation takes over.

I took the Sanborn Map and created a Google Earth overlay, lining up the streets and railroads of the map with the current map.

Now that I had a point of reference I could see what was still there. It looks like the heart of Paris was at the intersection of Rutherford Road and Mooney Road. Mooney Road is now a dead end, cut off from its old route by the railroad. None of the old businesses remain. Now there is a car repair business on either side of Mooney.

But there is one remaining building from old Paris. On Rutherford right across from Mooney Road is a dive bar once known as The Station, but now known as At the Depot. It’s been a dive bar for as long as I can remember.

While chatting with Teresa Slack she told me that this building actually appears in the old postcards of Paris. I’ve circled the building below.

Teresa said she had helped the owner put together a memorial to Camp Sevier on the wall of the tavern. I knew I had to pay it a visit. At 4:00 pm on a Friday afternoon I thought it wouldn’t be too busy and I might be able to chat with someone about the history of the building, and maybe have a beer and make some new friends. That didn’t quite happen.

There were more cars in the parking lot than I expected. I walked in with a guy that seemed friendly enough.

The interior was VERY dark compared to the bright afternoon sunshine. It was also much smaller than I imagined. There were a couple of pool tables, two dart boards, and a small bar. There were probably about ten people inside, including the young bartender. There was no way to really take a seat at the bar, or anywhere else for that matter, without it being awkward. The bartender seemed to be ignoring me, and I felt really out of place. Not intimidated, just…awkward and intruding. I’m sure any one of these guys would have been happy to talk, but most were smoking and I didn’t really want to hang about.

I did find Teresa’s collection of Camp Sevier mementos. Two guys were on the pool table right in front of the display, so getting a decent photo was awkward, but I managed.

The bartender stepped outside to take care of something and it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get a beer without having to wait in a smoke-filled room. I decided to take the opportunity to make my exit.

As I paused outside for one final photograph it occurred to me that The Depot was probably a true embodiment of the old town of Paris. Take the men in there, make them about 30 years younger and put them in uniform, and you probably would have a scene from old Camp Sevier. I may yet pay this place another visit, and maybe even play a round or two of pool with the ghosts of WWI veterans looking over my shoulder.