History of Chesnee
CHESNEE, S.C. (WSPA) – Chesnee was established in 1911, and despite being one of the youngest towns in Spartanburg County, it has plenty of history.
A lot of the same families who lived and worked in Chesnee decades ago are still there.
Therefore, to an outsider, in the small downtown that’s kept many of the same businesses alive for years, a sense of community can be felt almost immediately.
“The community here is just absolutely amazing, you know, and the business owners, if I walk across the street, they’re going to know who I am and what I’m there for,” Becca Watson, the Sales and Marketing Manager at Watson Furniture, said. “It’s amazing knowing there’s so much support in this area for everyone and everything.”
Growing up in her family’s furniture store downtown, Watson said the business has had a front-row seat to Chesnee’s evolution.
“A few years ago, the downtown looked completely different,” Watson said. “Everything was closed up, there weren’t a lot of businesses here and so there weren’t a lot of people down here. Now if you come on a Saturday, we’re booming, the town is booming, and it’s so nice to see there’s so many new faces in town.”
Down the street at city hall, Mayor Bruce Mahaffey, a lifelong Chesnee resident, keeps reminders of the city’s history nearby.
“You don’t meet strangers, everybody knows everybody, they don’t want to leave their home, they want to be here, they want their children to grow up here and their grandchildren to grow up here,” Mayor Mahaffey said.
The battle of Cowpens took place 2 miles to the east of downtown Chesnee, but the community and area remained largely unchanged by the war, until the railroad boom in the early 1900s.
During those years, Chesnee had textile mills that supported the city, but the leaders said it was always more of a rail town than it was a mill town, with many residents using trains as their form of transportation.
While that era has faded away, the scenic routes the trains would ride on have not.
“I’ll be out in some other town and somebody says, oh you’re from Chesnee, y’all are really looking good, and so we’re just tickled to death when people tell us we’re really stepping up,” Mahaffey said.
The city predicts they’ll continue to grow like the rest of the Upstate, but leaders said they won’t be overwhelmed by it, allowing Chesnee to remain a small town for years to come.
“To really think about why you’re here and what you’re doing here, you know, you want to keep the small town roots and you want to keep the businesses who have been here for so long here, but you want to be welcoming and invite new faces and invite new people into the area,” Watson said.
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