From These Roots

In 1950, Dr. George R. Wilkinson donated $500 to North Greenville for a lake to be built on campus. The spot chosen for the lake was about a mile from the center of campus. Construction for the lake began that summer and was completed by the Stephens Brothers. The lake covered roughly three acres and was fed by a small stream, so it did not fill up completely until December 1951. The deepest part of the lake was located near the dam. The dam was about 200 feet across and wide enough for a car to drive across it. The lake ended up being built larger than planned and the final cost was $1,228. About a year after the lake was finished, it was stocked with bass and bream donated by a local government hatchery.

Originally, swimming in the lake was discouraged for safety reasons and it was mostly used for fishing. Former North Greenville professor Wade Hale and Business Manager Mr. Bruce built a boat house and a boat at the lake using scrap lumber. In addition to boating and fishing, there were picnic tables and cooking facilities set up along the lake for the campus community to use.

Improvements came to the lake in 1960 when a beach and swimming area were added. Work on the lake started towards the end of 1959. The lake was drained, and six inches of sand was placed at the bottom of the lake where the new swimming area would be. A short retainer wall was built above the boathouse to keep mud out of the swimming area, and a sixteen-foot new pier was built for children to use while a diving board was placed on the old pier. Once the lake filled back up with water, it was restocked with fish and became a popular area for swimming, fishing, and picnicking.

When the campus swimming pool was finished in 1965, the lake was used less and less. People in the community still used the lake at times, but it was becoming a liability to the school. To deter people from using it, the lake was mostly drained.

In 1969, another lake was built down past the baseball fields on campus by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). This lake was not built by the school, but students would still sneak down to it to fish, swim, and hang out. In the early 1980s, North Greenville professor Marie Burgess and her husband along with some students including John Youngblood built a nature trail that ran from Unit A, back to the NRCS lake, and then ended at the baseball field. The two-mile trail was marked with red blazes and along the trail, hikers could see oaks, maples, 100-year-old hickory trees, sweet gums, sourwoods, pines, rattlesnake plan tan, hearts-a-bustin’, Soloman seal, Virginia creeper, and other plant varieties.

By 1990, North Greenville College was going through some hard financial times. To ease the school’s financial burden, nearly 500 acres of the school’s land were sold to the developers of Laurel Valley. This sale included some of the land surrounding the NRCS lake as well as the entire lake built by the school. With this sale, part of the nature trail had to be rerouted. Professor Burgess fought hard to stop the land sale and even called in Rudy Manke, a naturalist and co-host of South Carolina ETV’s NatureScene, to help identify an exotic plant species in order the head off the golf course project, but she was unable to stop the development. Since the sale, the NRCS lake is still used occasionally by Centrifuge kayakers and others. The original campus lake is a part of the Cherokee Valley golf course.

We’d like to thank Dr. Chuck Morton and Mr. Billy Watson for their help on this post.