Spartanburg — South Carolina

The self-declared Hub City of the Upstate, where old textile money built handsome squares and a new wave of breweries and music venues moved into the leftover warehouses. Lia and I stumbled on it between Asheville and Charleston and stayed long enough for two rounds at RJ Rockers.

We rolled into Spartanburg on the kind of gray Upstate afternoon that makes brick buildings look almost purple, and the first thing we found was Morgan Square, a compact plaza with a bronze statue of General Daniel Morgan facing down Main Street. Lia liked that the town didn’t try too hard to explain itself — no polished welcome center, just a scatter of independent coffee shops and a music scene that locals will tell you about unprompted if you ask where to get dinner. Spartanburg was built on textile mills like so much of the Piedmont, but its downtown revival feels less curated than some of its neighbors, still a little rough at the edges in a way that felt honest.

Hatcher Garden and the mill legacy

On the edge of downtown, Hatcher Garden and Woodland Preserve is eleven acres that a retired couple, Harold and Josephine Hatcher, spent forty years turning from an eroded gully into a network of ponds and native plantings — it’s free, quiet, and almost nobody else was there when we walked it before lunch. Afterward we drove out to see the old Beaumont Mill village, one of the dozen-plus textile mill communities that once ringed the city and gave Spartanburg County the nickname “Hub City” for the seven rail lines converging here to move cotton and cloth.

A wooden footbridge over a pond at Hatcher Garden in Spartanburg, South Carolina

RJ Rockers and the Music Trail

Spartanburg has quietly become a beer town — RJ Rockers, the state’s oldest craft brewery, still bottles in a low brick building near the railroad tracks, and we spent a slow evening there with a flight of their Bell Ringer brown ale while a bluegrass trio set up in the corner. The city also markets itself as the birthplace of a surprising number of musicians, and bronze plaques along the Spartanburg Music Trail on Main Street mark names from gospel to hip-hop. We followed the trail more or less by accident, reading plaques between bars, which felt like the right way to do it.

Getting There

Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport (GSP) sits about 20 minutes west of downtown, making Spartanburg one of the easier Upstate towns to reach directly. From Charlotte it’s a straightforward hour and a quarter west on I-85. A car is essential for reaching the mill villages and Hatcher Garden, though downtown itself is walkable once you’ve parked.