Five Forks Branch

Five Forks Branch History

Today, the Woodruff Road area teems with businesses, subdivisions, and traffic, but only a few decades ago it was farmland. In fact, that’s the way it had been since the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner (1777) opened Cherokee lands to European settlers. Who was its first farmer? If family tradition is to be believed, Nathaniel Austin lived on the land next to Gilder’s Creek as far back as 1761, but he didn’t obtain a deed for it until 1796. The name “Woodruff” comes from James Woodruff—an influential early settler just over the Spartanburg County line—but when exactly the name became attached to the country lane leading from Greenville to Woodruff township is a mystery. The earliest road map of Greenville (Mill’s Atlas of 1825) shows the country lane without any name at all, while a map of 1882 labels it “Spartanburg Road” and one from 1904 simply as “Rural Route-G #2.”

The soil for these farms was not the “rich bottom land” or “Black Alluvial soil” of some other areas in the county, but it was “good land,” and so the farms flourished, and the cattle enjoyed their grazing until the mid-1980s. The steady growth of the Greenville suburbs led developers to begin buying up the farms and planting subdivisions there, soon followed by businesses thriving on their proximity to the new population. Development demands infrastructure, so bigger highways were built to bring new customers there, and the Greenville County Library System took note of the need for a new regional branch to serve the community taking shape.

The ambitious plan to replace and update existing Library System buildings (approved in 1993) included the proposal for an entirely new branch in the Five Forks area. The new Hughes Main Library and each of the old branches were duly built, while the need for the new branch on the south eastside grew more acute. A plot of land was found at the intersection of Sunnydale Drive and Woodruff Road and purchased in 2013. Construction of the new branch began in 2016, and the facility opened March 25, 2018. It was well worth the wait considering all the improvements. More than twice the size of the other branch libraries, it includes a drive-through window, a kiosk that dispenses laptops, a secure outside Play Porch for kids, and a variety of meeting and collaboration spaces for groups large and small. One sees very few cows now, but lots of happy library patrons.

Sources:

• Edens, A. W. , C.E. Greenville County, SC, in 1904 (map). (A. Hoen and Co., Richmond, VA, 1903).
• Greenville News, Nov. 27, 1994, p. 4A; Apr. 9, 2000, p. 7B.
• Huff, Archie Vernon, Jr. Greenville (University of South Carolina Press, 1995).
• Kohn, David, ed. Internal Improvements in South Carolina, 1817-1828. (Washington, DC, 1938).
• Mills, Robert. Mill’s Atlas: Atlas of the State of South Carolina. (1825).
• Nash, Sara M. Abstracts of Early Records of Laurens County, South Carolina 1785-1820. (1982).