Greenville historic tour 

Greenville’s revitalization dates back four decades and serves as a case study in urban planning. It attracts city leaders from around the country who aim to recreate Greenville’s success in their own towns.  

The city also has a rich civil rights history, a vibrant arts community and a storied history as the “textile center of the world.” Noted local historian John Nolan and his team will guide us through Greenville’s past, blending lively storytelling with encyclopedic knowledge of urban renewal, as well as architectural and culinary history. 

Nolan is Greenville’s original tour guide, having personally given tours and lectures to more than 100,000 visitors since the early 1980s. On our ride, Nolan will share “before” photos of a struggling downtown area from the 1970s and detail how Greenville’s city center was changed so drastically over the decades via urban planning. 

We’ll travel in two buses on Friday afternoon after lunch, and we’ll hop on and off at least a couple of times. Via large digital screens in the tour bus, we’ll view scores of old photographs, maps, drawings and paintings from a before-and-after vantage-point of where they were taken to illustrate the themes discussed as we drive through the area. 

The weather is typically lovely in Greenville in early November, ideal for peak leaf foliage, milder temperatures and lower humidity. But you never know. Weather permitting we’ll stop at the Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery, an outdoor hub alongside the Swamp Rabbit Trail. The café supports local farmers and food makers, housed in a formerly abandoned meat processing facility that was also slated to become a scrap metal yard. We can grab a coffee, beer or a prosecco on draft, pick up some Greenville souvenirs or some famous stecca bread at the café. 

Nolan and his team’s custom tour will also give us an insider’s look at the textile industry, which employed one out of every three people here for many years and had world-wide reach and importance. This tour will take us to mills from the “early years” built up between 1874-1902 then continues to the “second wave” of mill building between 1910-30. We will learn what the mills produced, why they closed, and what is going on there now. 

The buses will also make a stop at the Greenville County Museum of Art where docents will guide us through a nationally acclaimed collection of American art including significant holdings by Andrew Wyeth and Jasper Johns.

“Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection” is the largest and most comprehensive collection of Wyeth watercolors in any public museum. Other highlights include an important group of pre-Civil War vessels by the enslaved African American potter and poet David Drake, as well as an exceptional collection of works by African American artists, including modernist William H. Johnson, a South Carolina native. The museum also features impressive holdings in American Impressionism and the Charleston Renaissance, alongside works by Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert S. Duncanson, Frank Duveneck, and Kara Walker. 

Buses will drop us off at the hotel at 5:30 p.m.