Anybody commute from Newberry to Columbia? With all the construction and traffic issues lately, it would be nice if someone else would do the driving every now and then. One way to do that way back when was to ride the train. You had a couple of options, one being the Greenville to Columbia line.
Another option was the Columbia, Newberry and Laurens railroad, sometimes called the Dutch Fork line. The Greenville to Columbia line was chartered in 1848, and a few years later was up and running. The Columbia, Newberry and Laurens railroad was officially chartered in 1885, and by 1891 the line was completed from Columbia to Dover Junction. The line was completed to Laurens when the Laurens Railroad was purchased from the Richmond and Danville Railroad. Trains left the former Union Station in Columbia for Laurens daily beginning in 1902. (As an aside, for those of you who venture into Columbia, the old Union Station on South Main Street is now a California Dreaming restaurant, near the USC campus.)
Towns or rail stops we take for granted today were established, or grew significantly, because of these railroads. Alston, Peak, Hope Station, Pomaria, Irmo, Chapin, Little Mountain, Prosperity, Newberry, Jalapa, Kinards, Joanna, Clinton and others all owed a lot to the railroads. Most rail stops were named after people or places, but Irmo is a particularly interesting case as it was named after two people, using the first two letters in the last names of C. J. Iredell, secretary-treasurer of the CN&L, and H. C. Moseley, first president of the CN&L.
The Palmetto Trail was able to purchase a section of the railbed and trestles of the old Greenville and Columbia rail line from Norfolk Southern through the national railbanking process and convert it to a hiking and biking trail (the Peak to Prosperity Passage) which travels through several of these locations. We hope to be able to connect even more of these locations along the old CN&L route sometime in the future. If you’re wondering, “railbanking” was established in 1983 as an amendment to Section 8(d) of the National Trails System Act, as a way to preserve thousands of miles or rail corridor that might otherwise have been entirely abandoned. It allows for a voluntary agreement between a railroad company and a trail sponsor (such as Palmetto Trail) to use an out-of-service rail corridor as a trail until a railroad might need the corridor again for rail service. We’re grateful to all the railroads who contributed to our ability to reuse/recycle these wonderful assets.
February is a good month to hike, although it was not a good month for railroads in the past. In February 1865, Shermans army destroyed much of the rail line from Prosperity, through Alston in Fairfield County, to Columbia. Even though these railroads rebuilt their lines after the war, they eventually gave way to progress and discontinued passenger services through the area. So even if you can no longer take the train to these towns, you can still visit them by hiking or biking along the Palmetto Trail, taking the same route the trains themselves took, all the while enjoying the history and beauty of South Carolina. And if you happen to hear a train whistle in the distance, just consider it a ghostly reminder of a time when trains roared along the very ground you are walking, carrying travelers just like yourself to their next destination.
As always, if you want to volunteer with Palmetto Trail or are interested in scheduling a group hike, please get in touch.
See you on the Trail!