Before There Was a City
Long before Greenville existed, the Cherokee, Catawba, and other Indigenous peoples lived along the Reedy River. Archaeological evidence confirms Cherokee villages lined these banks. They fished in the shallows, hunted deer in the surrounding woods, and gathered river cane for baskets and arrows.
In the late 1700s, a Virginia trader named Richard Pearis married a Cherokee woman, gained large tracts of land, and built a trading post and mill along the river. But he backed the British in the Revolutionary War, got captured, and lost everything. New owners laid out plots and named the town "Pleasantburg" — a name that, mercifully, didn't stick. By the 1830s, it was Greenville.
The Textile Empire
The waterfall that powered Cherokee fishing grounds soon powered something else entirely: cotton mills. In the 1870s, entrepreneurs launched a cotton-spinning venture in an old sawmill along the Reedy. By 1876, Camperdown Mill was one of South Carolina's most profitable operations.
Workers lived in company-built mill villages with company houses, schools, churches, and stores. When the machines fell silent after shifts, mill baseball leagues took the field — the community's pastime of choice.
By the early 1900s, Greenville's "Textile Crescent" — a ring of mills including Poe, Woodside, and Brandon — had earned the city the title "Textile Capital of the World."
The Hidden Waterfall
As the textile industry declined, the Reedy River suffered. Mills had polluted the water. Then a four-lane highway bridge — the Camperdown Bridge — was built directly over the falls, blocking any view of them entirely.
Imagine walking through downtown Greenville and not even knowing there was a waterfall here.
For decades, that's exactly what happened. The falls were forgotten.
The Transformation
In 1967, the Carolina Foothills Garden Club saw potential where others saw neglect. They began reclaiming the riverbanks, cleaning up pollution, and planting gardens. It took decades of persistence.
Then in 2002, the Camperdown Bridge came down. Two years later, the Liberty Bridge — a 345-foot cantilevered suspension bridge with no vertical supports, one of only two like it in the United States — opened in its place. The falls were finally revealed.
Today, Falls Park is the heart of Greenville. The gardens host festivals, weddings, and community gatherings. The park draws visitors from around the world to see the waterfall that was hidden for generations.
Hear the Full Story
Our self-guided audio walking tour brings this history to life at 10 stops throughout the park and downtown. GPS-triggered audio plays automatically as you walk. No app download needed.