Greenville and Columbia Railroad

The line traces its history back to 1845, when Greenville, South Carolina-area leaders Benjamin Perry, Waddy Thompson Jr., John T. Coleman and Joel Poinsett called a public meeting, this one presided over by Vardry McBee.

The goal was to create enthusiasm and collect subscriptions for a rail line to the northern and southern parts of the state.

With a committee of 30 potential subscribers, they agreed to seek a preliminary charter for a Greenville and Columbia Railroad, with the understanding that they raise at least $300,000 in subscriptions within a year.

They were successful but when stockholders met in May 1847 in Columbia, those from the capital city and from the Abbeville and Anderson districts, urged by local property owner and famed politician John C. Calhoun, who wanted a different route, voted to build a 147-mile line on the west side of the river with its terminus in Anderson.

Despite a flash flood that washed out bridges, embankments and tracks along the Broad River, the line went forward.

Henry Hammett, one of the few solvent Greenvillians after the war, became president in 1868, but then the Greenville and Columbia fell into the hands of the Railroad Ring, politically connected embezzlers who bilked the state out of its lien and mortgage on the rail line.

[9] At one point in the 1870s, a quarter of the state's revenues were lost in a single fiscal year after a failed investment in the troubled railroad.