Vardry Echols McBee (June 19, 1775 – January 23, 1864) was an American saddlemaker, merchant, farmer, entrepreneur and philanthropist who has frequently been called, "the father of Greenville, South Carolina".

McBee, the youngest of ten children, was born to an impecunious Revolutionary War officer in the Spartanburg District of South Carolina and reared in Thicketty.

[1] Briefly a clerk at a grocery in Charleston, South Carolina, and a pioneer farmer with his parents in Logan County, Kentucky, McBee returned to Lincolnton as a saddler and merchant, where he prospered and, in 1804, married Jane Alexander, the daughter of a prominent local family.

[5] After buying up worn-out land abandoned by westward immigrants, McBee practiced new methods of restoring the fertility of the soil, such as drainage, the use of manures, crop rotation, and seed selection.

[9] McBee used the same mill to operate cotton and woolen factories, ordering textile machinery from the New Jersey firm of Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor.

[16] In 1852, when the Greenville and Columbia Railroad was about to fail, McBee saved it by subscribing $50,000, a contribution that Debow's called "the largest individual subscription ever made to a Rail-road in the United States.

Greenville was also chosen as the site of the State Military Works because McBee gave South Carolina twenty acres of land to build on.

[20] McBee donated land in downtown Greenville for the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches; and in Conestee he built an octagonal chapel for his workers.

He breakfasts very early, and then employs himself in riding and superintending his business till dinner....[V]ery few men who have made their fortunes have appropriated so much of them to public purposes, and, to the support of honest industry, to the improvement of their country in her agriculture, manufactures.