Bainbridge: How old Furman campus became prized site for billion-dollar development

If you lived in Greenville 70 years ago, you might remember the curving drives, flowering shrubs and tall trees of the Furman University campus. Overlooking the Reedy River at Main Street, the university’s park-like campus was the pride of Greenville.

Buildings  —the bell tower and the Italianate Old Main as well as the others, less distinguished and rather haphazardly located, had the patina of age.

If you arrived in the 1970s, you might have shopped at the Bell Tower Mall. Without even a hint of landscaping, its acres of vacant parking edged up to a Woolco, Edwards Department Store and a Winn-Dixie.

And if you are a more recent Greenvillian, you probably have visited County Square with its Family Court, tax office, Register of Deeds and conference rooms. With plenty of parking and nicely landscaped, it’s now, evidently, soon to be demolished in favor a billion-dollar development and an undetermined number of multi-story buildings.

Before that happens, however, perhaps a bit of history is in order.

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In 1947 Furman was bursting at the seams. Veterans had flooded the campus, doubling enrollment in two years. (In 1946, 25 trailers were provided for married students; there were 64 barracks for single men at “Vetville” on the old Graham baseball field.)

With two campuses, the women’s on College Street and the men’s a mile away in the West End, the university had location problems. No new buildings (except Sirrine Stadium) had been erected since 1930, and little maintenance had been done on existing ones.

The university had to expand. Because no vacant land lay around the women’s college, expansion could only happen around the men’s campus. When word leaked out that Furman was buying property, prices zoomed upward. So in 1948 the Board of Trustees decided to sell both campuses and move the university to a new site. In 1950 the board decided on a location near old Duncan Chapel close to Buncombe Road.

The Furman Co., the university’s long-term Realtor, assembled more than 11,000 acres from 26 different plots, ranging from 848 acres to a single lot. Ground was broken for the new Furman in 1953.

In the fall of 1955, the first students  —102 men of the class of 1959 and six senior counselors — moved into the first completed dormitories.

It was a lonely, barren campus (workers were planting 1,400 trees at the same time), but nine holes of a golf course had been finished and there were tennis courts, although there was no heat in the classroom building until December.

Having three campuses just didn’t work. After that experimental year, the university waited until 1958 to officially abandon the men’s campus and install all male students and senior women on the new campus.

In 1961, when the women’s residence halls were complete (they had air-conditioning and fancy parlors that men didn’t need), women joined the men on the Poinsett Highway. Their 12-acre College Street campus, the home of the Greenville academies (1821-1854), the Greenville Female College (1855-1915) and the Greenville Women’s College (1916-1933) was abandoned and became the site of Heritage Green.

But the men’s 90-acre campus (40 acres south of University Ridge) was a problem. Realtor Alester Furman Jr., a trustee, noted that income from the land was needed to ensure the future endowment of the school. 

Trustees assumed the land would be leased and developed into a shopping center. The Furman Co. would serve as leasing agent in order to distance the university from any direct involvement in the mall’s operation. 

In 1961 the company commissioned a feasibility study from Hammer and Associates of Atlanta that supported the concept, although the planning group warned that there could be competition. Options had already been taken, Hammer noted, on the McAlister farm on newly extended Pleasantburg Highway, and the Hughes Development Co. was planning a Kmart 2.5 miles south on Mills Avenue.

The Furman Co. sought potential developers and anchor tenants for the site in New York and Atlanta, but it wasn’t an easy sell. Greenville was perceived by developers and national retailers as a mill town.

In the early 1960s, University Ridge was widened and straightened, and in 1964 a fire destroyed the old main building, Richard Furman Hall. When the university decided to dismantle the bell tower, its most significant building, the old bricks crumbled.

(The Furman family covered the cost of building an exact replica on the new campus.)

At the same time, the Furman Co. began leasing and selling land on the south side of University Ridge where the president’s home and Graham Field had stood. One site became an office complex, the 300 Building. Another became the Greenville County Health Center in 1966, a third became Scott Towers (now demolished).

But about 40 acres lay north of University Ridge and it too needed to be developed. A preliminary plan had suggested an upscale “Lenox Square”-type development, including high-end anchor tenants, heavily landscaped parking, and condominiums along the rear of the development.

But the Hammer study had more modest recommendations. It suggested a partially enclosed central “Demonstration Area,” featuring the relocated Furman bell tower, lots of parking, and a national mid-level retailer like Sears as the anchor tenant. 

Four years passed. Nothing happened. The company asked Hammer for a second feasibility study, which was as upbeat as the previous one. Finally, in November 1965, Bell Tower Associates unveiled plans for a 345,000-square-foot enclosed, air-conditioned (in capital letters and with exclamation marks) shopping center with discounter Woolco as its prime tenant.

Bell Tower Mall’s New York and New Jersey developers leveled the old campus, creating 2,000 parking spaces. Woolco opened first, late in 1969. The grand opening in July 1970 boasted full occupancy, including a Winn-Dixie grocery, an Edwards Department Store (a Charleston-based chain), and a multiplex theater. An 18-foot replica of the bell tower stood in its central space.

Although it was initially profitable, Bell Tower Mall’s size, location, and store mix did not succeed. Residential development was moving east, and the old West End did not have the population base to support even a low-end mall. In less than a decade, it began losing tenants. By 1982, when Woolco closed, the mall was dying, although a few stores hung on briefly.

The huge vacant shopping center with acres of empty parking spaces was an embarrassment (and a financial loss) to the university and to the real-estate industry, but then, in a remarkable turnaround, the lemon was turned into lemonade.

County government needed office space, and county commissioners were investigating making a major investment in a new building when Furman Realty approached them in 1984 with an idea: Why not bring all county offices (including those in the recently condemned Family Court Building) together on one site?

Parking was more than adequate, and space was not an issue. The facility could house social services, probate and family courts, tax offices and meeting spaces.

County Council agreed, purchasing the mall for $5 million in May 1984. Three years later, the newly named County Square, thoroughly renovated and redesigned by the architectural firm Craig, Gaulden and Davis, and with heavily landscaped parking, opened in 1987.

There were problems, of course. It was a long walk from one end of the office complex to the other. (“I need a skateboard,” one employee complained.) Security was difficult. And County Council members were certainly aware that the 32-acre property was valuable.

In December 2013, members announced that they were considering redeveloping the site. The future of the old campus is still taking shape today.

Judith Bainbridge is a retired Furman University professor who has written seven books about Greenville history. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and taught composition at Furman for 30 years.

Judy Bainbridge Questions? Comments? Write Judy.Bainbridge@furman.edu.