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By David Stephens
Hometown News
The Chesnee Mill Village, like many other similar villages in South Carolina, is a product of the heyday of the textiles when mill employees lived near their work. Homes there dating back to 1910 and possibly older are sturdily built and the homeowners are proud to live there.
Now, ahead of the upcoming Centennial event for Chesnee, residents in the Mill Village are “sprucing up” their neighborhood.
One of the organizers of the effort is Arnold Hughes, who said, “We are cleaning up the neighborhood not just for appearance, but to make it a safer place for the kids and the elderly folks. We have 15 residents involved right now and others are always stopping when they see us and asking what they can do to help. I think everybody appreciates what is going on.”
Hughes said volunteers are cleaning up the yards of some of those older residents and taking care of plants and trees.
Hughes said, ‘The County has been very helpful to us with hauling away rubbish and trash from the cleanup.”
Another project involved restoring as many of the original village street markers like the one pictured above.
Hughes stated, “We found them in ditches, alongside the roads and streets and some even in the woods. One of them was broken into four pieces, but one of our volunteers put it back together again with some rods and concrete.”
Once found, the markers had to be painted and lettered as close as possible to the original style. For that task Chesnee High School senior and neighborhood resident Karissa Offenburger was enlisted and spent many hours completing the restorations.
Photo by David Stephens
Chesnee Mill Village residents from left: Arnold Hughes, Dennis Cooper, Paula and Boyd McKinney, Todd Watson, and in front Chesnee High School senior Karissa Offenburger, show off one of the restored village street markers.
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