Located in the lush northern Piedmont region, Rock Hill strays from the traditional identity associated with South Carolina, where the prevailing images consist of antebellum estates, plantation societies, smoldering Civil War landscapes, and countrysides dominated by cotton. While Rock Hill shares many of these scenes and has been shaped by this history, the city, infused with a New South spirit, has grown and developed differently than most other of the Palmetto State’s towns. In Rock Hill: Gateway to the New South, you will take a step back into the Rock Hill of yesteryear, when life was a little simpler and this small town was making its first steps into becoming one of the state’s primary industrial centers. This volume contains both vivid images of Rock Hill’s past and a selection of personal histories from a wide variety of citizens, from its Catawba roots to its African-American heritage. Throughout, you will be reminded of a place and time becoming increasingly foreign to today’s generations, when lazy Saturday afternoons were spent playing fox and hounds, hop scotch, and gloveless baseball, when doors, both car and home, were left unlocked, and when the week was measured by the social calendar’s local parties and dances. Besides these romantic scenes of small-town life, Rock Hill contains compelling stories detailing the devastation of storms, the tense emotions and sacrifices surrounding homefront Rock Hill during wartimes, the excitement of early businesses moving into the area, and the bidding struggle and birth of the city’s proudest educational achievement, Winthrop University.