“G” is for Greenville County

“G” is for Greenville County (790 square miles; 2020 population 532,486). Greenville County was created in 1786 out of Cherokee land. Originally part of Ninety Six District, the county consisted of the land between the Saluda River and the Indian boundary line of 1767. After the Revolutionary War settlers moved into the area--most numerous were veterans who applied for state bounty lands. The antebellum economy was agricultural, based on wheat and corn and a few mills and foundries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dozens of textile factories sprang up in Greenville County and the county found itself at the center of a booming textile industry. After 1945 agriculture declined and a generation of business leaders began to court diversified industry to replace declining textiles. Greenville County is the most populous county in the state of South Carolina.