Pacolet River

About

Pacolet River, South Carolina — 1881 Montgomery Textile Mill, 1840s-1880s Textile, 1990s-2010s Pacolet Trail 50-mi Spartanburg. The Pacolet's most useful modern reference point is its gauge. USGS streamgage 02156370 tracks the river's discharge, showing a long-term average of about 737 CFS. Paddlers running its Class II–III sections find the cleanest passages when the gauge sits between 375 and 1,100 CFS, a window that keeps the shoals lively without turning them dangerous. Across roughly 35 miles, the river gathers runoff from a 320-square-mile watershed in Spartanburg and Union counties before delivering it into the Broad River.

Long before any of that was measured, the Pacolet flowed through the ancestral territory of the Catawba, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the Muscogee (Creek), the Cusabo, and the Yemassee. The river served as a primary travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place. Indigenous people worked the ancient soapstone quarries now preserved within the Pacolet River Heritage Preserve, carving vessels from the soft stone along its banks. The cession framework that later displaced these communities took shape through the 1761–1763 Catawba Treaty, the 1817 Treaty of Old Town, and the 1826–1830 Indian Removal Acts — but the Catawba Indian Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation maintain cultural connections to the corridor.

European settlement crept in slowly. In 1766, Joseph Wofford acquired a 200-acre tract on the river's west side, a parcel that encompassed Richland Creek and signaled the frontier's gradual transformation. Over the following century and a half, the surrounding forests fed an extractive economy. The Pacolet was logged from the 1700s through the 1920s to support South Carolina's longleaf-pine, cypress, and hardwood industry, its rice-belt and cotton-belt agriculture, and its Reconstruction-era lumber operations. Sawmills, turpentine stills, cross-tie cutting, and naval-stores work all drew on the river and its banks until the longleaf pine was exhausted in the 1920s.

The river's defining industrial chapter arrived in 1881. That year, textile manufacturing pioneer John H. Montgomery and his associates — organized as Montgomery and Walker, Fleming, and Company — purchased 350 acres on the Pacolet at Trough Shoals to develop a textile mill. The area, originally known as Trough Shoals, became the seat of a mill economy that would sustain the Spartanburg, Pacolet, and Clifton communities for generations. The Glendale Shoals and the Pacolet River Heritage Preserve remain on the landscape as reminders of that era.

Today the Pacolet has shed much of its mill-era grit and turned toward recreation and repair. Since 2008, the Pacolet River and Lawson's Fork Creek Blueway — launched by the Palmetto Conservation Foundation — has opened more than fifty miles of paddling and river travel, and the corridor is designated as a water trail. Since 2010, SC DNR, working with the Pacolet Watershed Partnership and the Catawba Indian Nation, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Recent efforts include streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024 and native fish restocking from 2017 to 2024, reintroducing redbreast sunfish and shoal bass to a river that once turned mill wheels.