Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021 - 16

OUR BLUE RIDGE TOWNS

Walhalla, South Carolina: Deep
in Cherokee and German Pasts
Rivers and mountains and waterfalls surround a town with deep German roots.
By JOAN VANNORSDALL

t was the name that did it. That, and the beautiful
160-year-old Lutheran church.
As a lifelong Lutheran and graduate of Norwegian-rooted St. Olaf College, how could I resist a
town named Walhalla?
Which is how the Germans spell Valhalla, the
Norse concept of Heaven. The Garden of the Gods:
a magnificent palace, where kings and slain warriors
lived eternally, well-fed and safe and, well, heroically.
All of which sounded like just the ticket as the COVID pandemic wears on, and on.
Like most things now, my travel was virtual. But the
stories told are real, the photos shared enticing-and
when it's safe to travel, I'll be there.
As I have found with nearly every small town I've
written about in this column, you have to understand
the past if the present is going to make real sense. And
for Walhalla, the past is German.
Specifically, immigrant Germans living in Charleston, South Carolina, where the long-lasting, humid heat
made them long for home. One of them, Johann Andreas Wagener-who went by John when he settled in
Charleston in 1833-formed the German Colonization
Society in order to help his fellow Germans find farmland and cooler days. They found it in the Pickens district, in far northwest South Carolina. For $27,000, the
well-to-do Germans bought more than 17,000 acres of
land, in a place they called Walhalla, " the pleasant hall,
the real heaven of our German forebearers. "
In careful German order, the Society laid out the
town of Walhalla in a strict grid, pointing it in a direction not receiving direct sun to mitigate summer heat.
On both sides of Main Street ran half- and full-acre lots.
Beyond these lay 50-acre farm plots. The outlying land
was divided into both large and small tracts. And in
the spring of 1850, paying Society members drew lots
for land parcels. The only caveat was that within three
years, each parcel of land had to have a building on it.
It wasn't just the farmland and mountains that drew
the Germans to this part of South Carolina. The Blue
Ridge Railroad was in the planning stages, to run from
Charleston to Knoxville, Tennessee. The German Colonization Society saw potential profit in being the last
supply stop before crossing into Tennessee.

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Problem was, those
railroad planners underestimated the obstacle
of the Upcountry mountains, and tunneling under Walhalla's Stumphouse Mountain proved
undoable. The tunnel
was half-completed when
the State abandoned the
project, and Walhalla was
the end of the line.
Not ones to let building material go to waste,
German residents constructed a number of the
buildings in their town of Stumphouse stone, including
the Oconee Military Museum at Patriots' Hall. Today,
the mountain is part of the New Mountain Bike Path,
10 miles of riding beauty just off the Appalachian Trail.
Centuries before the Germans arrived, South Carolina Upcountry was Cherokee territory-and Walhalla's
Cherokee history runs long and deep. Issaqueena Falls,
100 feet high in the Sumter National Forest, is part of
that: the site where, legend has it, a young girl hid on
a ledge behind the falls after warning settlers of an imminent Cherokee attack. Walhalla's Museum of the
Cherokee Indian in South Carolina is the place to go to
see a large collection of Cherokee artifacts, most found
in farmers' fields and along the region's many rivers. In
addition, the Oconee History Museum offers visitors a
self-guided tour of the area's history.
That was then, and now is now. Walhalla is a new
Main Street community, and good things are happening. The small city of 4,200 has lured back some of its
native sons and daughters, who are investing in Walhalla and its future.
Lana Justice grew up in Walhalla, and as a young
mother brought her children back to visit their grandparents. " You'd drive up, and it was just beautiful, the
town with mountains rising up. "
A few years ago, Justice and her husband opened an
event venue on Main Street, Durham Hall.
" During the renovation of the building, " she says, " I

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Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021

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