A paradise of breathtaking waterfalls, flawless vistas, and picturesque lakes, Pickens County enjoys a remarkable natural beauty along the stream-laced foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The county, named for early settler and Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens, was once part of the Old Pendleton District, a portion of the Palmetto State that also included Anderson and Oconee Counties, and like much of the Upstate, echoes its Cherokee heritage through local names such as Lake Keowee and the Cateechee community. This volume, containing over 200 black-and-white images, provides readers a unique opportunity to step back into the Pickens County of yesteryear, a time remembered for clay main streets, horse-drawn buggies, railroads, and early textile mills, gristmills, and sawmills. Covering the county's towns, such as Easley, Pickens, Liberty, and Central, Pickens County recounts the intriguing stories of hardships and accomplishments of the area's pioneering families and descendants, who have continued to shape the county without destroying the area's natural environment.

“Reminds readers that the history of lynching and racial violence in the United States is not a closed book, but an ever-relevant story.” —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously recreates the case’s details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article “Opera in Greenville” is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area. Gravely also probes problems with memory that resulted in varying interpretations of Willie Earle’s character and conflicting narratives about the lynching itself.