Ode to the Option and Other Relics of the Old South

By Dantzler Smith

Heading to a Wofford football game on Fall Saturdays, you drive from the leafy neighborhoods towards downtown on Main Street. At the Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce, with its flag poles hoisting the standards of countries the small city boasts as business partners, you turn down Pine Street.

Following those Norman Rockwell directions, the road rolls downhill under an old railroad bridge, and just past that overarching amalgam of aged concrete and steel appears the spot where Spartan Mills used to stand.