Mountville

Mountville is one of Laurens County‘s earliest communities. Though the town was not chartered until 1890, people had begun to settle along Beaverdam Creek by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Solomon Fuller, who is listed in the 1800 Laurens County census, brought his family here from North Carolina and is considered the area’s first settler. By 1808 a school and church had been built near the creek community, and more families established homesteads on neighboring land.

By the late nineteenth century, the Georgia, Carolina, and Northern Railroad had built a rail line through the area, and families relocated closer to the depot, which became the center of the town’s emerging commercial activity. Local cotton crops were creating a prospering economy, and before long banks, stores (seen below), cotton gins, and a post office had changed the landscape from a rural settlement to a booming town.

Sadly, the town declined with the advent of automobiles and the development of the highway system in the early twentieth century. As a result, passenger rail service was no longer offered to Mountville, and the town’s economic hub eventually faded away. Remnant of Mountville’s railroad and commercial days remain in old buildings that sit vacant along the once-lively tracks.