Danny Lee Ford II of Pendleton, son of legendary Clemson football coach Danny Ford, entered the race for the South Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture on Monday with a campaign kickoff in Anderson at the Upstate Livestock Auction. Ford, who has worked alongside his father in hemp and row-crop farming and raising cattle in Upstate South Carolina, has been an outspoken critic of regulatory shifts he argues have whipsawed small growers.

Now Anderson County has been awarded its second Safe Streets and Roads for All grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, a $529,600 award that follows a $200,000 planning grant in 2023. The earlier money produced a Safety Action Plan; the new money is meant to test one of its more pointed recommendations, which is that it should not be quite so dangerous to hurry to save someone’s life.

Garrison’s record in Columbia was less a string of headline‑grabbing bills than a long, methodical campaign on behalf of farms, land, and the back roads that tie them together. Over three decades in the General Assembly, his work traced the contours of an older South Carolina—one in which dairies, soil districts, and extension offices were central institutions rather than nostalgic props. 

council will consider second reading of an ordiance to annex and zone to GC (General Commercial) about 9.8 acres off the S.C. 28 Bypass near the Clemson Boulevard interchange—six parcels fronting the highway, adjacent to existing RM-18 apartments and other commercial uses. Connelly Development plans a multi-unit apartment community there, contingent on city water and sewer under an annexation covenant that has already cleared the Planning Commission and first reading. Another ordinance would annex a 0.2-acre vacant lot at 1310 West Market Street and zone it NC (Neighborhood Commercial), allowing it to be combined with an adjoining barber shop property already in the city. Owner Charles Jones plans a barber-training facility on the combined site, extending small-scale commercial activity along the West Market corridor toward the bypass.

Registration opens at 7:15 a.m., followed by networking from 7:30 to 8 a.m. and the program starting at 8 a.m., wrapping by 9:30 a.m.

Early voting runs February 23 through March 6, weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Anderson County Office of Voter Registration and Elections, 301 N. Main Street. Election Day polls open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on March 10; photo ID is required at any county site.

The alternative—renovating the existing buildings in place—turns out to be both costly and disruptive in ways that are less immediately visible than a new brick façade. Both Belton and Honea Path middle schools were originally built as high schools, one in 1951 and the other in 1954, and have, over the years, been expanded with additions that did little to modernize the original structures. The 43 to 57 million dollars estimated for upgrades would mostly disappear below the surface: electrical systems, plumbing, and “below-grade” work, Johns notes, that would leave the buildings looking much the same to anyone pulling up to the front door.

Erin Spainhour, the center’s executive director since last fall, describes the process with the quiet precision of someone who has watched it unfold for years. Artists may submit up to two original works in any medium—paintings, sculptures, prints, jewelry—created within the past two years; jurors chosen for their expertise, sift through more than 400 entries to select roughly 180 for display. Intake begins March 15 and runs through the 17th, with the opening reception set for April 10; those pieces that don’t make the cut aren’t turned away but juried into Art on the Town, a companion crawl through downtown Anderson businesses, kicking off April 23.

Formally, the work is known as the U.S. 76 from N. Main St. to Bleckley St. Safety Project, a title that suggests an engineering exercise in friction reduction. According to the state’s online project portal, SCDOT plans to pair routine resurfacing with a new pattern of lane markings that will change how drivers, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, move through Murray Avenue. In its most common form, a lane diet trims a four-lane undivided road down to three: one lane in each direction, with a center lane reserved for left turns. It is a small act of subtraction intended to produce a larger sense of order. Everything happens within the existing width of the street; the work is less an act of expansion than of reinterpretation—restriping in lieu of widening, a revision rather than a rewrite.

Hartwell Lake and Anderson County’s signature tournament facility, Green Pond Landing, will once again take the national spotlight this fall as the site of the 2026 Mercury B.A.S.S. Nation Championship presented by Lowrance. The event, set for November 18–21, will bring hundreds of anglers, fans, and media from across the country to Anderson for one of bass fishing’s premier grassroots championships.

DeShields arrives, as the board’s announcement puts it, with “extensive experience in nonprofit leadership, mental health advocacy, youth and family services, and community engagement,” a résumé that maps neatly onto the overlapping crises that now define everyday life for many Westside families.

For the past decade or so, the district has managed this situation with a series of allowances and workarounds.  Schedules are adjusted; events are split into multiple sessions; classrooms are repurposed. But there is a point beyond which improvisation becomes a form of denial, and in District 3 that point appears to have arrived.

Greenville in the 1940s and 1950s was a place where the rules of race were enforced with a casual ferocity that Jackson would spend his public life naming and resisting. His mother, still a teenager when he was born, raised him in a house that sat in the shadow of white prosperity but outside its protections, and the circumstances of his birth—out of wedlock, the son of a man who belonged to another family—were used by other children as an instrument of shame. Jackson would later say that those taunts, and the knowledge that his very existence was considered irregular by the people who ran his town, helped fuel his determination to excel.

The new director of the Westside Community Center won’t need much prepping to get to work. Dr. Treca Yvette DeShields has been involved in the community for some time, and is ready to fill some big shoes as she followers the organization’s founder who retired last year. For more than three decades, Westside has been shaped by the presence of one woman, Dr. Beatrice Thompson, whose tenure as director began when the neighborhood, and the country, were having a very different conversation about what counted as a “community center.” She arrived at a time when such places were still often imagined as gymnasiums with side rooms, and proceeded to turn Westside into something more complicated: a hybrid of school, informal social-service agency, and civic commons, with after-school tutoring in one room and quiet consolations in another.

Council will also take a final vote Tuesday on a plan to create the legal framework for issuing revenue bonds backed by the county’s 3 percent accommodations fee and a portion of “park fees” to fund tourist-oriented projects. Currently, accommodations-tax revenues are distributed annually in relatively small amounts to various groups that promote projects or events aimed at “putting heads in beds” and generating taxes in the county’s hotels, VRBOs and Airbnbs. The proposed $12.7 million in bonds, with a cap of 6 percent on the interest rate and plans to solicit bids from roughly 40 banks and financial institutions, would allow for funding more expansive and higher-impact projects.

Anderson County marks its bicentennial, tracing its official birth to 1826 and the carving up of the old Pendleton District into new political units. At the same time, South Carolina is part of a nationwide commemoration of the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary — “the 250,” in the shorthand that has crept into planners’ conversations—recognizing the quarter‑millennium since the colonies began the slow, violent process of becoming a country.

The Cleo Bailey Experiment, the nonprofit Smith runs with his wife, Whitney, took root in 2020, when the couple bought a retired 1913 schoolhouse in a former mill village on Anderson’s East Side. The brick building—28,000 square feet on two green acres—had slipped into disuse, a monument to a neighborhood that had seen better factory days. The Smiths’ intention was both ambitious and oddly intimate: to restore the school as a community hub and to chip away at what they describe as the “cycle of generational poverty” that has left families in the surrounding blocks with limited transportation, few services, and persistent food insecurity.

South Carolina has grown into a manufacturing powerhouse over the past three decades, since German carmaker BMW planted its flag in the Upstate, transforming the former textile region into a major automotive hub.

At the same time, rapid advancements in automation, driven by artificial intelligence, puts workers at elevated risk of losing out in favor of machines.

But walk into almost any public school in South Carolina—particularly those where over half the students qualify for free or reduced lunch—and you’ll hear a different philosophy. Teachers do not hand out fifties to reward sloth. They do it to prevent despair. A single zero can send an average plummeting beyond any mathematical recovery, no matter how much a student may improve. The grading floor keeps the door open for redemption.

The pigs are off to the races in 76 days, as part of the return of the annual Great Anderson County Fair at Anderson Sports & Entertainment Center April 30-May 10, for 11 days of family fun, rides, live entertainment, and fair food favorites to the Upstate.

As the largest fair in the Upstate, the annual event attracts more than 75,000 guests each year. Fair hours are Monday–Thursday from 4–10 p.m., Fridays from 4–11 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m.–11 p.m., and Sundays from 12:30–10 p.m.