Vardry McBee

Vardry McBee (June 19, 1775 – January 23, 1864) was a saddlemaker, merchant, farmer, entrepreneur and philanthropist who has frequently been called the father of Greenville, South Carolina.

McBee, the youngest of ten children, was born to an impecunious Revolutionary War officer in the Spartanburg District of South Carolina and reared in Thicketty. After working on his parents farm as a teenager, in 1794, he was apprenticed to his brother-in-law, a saddler and postmaster in Lincolnton, North Carolina. Briefly a clerk at a grocery in Charleston, South Carolina, and a pioneer farmer with his parents in Logan County, Kentucky, McBee returned to Lincolnton as a saddler and merchant, where he prospered and, in 1804, married Jane Alexander, the daughter of a prominent local family. They had nine children, seven of whom survived to maturity. In 1806, he was partially, but permanently, lamed when he was thrown from a horse and broke his leg.

After buying up worn-out land abandoned by westward immigrants, McBee practiced new methods of restoring the fertility of the soil, such as drainage, the use of manures, crop rotation, and seed selection. In 1815 he purchased from Lemuel J. Alston more than 11,000 of acres of land in South Carolina, including the heart of what is today Greenville. He established a number of small industrial works on the Reedy River, including a sawmill, ironworks, brick yard, and stone quarry. McBee also engaged in selling leather goods, locating his tannery on the outskirts of the village. In 1829, he built a stone mill in Greenville and a flour mill and paper mill seven miles down stream in modern Conestee. McBee used the same mill to operate cotton and woolen factories, ordering textile machinery from the New Jersey firm of Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor. McBee's cotton and woolen products were apparently competitive with those produced by the Northern textile industry. DeBow's Review reported that they sold in New York for "a handsome profit."

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