Two years ago Save Our Saluda was just a group of angry people crowded into a back room at the Marietta firehouse to gripe about development along the North Saluda River.
Today SOS is a legitimate river advocacy organization with a regular program of service work cleaning up the headwaters of all three branches of the Saluda River in Greenville County as well as an expanding role downstream and a budding program of water quality testing.
The organization celebrated their second birthday just after the rest of the country rang in 2010.
Founders Nick and Dianne Anastos and the group’s first board knew that a transition from “anger to advocacy” would be vital for SOS to become a viable and sustainable organization.
Early on that core group was encouraged and supported by Frank Holleman, long-time environmental activist and Greenville attorney, who came to those early meetings and encouraged the nascent river advocates to realize that 90 percent of any battle is just showing up.
SOS also came under the wing of Upstate Forever’s Mountain Streams and Rural Waters program and were pushed to establish a goal of watershed advocacy in northern Greenville County.
Those first few meetings in 2008 were not pretty, however, beer flowed freely, either just before or out in the parking lot, and it showed in the rhetoric.
Mostly, residents of the Dark Corner were angry about development and more than a bit jealous about the perceived takeover of “their” rivers and mountains by rich outsiders.
The now-defunct plan to discharge treated effluent into the North Saluda River by the Cliffs at Mountain Park was simply the primer on a powder keg of resentment and fear.
But it did galvanize support among the population in a part of the county not known for environmental activism of any sort.
To comprehend how unusual SOS is for Northern Greenville County it is necessary to understand something of the history of the region that comprises the three forks of the Saluda.
The northern parts of Greenville County were once collectively known as the Dark Corner – a land of moonshiners and snake-handling churches; a place where corn that could have productively gone to feed the hogs very often went into a mash vat instead.
It was a place where the people didn’t just feel isolated, they were.
The North Saluda prior to any of the development that now cloaks the mountains like high-priced rhinestones had historically been one of the most abused streams along the Blue Ridge Escarpment.
The floodplain of the North Saluda has been a focus for farming and manufacturing for decades. Were it not for the Greenville Water System’s block of protected land around Poinsett Reservoir it probably would have degenerated years ago into something more closely resembling a hog trough than a mountain stream.
Much of the once hotly disputed Cliffs at Mountain Park development was a truck farm and a drag strip in the not too distant past.
Golf course and rich man’s playground could be called a step up, were it not for an envy factor and the idea that traditional uses should be protected for future generations without large checkbook balances.
SOS built much of their early success around a traditional uses argument.
As time passed and the battles over Mountain Park twisted their way through the state’s regulatory maze many of the hotheads from those early SOS meetings faded away.
The plans to dump treated effluent into the North Saluda died away, too, and was replaced by a ground discharge plan that added an extra layer of protection for the much abused river.
Today, SOS is a welcome participant at discussion tables with state regulatory agencies and with a growing Upstate environmental movement.
Alliances have been struck with neighboring counties and towns up and down the Saluda far removed from the mountains of the Dark Corner. Out of a time of fear and anger something of enduring value may have been born.
