In 1895, William C. Whitner ran a transmission line from a hydroelectric plant on the Rocky River into downtown Anderson. The city became one of the first in the South to power its streetcars with hydroelectricity transmitted from a distance, and the nickname Electric City attached itself permanently. The technology was new enough at the time that engineers from across the country came to study what Whitner had done. The streetcar system is long gone, replaced eventually by buses, but the city's current transit fleet includes both modern hybrids and older-style trolleys that deliberately echo Anderson's electrified past. The hydropower system Whitner pioneered also helped explain why a textile industry could blossom in a Piedmont town that had nothing else but water and cotton.

Cotton built the city. When the textile industry started collapsing across the Carolinas, Anderson did what many southern textile towns failed to do: it diversified hard. The largest Glen Raven manufacturing center in the world sits here, making Sunbrella fabrics that end up on patio cushions, boat canopies, and convertible tops across the country. Bosch runs a major plant. The Upstate region's BMW supply network counts twenty-seven companies, eleven of them inside Anderson County, and the broader automotive cluster has made this stretch of South Carolina an unlikely European-style industrial corridor. AnMed Health is the dominant healthcare network, employer, and physical presence in town; the main medical center, north campus, and rehabilitation hospital form a small district of their own.

The city has eight historic districts on the National Register: Anderson College, Anderson Downtown, Anderson Historic, McDuffie Street, North Anderson, South Boulevard, Westside, and Whitner Street. That's more registered districts than most upstate cities of any size. They preserve the Victorian-era mill village houses, the antebellum survivors like the Caldwell-Johnson-Morris Cottage built around 1851, and the early-twentieth-century commercial buildings downtown. T.L. Hanna High School became unexpectedly famous in 2003 when the movie Radio dramatized the real-life story of James 'Radio' Kennedy, an intellectually disabled man who spent decades as an honorary member of the school's football program. Coach Harold Jones befriended Kennedy in the 1960s, and the relationship grew into something the whole town came to know. Cuba Gooding Jr. played Kennedy; Ed Harris played Jones. Kennedy died in 2019.

Chadwick Boseman's story dominates the list of notable people from Anderson, but the cast around him is unusual for a city of 28,000. Baseball gave Anderson Jim Rice, the Hall of Fame slugger who won the 1978 American League MVP with the Boston Red Sox, plus the Negro League pioneer C.I. Taylor and his brothers Ben and Candy Jim Taylor, all baseball men of consequence in their era. Larry Nance played fifteen NBA seasons and won the league's first slam dunk contest in 1984. Jack Swilling left Anderson in the 1850s, drifted west, and is credited as one of the founders of Phoenix, Arizona, by reviving Hohokam-era canal systems for modern irrigation. Singer-songwriter Bailey Hanks won Legally Blonde: The Search for the Next Elle Woods. Author Guy Davenport, born here in 1927, became one of the most quietly admired American men of letters of the twentieth century.

Anderson's Sports and Entertainment Center spreads across 300 acres on the city's edge and includes one of South Carolina's largest amphitheaters, with capacity for 15,000 people, plus a 64-acre sports complex with seven baseball fields, three soccer fields, a disc golf course, and tennis courts. Lake Hartwell, the Army Corps reservoir that defines the western edge of Anderson County, draws weekend crowds for bass fishing and Clemson-game tailgating by pontoon. Sister cities Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar in Scotland reflect the Scots-Irish ancestry that settled this part of the Piedmont in the eighteenth century. The downtown itself has spent the past two decades pulling itself back together with restored facades, new restaurants, and a calendar of festivals; it is the kind of small-southern-city renewal that depends less on a single big project than on dozens of small ones that keep showing up.