The greenway sprawls across the edge of Fort Mill in a patchwork of habitats - hardwood forest, longleaf pine, pasture grazed by horses, three named lakes, and the creek bottoms that connect them. Trails for hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding thread the property, with separate kayak launches on the lakes. The center hosts summer concerts in an outdoor amphitheater and runs a small campground for tents and primitive sites. Picnic shelters and pavilions are scattered through the woods. Bird watchers report Pileated woodpeckers, owls, herons, and seasonal warbler migrations. The land sits in the upper Catawba River watershed, less than a mile from where the river bends below Lake Wylie.

Colonel Elliott White Springs built Springs Mills into one of the largest cotton textile companies in the United States by the mid-twentieth century. The fortune that funded the greenway came from those mills - and from the labor of thousands of workers who tended the looms in Fort Mill, Lancaster, and Chester. Cotton mill work meant long shifts, brown lung disease, mill-town housing tied to employment, and wages that union historians have documented as deliberately suppressed. Anne Springs Close, Elliott's daughter, inherited a fortune. She also inherited the land where many of those workers had farmed before the mills. Her decision, late in life, to preserve the land rather than develop it is part of the textile family's legacy. So is the wealth that made the preservation possible.

The greenway is operated by Leroy Springs and Company, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established by the family to run recreation and community programming for the region. Named for Colonel Leroy Springs, an earlier patriarch, the organization predates the greenway and operates other facilities across Lancaster and York Counties. In 2019, Leroy Springs gifted a separate Recreation Complex on Tom Hall Street to the Town of Fort Mill - three baseball diamonds, six tennis courts, a multipurpose athletic field, two indoor pools, and a gym. The complex now serves as a branch of the Upper Palmetto YMCA, run in partnership with the Fort Mill School District. The town's Parks and Recreation Department uses the facilities for youth sports.

Spring brings dogwood and redbud across the upland forest. Summer turns the pastures gold and pushes mountain bikers to ride at dawn. Fall colors arrive late in the Piedmont, usually peaking in early November when the hickories and red maples turn copper. Winter strips the canopy and reveals views across Lake Haigler that the rest of the year stays hidden. The greenway sits at roughly 600 feet elevation, low enough to escape mountain weather but high enough to feel the seasons clearly. The popular Bottoms Trail along the creek floods after heavy rain. The Steele Street entrance is gravel; the Dairy Barn entrance is paved and hosts the welcome center, a restored 1946 dairy barn that serves as event venue and orientation point.

Fort Mill grew from a textile town of a few thousand to a Charlotte commuter suburb of more than 24,000 across the late twentieth century. Subdivisions filled the pastures around the old mill village. Without the 1995 donation, the 2,100 acres of the greenway would almost certainly have become more of the same. Instead, the largest privately donated nature preserve in the region anchors the south edge of the town like a green hinge. Walking the Lake Haigler loop on a fall afternoon, you can hear traffic on I-77 a couple of miles east. You can also hear silence under the pines. The greenway protects both.