Qualla: Anne Springs Close Greenway

Anne Springs Close Greenway: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The land was a gift, but it was also a reckoning. In 1995, the family of Anne Springs Close donated 2,100 acres of forest, lake, and rolling pasture to the town of Fort Mill, South Carolina - acreage that had belonged for generations to one of the most powerful textile dynasties in the American South. The Springs name appears on mills, on schools, on roads. It appears, too, in labor histories of the Carolina Piedmont. The greenway today preserves what those mills could have erased. Walking the trails, the contradiction walks with you.

Anne Springs Close Greenway: What 2,100 Acres Holds

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Anne Springs Close Greenway: The Springs Family Wealth

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Fo...

Anne Springs Close Greenway: Leroy Springs and Company

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 faci...

Anne Springs Close Greenway: Trails and Seasons

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Anne Springs Close Greenway: A Suburb's Lung

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 certain...